First of all, thanks for reading AND responding. Really appreciate it.

And second, I wrote this post exactly to demonstrate what you are saying. As mentioned at the end, we aren't taking the results of this seriously. And we do have other ways to determine if someone is a good fit.

I have never been a big fan of these kinds of questions either. I just wanted to try it out because I was seeing fizzbuzz everywhere (thanks to this youtuber ben awad) and everyone said it would be easy and people would be able to get it right.

I thought it would be easy too. But I never wanted to judge someone solely based on this one question. I just wanted to see if it was really effective. And as I concluded, it is not effective.

And the somewhat cockiness in this post is sarcasm most of the time (maybe some of mine also slipped through and I apologize for that) like this one:

"Most of the interviewees had multiple years of experience. They had built large, complicated applications in other companies. We asked them a very simple question with a very simple solution. We did not ask them to reverse a linked list or to invert a binary tree."

because linked list and binary tree algos have become a FANG interview meme at this point. lol

When I said that someone with little experience should be able to solve this problem, I didn't mean during interviews. I just meant that a programmer can solve this given they are not under pressure. (I'll edit the article to say that. thanks)

I had no intention to talk down on people who didnt complete the challenge. In fact, we offered the position to some people who didn't complete these kinds of challenges. Bottomline, this post was just to show that these kind of questions might not be as effective as people think.