Yeah, exactly. Just openly saying that one cannot do something, but is willing to learn (and is able to) is way more worth than people telling you they can do everything and then fail doing so.

I think many coders just don’t know about % because you don’t use it very often.

Maybe it depends on the level of abstraction, but I use % (or, more often, bit-twiddling special cases of it) quite a lot in C/C++. That said, you don’t actually need % for fizzbuzz. The pattern repeats every 15 elements, so if you don’t know about modulo arithmetic (which is surprising, since it’s a pretty important part of a computer science degree, even if you don’t know that there’s a built-in operator for it) then you can write something like this:

long i=1;
while (1)
{
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("Fizz\n"); i++
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("Buzz\n"); i++;
  printf("Fizz\n"); i++;
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("Fizz\n"); i++;
  printf("Buzz\n", i++);
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("Fizz\n"); i++;
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("%ld\n", i++);
  printf("FizzBuzz\n"); i++;
}

This implementation doesn’t require modulo arithmetic at all. If I saw this in an interview, I’d then ask how to do it in a single printf call in the loop. This would then hit an interesting corner case in C, because argument order is undefined and so a correct solution couldn’t use i++ in the arguments and would have to look like this:

long i=1;
while (1)
{
  printf("%ld\n%ld\nFizz\n%ld\nBuzz\nFizz\%ld\n%ld\Fizz\nBuzz\n%ld\nFizz%ld\n%ld\nFizzBuzz\n",
     i+1,
     i+2,
     i+4,
     i+7,
     i+8,
     i+11,
     i+13,
     i+14);
  i += 15;
}

So you can actually write C FizzBuzz implementation with a single statement in the loop body and no arithmetic other than addition.

This isn’t a particularly optimised FizzBuzz, but it’s very simple and the required knowledge to build it in any language is:

• Loops
• Addition
• Outputting strings and integers
• The rules of FizzBuzz
• The ability to spot a repeating pattern in a trivial sequence

I’m not sure I can agree with this. An average developer proficient in C should not be so confused that they would submit something like that above (assuming that’s a verbatim submission).

I wouldn’t expect perfection, or even idiomatic usage or the language, but if you’re sending in code to apply for a job the code should at least make sense. I would not want to hire someone willing to send in code that doesn’t make sense - though I would also accept submissions in nearly any language that a candidate is familiar with.

I’d expect someone who says they know Python in their CV to well… know Python. And I’m not claiming this is proof of “has never programmed”, I’m saying it’s proof that people that can’t program apply for programming jobs.

That sounds like a great interview. You learned that the company valued memorising details that are trivial to look up over thinking skills.

Interviews are a bidirectional communication channel. I don’t know what information was transferred towards them but they efficiently communicated that they’re not the kind of place you’d want to work.

I had an interview where someone asked about inner vs. outer join and I said, “Oh, I just google that every time.” Didn’t get the job. :-)