> So, we switched to "here's a short test, go in this room and do the test". Then we'd look at their answers. If the answers were wrong/poor we'd thank them for their time and excuse them.

I remember about a dozen years ago taking one of these tests at an interview. Interviewer takes me to a room and says "We've got this little test, I'll be back in 2 hours.". I take the test. Guy comes back in and says ok, we'll look this over and let you know... Crickets. Didn't hear back so I figure I must've bombed the test. 2 years later that guy calls me up and asks if I want to come in for an interview. I say "I never heard back so I figured I bombed your test" He says "No, you did great, we just got kind of busy". I politely declined to interview with them again.

I had a similar experience in the late 90s. We had people who couldn’t program but represented that they could.

We would give them a quick screen of “write in one of the languages this position requires a program that takes in a string, reverses it and prints it out.” And we changed it to any language once we started working with novel stuff like JavaScript that any programmer could pick up.

It was so weird how many people would fail this test.

I always wondered how other industries dealt with people just flat out lying on resumes and applying for positions they shouldn’t. Programming is lucky that we have some litmus tests.

I feel bad for people who freeze up and can’t even write a three line program on paper.

Not in my opinion no, and I don't mind people asking me simple questions either. There are quite a few people who simply don't understand basic concepts and cannot actually write code. Higher qualifications are usually weakly positively correlated with competence, but there are plenty of outliers and exceptions.

I do generally agree with the cargo cult sentiment, but not in this case.

The main thing I dislike about the 7+ interviews is that I dislike interviews and there are 7 of them to get through. I once did four in one day, back to back, and I was extremely tired afterwards. So my big fear as a candidate is that either 7 interviews will happen over 1-2 days and I'll be absolutely fried after the first 2, or they'll be so hard to schedule it'll take 6 months just to have them all. I'm also a bit afraid they'll cargo cult some of the interview questions and I get a bit sick of "please recite 1st year CS algorithm" questions (I never ask these personally) but otherwise 7 interviews is fine, if they accept I am a human candidate and I'm not really comfortable in the process anyway.

Agreed, a team I worked with added a very short (few minutes) screener quiz because we had about 10-20% of candidates make it past phone screen who struggled to write a simple function.

FizzBuzz is definitely not in the cargo cult category. It is merely extremely popular.

It literally takes a few minutes and is great for weeding bad candidates. It is a win-win for everyone involved.