FizzBuzz Program

I was reading an old article yesterday that stated most programmers don’t know how to actually program. The that had wrote the article went on to test his theory by asking both amateur, senior and intermediate programmers to write a simple program. The program had to count to 100 but multiples of 3 had to print out “Fizz”, multiples of 5 had to print out “Buzz” and multiples of 3 and 5 had to print out “FizzBuzz” instead of the actual numbers. For example:

Simple right? Well according to his study 199 out of 200 people count not write this program in under 10 minutes. Did I mention he tested some senior programmers in there too? Pretty surprising results and also a great way to weed out unexperienced programmers. So if you are a programming searching for a job make sure you actually know what’s what in case your tested in the middle of an interview. I tried to write the same program in under 10 minutes – it took me a bit longer but I finally got it to work. In all it took me 17 minutes. Not as easy as I thought it was.

Do you keep up to date with your programming? Can you complete this program under 10 minutes? What do you think about testing programmers during the interview process?

By – Alex Miller