My company has been giving the fizzbuzz for students applying for internship, with any language they wish and extra for style points.
The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it.
It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.
How do you know the people failing your interview process have "second grade coding skills"? The fundamental challenge with evaluating interviews is that companies don't hire people who flunk interviews - so there is no easy way to reliably measure the false negative rate. Does fizzbuzz ability correlate with coding ability? Maybe, but you'd have to hire people who fail fizzbuzz to definitely answer the question. I know that I use google extensively at work - interviews don't allow you to use search.
I'm not sure about OP, but there is a tech company that has said it hires people who fail their interviews occasionally to see if their interview process is working. That company is the one that is the subject of this thread.
If you require using real, compiler correct language in a coding exercise, and the problem is not trivial, than allowing search is more than fair.
But the point of Fizzbuzz is being such trivial problem that it really should not require nothing more than an understanding of basic programming logic and constructs.
In my (limited) experience, there were instances where the candidate could not even decide on a programming language to use, I told them to use pseudo-code and they still flunked horribly.
Aside from that, Fizbuzz is rarely a dealbreaking task in itself, it tends to correlate pretty well with the overall performance, I would be surprised seeing someone failing fizzbuzz and excelling in the rest of the interview (once again, in my limited experience).
These were done in recruitment events at universities and the applicants were free to access Google if they wished. Some guys even went to the computer lab to do the assignments on a computer and then return a printout of their code. And we were completely fine with that.
But really, if an applicant needs to google to solve FizzBuzz, they don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals. You're required to write one loop, a few if/then/elses and understand how the modulo operator works. Our jobs are much more demanding than that.
The results speak for themself. All the good applicants do it in no time, without hesitation and give a perfect answer and usually some style points on top. The ones who have second grade coding skills have always something wrong with it.
It's a good 5 minute test whether someone can code or not. It shouldn't be the only test, of course.