> It is condescending. Asking people to do FizzBuzz indicates that you expect a large portion of your candidates to be completely clueless. That's not a good message to send.

I think it's a fairly honest message. Regardless of how you feel about demanding data structure implementation and asymptotic analysis on a whiteboard in an interview, there are many people interviewing who literally cannot code. I don't believe you can find a heuristic to filter them out that won't come across as condescending.

The problem is that interviewers cannot usefully distinguish between people who are protesting FizzBuzz because they can't do it and people who are protesting it because it's actually beneath them. On the other hand, candidates can reframe their attitude. I don't think they should put up with all the nonsense hazing of whiteboard interviews, but FizzBuzz can literally be done in the time it's taken me to write this comment. If a candidate pushed back against doing it, I'd actually point that out.

I've interviewed people who were "senior" engineers, yet couldn't actually complete FizzBuzz problems in their areas of expertise. It's not a trick question or testing for something abstract and far removed from the job - it's testing for, "Have you flipped through a book, compiled a program, and ran it before?" I'm sure some of the people I asked found it condescending as well, in particular the ones who couldn't complete it. But it saved me an hour of second-hand embarrassment.

> Think about the following. FizzBuzz filters out some extreme cases of incompetence, but tells you nothing of value about the people who passed. You can use the same chunk of interview time to ask a more challenging question that will still filter out the extremely incompetent, but also give you some level of confidence in the people who passed. So why would you prefer to ask a question that gives you less useful information?

You are talking about 5 - 10 minutes of interviewing time here. If I weed out some nontrivial percentage of applicants using a benchmark that doesn't rely on trickery and actually tests for facility with the domain, I'm happy! That's a great result - I don't want to be condescending, so if you have a better suggestion, I'd love to hear it. But like I said, sooner or later you're going to insult people with these mundane questions. You can spend the rest of the entire interview on whatever sexy signaling material you'd like, it's not like the FizzBuzz problem really ate into your time budget (unless, of course, they actually cannot code).

To give you a concrete comparison: I'm very competent in cryptography (up to and including research and protocol cryptanalysis). If someone were to ask me in an interview, "Hey, what's the difference between symmetric cryptography and asymmetric cryptography", I wouldn't respond with, "Haven't you read my resume? Ask me something real." If they asked me to, I don't know, draw a diagram of a Feistel network, I wouldn't roll my eyes and take offense. I'd just do it. I might have a lesser view of their recruiting pipeline after the fact, but I'd sympathize with the necessity of the question overall and hope the interview picks up in the next ten minutes.