If that were a real situation, I wouldn't have, he over-engineered the shit out of it and while cool, I prefer devs who can solve simple problems simply; they get more work done for the price.

This is not over-engineering. Defining a couple of functions to solve it would be over-engineering, like offloading Fizz to it's own function, Buzz to another one etc. Anything (deliberately) more is just comedy.

Training a neural network to solve fizzbuzz is over-engineering, fun over-engineering, but over-engineering none the less.

Depends on the position no? If you are looking for a developer sure. But if you are looking for an engineer, creative solutions are a plus.

Sometime it is better to hire for culture, someone who is intelligent but also, and this is critical, can take a joke.

Yeah, I suppose the guy wouldn't feel good in the company anyway. Personally, I wouldn't either. Sense of humour is an essential part of good dev environment, IMO.

Which is why I said if this was for real.

I prefer employers that don't treat me like a baby, so to each their own ;)

Well, when you give a hilariously bad interview question...

It's not a bad interview question, if you think it is, you perhaps haven't had enough experience with candidates applying to programming jobs who talk a good talk but can't program to save their lives.

Well, technically, as a programmer and not enterpreneur you shouldn't be expected to have "experience with candidates applying to programming jobs who talk a good talk but can't program to save their lives".

No one said programmers were expected to; however, not having that experience makes judgement of what is or isn't a bad question baseless. FizzBuzz and all such trivial code tests are fantastic interview questions because most applications can't program, that is exactly the point and purpose of FizzBuzz, weeding out liars of which there are many due to high salaries in comparison to other fields.

Yeah, hopefully this kind of question is handled in a phone screen before bringing them in.