HACKER Q&A
📣 CM30

Is Fizz Buzz an American Thing?


Because I've never seen either the word game or coding exercise based on it ever come up here in the UK, regardless of the context. It's never been asked in any interviews, I never did anything like this in school, and if you asked me to do it, I'd have to look up what the name means first or what it actually requires.

It also makes me wonder how many of these coding exercises and leetcode tasks are based on things specific to certain countries and cultures, and whether the ones asked of people vary based on the region.

  👤 throwaway09223 Accepted Answer ✓
No, it's not a US thing. In fact, it's a UK thing -- I believe popularized by Imran Ghory: https://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-de...
👤 sethammons
> it, I'd have to look up what the name means first or what it actually requires.

Nobody says, "implement fizzbuzz." If they did want a fizzbuzz program, they will explain "write something that counts consecutively til 100 and prints fizz if the number is a multiple of three, and buzz if it is a multiple of five."

More importantly, few places ask for literally the fizzbuzz function; it stands as an example of "something trivial with loops and conditionals." It is not measuring competencies, it is weeding out those who would def not be able to code from coming onsite and wasting everyone's time.

If the interview question is missing context you don't have, let the interviewer know. It is either a bad question or intentionally missing info to encourage you to ask clarifying questions.

As for the style of question, people realized that fizzbuzz was too easy and so leetcode problems were born. In reality, companies should instead strive to make Work Sample questions, those that are very similar to the work that will be done.

To do this, I recommend taking a recent problem the team solved and minimize the scope and required institutional knowledge down to something that can be coded up by an existing teammate in N minutes and give the candidate 3N minute to solve it (15 min/45min works well enough). My last two questions from this method included debugging a buggy nightly-ran script and some malformed sql data that "customers noticed something was wrong" and the other was focused more on implementing a cache in a way to allow easier testing and metrics.

👤 eesmith
Here's a book published in Britain in 1990, titled "Family and party games", which mentions calls it "BuzzFizz", but isn't quite the same a "FizzBuzz" ("57" is read a "buzz fizz" because the "buzz" replaces the 5 and "fizz" replaces the "7" and 57 is neither a multiple of 5 nor 7.)

https://archive.org/details/familypartygames0000diag/page/12...

Here's another British book from 1990 (reprinted in 1992), where FizzBuzz are for multiples of 3 and 5:

https://archive.org/details/algebra0000maso/page/10/mode/2up...

While from 1990 here's a US book which says "Fizz-Buzz-Fizz" and "Buzz-Fizz-Buzz" are well known, before describing "Reverse Buzz". It uses numbers with 7 in the base-10 representation, and numbers which are multiples of 7:

https://archive.org/details/greatgamestoplay0000harr/page/78...

And another 1990s book from the US does the multiples-of-5-and-7:

https://archive.org/details/hopscotchhangman00magu/page/36/m...

Conclusion: the game has been in the US and the UK for a long time.