I was really curious reading this. Many years ago I read this blog post (from 2007!) by Jeff Atwood[1] that mentioned FizzBuzz, and I guess I had mentally filed away that Jeff Atwood invented FizzBuzz! But that is not true.
Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2].
My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz).
Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong.
For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3]
I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important.
Thanks for digging out those links. I think Imran came up with it in 2006 or 2007, he was certainly experimenting with interview questions around that time, so the blog post was not long after. I had no idea at the time he had a blog and didn't see the post myself until a few years after that. In fact, I think I saw Jeff Atwood's first!
Thanks for digging that up! I'm quite sure that Jeff Atwood's blog is where I first heard about Fizzbuzz, but it never occurred to me that he had attributions.
Jeff's blog mentions Imran. Jeff's blog is still up, but Imran's isn't! However it is up on the internet archive, and Imran's post is also from 2007[2].
My sense is that Imran wrote a blog in January 2007 mentioning FizzBuzz and that Jeff's post in February 2007 is what made FizzBuzz the meme that it is today. This is probably very obvious to some readers of HN, but Jeff's blog (Coding Horror) has been around for a very long time and was one of the 'big' tech blogs back in that era of blogging (Jeff went on to, among other things, cofound Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky a year after writing about FizzBuzz).
Thanks for asking this - if someone asked me yesterday "who invented FizzBuzz?" I would have pretty confidently said "Jeff Atwood!" and I would have been totally wrong.
For completenesses sake, the other really influential interview question blog I remember from this era is Steve Yegge's "five essential phone screen questions," which is even earlier (2005!)[3]
I think interviewing discourse on message boards is tricky; folks have strong opinions, and if someone says "this is an essential question" and the question is hard for you, it's hard not to take that personally. In a past life I thought a lot about interviewing (here is a resource on interviewing I helped create for Jane Street back when I worked there[4]). I have never asked a FizzBuzz-style question, but I do think that "explicitly telling the candidate what you want and give them lots of help to get there" is really important.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080405225407/http://imranontec...
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DGdPkBBxg