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Randaly comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong
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If it was true that 99.5% of candidates fail the FizzBuzz test, then someone who passes it is better than 99.5% of the candidates who get to the interview stage, and should be hired immediately for any computer software job they try out for (unless you believe more than 100 people on the average get interviewed before anyone is hired) . The experience in the job market, of people who can pass the test, does not bear this out.
This is accurate for the top companies- as of 2011, Google interviewed over 300 people for each spot filled. Many of these people were plausibly interviewed multiple times, or for multiple positions.
The job market isn't just Google. Is it really true that anyone who can program FizzBuzz will immediately get snapped up by the first place they apply to, if they are not applying to someplace like Google which receives such large numbers of applications? I find it hard to believe that the average accounting company or bank that needs programmers has to do 100 interviews on the average every time it hires one person.
(Furthermore, multiply by how many competent programmers they go through. If they hire on the average 1 out of every 4 competent programmers who applies, that makes it 400 interviews for each new hire.)
You seem to be confusing applicants with people who are given interviews. Typically less than half of applicants even make it to the interview stage- sometimes much, much less than half.
There's also enough evidence out there to say that this level of applicants is common. Starbucks had over a hundred applicants for each position it offered recently; Proctor and Gamble had around 500. This guy also says it's common for programmers.
No, I'm not. From shminux's link:
The quote does not claim there has been no filtering done before the interview stage. If you read the original source it explicitly states that it is considering all aplicants, not only those who make it to the interview stage: "We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening."
You are confusing two different sources, the one that mentions FizzBuzz and the one in your link. Although both sources use the number 200, they are using it to refer to different things. It is the former (which uses it to refer to interviewees) which I object to, not the latter (which uses it to refer to resumes), except insofar as the latter is used to try to prove the former.
No I'm not. The Fizzbuzz article cited above is a wiki article. It is not based on original research, and draws from other articles. You will find the article I linked to linked to in a quote at the top of the first article in the 'articles' section of the wiki article; it is indeed the original source for the claim.
The wiki article uses as a source for the FizzBuzz statement the article at http://tickletux.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/ . The wiki does not use as a source the article you just gave me a link to, which is http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html and contains the "We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening" quote. What you describe is neither the source for the statement, nor the first link in the articles section, but the second link in the article that is the first link in the articles section. It is a stretch to claim that this is the wiki's source when the statement directly contains a source which is not the article you point to.
Furthermore, if you follow through the chain of articles, you find that because writers are playing a game of telephone with articles, the separate claims that people 1) cannot solve FizzBuzz (at a rate of 50% over computer science graduates) and 2) cannot program (at a rate of 99.5% over resumes) have been morphed into the Frankenstein-like claim that 99.5% cannot solve FizzBuzz as an interview question, which is not what either source says and which spuriously combines the two and changes from the plausible resume to the implausible interviewee. That combined statement is the one that I said doesn't fit a basic sanity check. And it doesn't.