Why I’m still using “Fizz Buzz” to hire Software-Developers

Hiring is a long and sometimes tedious process. As a hiring manager you want to make sure you filter people out in early phases.

How can you do this? Current measures include, but are not limited to phone screening, personal interviews, or technical tests. In my opinion, all of these are very important, since your company is interested in a lot of aspects in a person. For instance, communication skills are becoming more important, even for software developers, because processes change and include more and more teamwork.

But in this article, I’ll be focussing on hard technical programming and logic skills. There’s been a simple, but effective test in the industry that’s been used by hundreds of companies for decades (I think). It’s called “Fizz Buzz” and the problem to solve is rather simple.

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. If it’s a multiple of 3, it should print “Fizz”. If it’s a multiple of 5, it should print “Buzz”. If it’s a multiple of 3 and 5, it should print “Fizz Buzz”.

Most people start writing some code immediately, because they recognize the pattern of a for-loop. Oh, that’s great, they know a little syntax!

But software development has never been about writing code. The essence is always to solve a problem —…