@465
This is not a “pull out of the air” question. If you can’t loop or figure out when something divides by 3 or 5 you should be in an entirely different industry, an iPhone app wont give you competence. If I were interviewing someone and they said they needed to check the internet to figure it out they would not get past me.

My original comment was:

—
2 Things strike me about the article and a few of the more common references to it:

1) The commenter’s usually try to implement it.
2) The commenter’s usually try to implement it in visual basic.

I think both miss the point.

Here’s my attempt in perl. I think it would convince a lot of people _not_ to hire me if I gave it as a code sample. Can anyone get it down to 140 charactes (SMS) size? Seems like it should be possible with a few more shortcuts.

@c=(0,4,7,19,24);@e=(4,4);push@b,0,3,@e;push@f,1,2,@e;push@fb,@f,@b;sub x{$_+66};sub z{map(chr,map(x,map($c[$_],@_)))}sub b{z@b}sub f{z@f}sub fb{z@fb}sub p{print@_}for $i(0..shift){$i%15?$i%5?$i%3?p $i:p f:p b:p fb}

(put it in a file called script.pl, run it as ‘/usr/bin/perl -l script.pl 100′

—

The point was not that this is a programming exercise, the point is to see if the candidate even has a pulse.

int a = 5;
int b = 13;
a = a+b;
b = a-b; //b now has original value of a
a = a-b; //a now has original value of b

The best hire isn’t always someone who can pull answers like this out of thin air, more likely it’s someone who can find and understand an appropriate answer found on Google.

WTF re-invent the wheel?

: fizz ( n — ? ) 3 MOD IF FALSE EXIT THEN TRUE .” Fizz” ;
: buzz ( n — ? ) 5 MOD IF FALSE EXIT THEN TRUE .” Buzz” ;
: bazz ( n ? — ) IF DROP EXIT THEN . ;
: fizzBuzz ( n — ) CR DUP fizz OVER buzz OR bazz ;
: fizzBuzzes ( n — ) 1+ 1 DO I fizzBuzz LOOP ;

100 fizzBuzzes

Interesting posts. I have come across this phenomenon in academia and industry. However, it seems to be worse in academia!…hahaha.
My previous post-doctoral supervisor hailing from Yale working in Toronto, could not write code to save his life. We are in the field of computational biology.

I have seen educated people stare at computer screens similar to writers stare at blank pages. However, I would not call this a case of “writers-block”…but simple inexperience at a practical implementation of theoretical principles.

I have met very few people in my career that are all good-rounders ..they handle the math, the algorithms, the design and coding, as well as the artistic side of visual design. In academia, I have not met any.

In industry, the tempo ..is alot more fast paced, and your job is at risk. The incentive to get things done is a good motivation. In academia I have seen educated people sitting on projects for more than 6-9 months for a 3 month project, and I am not reffering to graduates with BSc, but MSc and PhDs in both countries that I have lived and worked (Canada and Sweden).

Possessing a large body of theoretical knowledge, however does not make a good programmer. Too much of their time is spent analyzing and predicting a result, when a computer can do the work in a few seconds to get a result.

What people in industry are looking for is a good combination of skills ranging from theoretical knowledge and practical skills but also multi-tasking abilities.

In some sense, a juggler who “thinks on his/her” feet while juggling balls. Those are the ones that are very few.

I found that the term does indeed originate from MIT. Apparently, in the early 60s there were two types of students: Tools and Hackers. It was presumed there was no middle ground.

The Tools would attend class regularly, get straight As and be in the library if there weren’t any classes. (I note here, with relish, that this term has entered pop-culture’s slang lexicon as a derogatory term).

Hackers, on the other hand, were Tools’ antithesis. They didn’t go to classes, didn’t get good marks, slept in all day. What set them above drop-outs was the fact that they had a hobby. Trains, construction, and also: computers.

BTW, you can’t cite a media as a source for etymology. A newspaper’s goal is to sell newspapers. To that end, they will always slant things, people, and groups in such a way that it is sensationalist. A white-hat hacker isn’t sensational. A black-hat cracker is. Add to the above mix, a general misunderstanding of word usage, and you’ve got a recipe to (incorrectly) use the word ‘hacker’ to describe a malicious cracker.

If I had a penny for every time the mass-media misinterpreted something, I’d be buying up a controlling share of Microsoft’s stock.

The source I will cite for the origin of the word: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html