[pkteison]

I have given over 100 on site interviews for a large well regarded company, and I’d say about 20 percent can’t seem to program at all. I have only actually asked FizzBuzz once because it feels terrible to go with that simple a question, but they were failing another easy question and I wanted to calibrate if the easy question was too hard or they really couldn’t program. They completely failed fizz buzz - they started a for loop but couldn’t decide what to do in it, and the idea of directly translating each instruction in fizz buzz into a line of code in the for loop didn’t seem to gel with them. I know there is no way to know for sure, but it didn’t feel like just nerves - it really felt like they had no idea how to do word problems in math class, they couldn’t turn a description with a few bullet points into code implementing them.

So, for what it’s worth, I’ve definitely seen it. I don’t even think it’s particularly uncommon.

[squeaky-clean]

1/5 is the same ratio I was going to say. And that's people that make it past the initial pre-screen phone call.

I've also never asked fizzbuzz, but some similarly easy things. Like reversing a list. No memory or complexity constraints.

[rebeccaskinner]

The candidate ratio I’ve seen has been all over the map depending on the company. At one place it was more like 90% of candidates who couldn’t write any code, another place it was closer to 50%, and I’ve worked at some places where nearly every candidate we got was at least somewhat competent as a programmer. The obvious answer is better pre-screening or candidate sourcing, but one of the places with generally high quality candidates was a small startup with no recruiting to pre-screen (although we mainly recruited from local meetups so perhaps that was good sourcing)