I suck at FizzBuzz

Why can’t programmers … program? has certainly been a hot topic (the followup mentions everyone tried to solve FizzBuzz in 20 bytes or less, etc).

I suck at Fizzbuzz problems, because my first response (in my brain) is always, “Why the fuck would I ever want to do that?”. I eventually get around to some “if mod foo == 0″ solution but then get all irate again: “I’ve used modulo exactly once in my life, and for a toy program to figure out when I was on call without doing a database query.”

I suppose, then, there are 2 camps. One, “You suck if you can’t come up with 20 different fizzbuzz solutions, because it proves you don’t have the programming abstraction chops to deal with real-world problems”.

The other, “You used freaky date math to not do a database query? OK I suppose you’re not an idiot.” It might technically count as one of those “innovative solutions” that FizzBuzz problems are supposed to illustrate.

I’m very bad at tests. I always have been. I’ve been quizzed in tech interviews before; the jobs I wanted were less “ok stand at the chalkboard in front of the class whiteboard and perform, monkey-boy write some code”, and more “let’s have a conversation about programming”. I get excited about questions that have real-world applications, I get frustrated at endless abstraction for the sake of it.

The FizzBuzzers are probably almost certainly right, though, in that the great majority of people that can’t solve it somehow probably can’t program for shit. I just wish they weren’t.