I'll tell you a secret. The first time I was asked to do fizzbuzz in an interview I got it wrong. It was about a year ago. I have been programming sine I was in middle school (I'm 29 now). Walking out of that interview was probably the worst day in my entire life.

Ever since then, two things have happened. First, the lines of fizzbuzz are forever etched into my mind. I can recite fizzbuzz verbally now. I don't even need any writing utensil. For i in xrange 1 comma 101 colon if i mod fifteen equals zero colon print "fizzbuzz" elif... [and so on]". This has come in handy in interviews since. All you have to say is "fizzbuzz" and I go ahead and write away. I don't even need the interviewer to explain the actual wording of the problem.

And the second thing is that I now have absolutly zero interrest in hiring a company that has fizzbuzz (or any other live coding portion) as part of it's hiring process. If I'm at an interview and the interviewer tells me "we're going to write code now", I'm done. If the problem is interesting I'll do it, but if it's fizzbuzz or anything having to do with reinventing something, I'm done. Not gonna work there.

I've struggled to put into words how to describe why I think live coding is such a terrible thing to ask candidates during interviews. Joel Spolsky makes a great point thats hard to argue against. If you're hiring a guitar player, you want to hear him play. If you're hiring a programmer, you'd first want to see them write code. I think the problem is that programming is kind of more like song writing. You can't ask a song writer to go the white board and bang out a new song. Even if you tell him exactly what the song should be about. Song writing is a process, and so is programming.