We’re hiring a new developer in my group at work, and my boss is including me in the interviewing process. It’s been a few years since I’ve done developer interviews, so I’m a bit rusty. I suggested having candidates do a FizzBuzz test on a whiteboard as part of the interview.
Jeff Atwood wrote a good post about FizzBuzz on his blog back in 2007. It seems like an overly simple test, but it can be quite useful. I’ve only been asked to do FizzBuzz once myself, and it was a good experience. The interviewer was really sharp and asked me a lot of good questions about how I could do it differently or why I chose to do something a certain way. He turned a simple 12-line program into a good conversation.
At very least, FizzBuzz should help filter out candidates who are exaggerating on their resumes. If you say you’ve got five years of C# experience and you can’t write a FizzBuzz program, you’re lying. The two candidates we’ve looked at so far both have an MS in Comp Sci, so they’re both better-educated than I am, at least, and they should both be able to handle FizzBuzz.
Anyway, it occurred to me that I never wrote a FizzBuzz program in X++. So here’s a short job to solve FizzBuzz in X++. I might post it to RosettaCode, if I get around to it. Not that the world really needs one more FizzBuzz solution.
static void AjhFizzBuzz(Args _args)
{
/* 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”.
*/
int i;
for (i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
if (i mod 3 == 0 && i mod 5 == 0)
info("Fizz Buzz");
else if (i mod 3 == 0)
info("Fizz");
else if (i mod 5 == 0)
info("Buzz");
else
info(int2str(i));
}
}