Fizzbuzz is not really about testing someones understanding of a modulus operator, it would be very easy to make an alternate fizzbuzz that does not require using modulus, and arguably anyone hiring for a large company should have their own as fizzbuzz is pretty widely known.

The point of fizzbuzz though is to make someone create a very simple algorithm on the spot. In my experience, there are some people in this world who simply lack the ability to structure their thoughts and plans into a complete set of ordered instructions. That's why you sometimes find recipes online that follow a structure like:

1. Dice the onions

2. Brown the mince for 5 minutes

3. But first, add the onions and tomato paste to the mince

It's the same personality type that cleans a room by walking backwards and forwards to the cupboard of cleaning supplies as they need them rather than grabbing all the cleaning supplies they can predict needing first.

Now, everyone does these kinds of things to a certain extent, but you can't program anything significant if you can't drop into an ordered mindset on command. Fizzbuzz tests your ability to do that without requiring you to know any apis or frameworks or computer science or even a programming language, since you can just as easily do it in psudocode.

Modulus is a rabbit hole - the mod operator has different behaviour for negative parameters depending on the language (and presumably other language specific quirks?)

Here's another one: when does the abs operator return a negative number?

Why make it a trivia game? Explaining the basics of how modulus SHOULD work is a fairly generic concept that is trivial for a lot of coders to describe, but impossible for non-coders. It's an ice-breaker.

Hmm, everytime I use modulus I need to double check whether it returns the number of times wholly divisible or the remainder.

I'm thinking the former without checking now.

Meanwhile, my last project has been to set up an entirely self hosted CI/CD pipeline using digital ocean, docker, jenkins, gitea, and docker registry to make changes to my websites I build with erlang, react, html and sass, so I _think_ I can create projects! (No guarantees).

The interview process is tough, and what do you want to root out more false negatives or false positives? It may depend on the size of the company. Google can probably shell out a few bucks to some putz who sounds impressive but isn't in the hopes they'll nab a few more great engineers at the loss of a few paychecks.

An early phase startup may not have that luxury.

Edit: must be tired since just thinking about fizzbuzz for two seconds clearly gives me the answer to what modulus returns ;-)

> Google can probably shell out a few bucks to some putz who sounds impressive but isn't in the hopes they'll nab a few more great engineers at the loss of a few paychecks.

They actually take the opposite approach. Supposedly there is compelling research that low-performing members of a team provide large negative contribution to team performance from knock-on effects of their low standards and low quality work. Google has consequentially structured their interview process to minimize false positives rather than false negatives so as to minimize firings and the associated psychological stress caused by working in an environment in which people are regularly fired.

Modular arithmetic ought to be explainable by anyone who’s studied basic number theory. Not just coders.

The differing behavior is because some of those implement remainder instead of modulus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13683563/whats-the-diffe...

That sets the bar too low for screening IMO. My wife has interviewed people who literally can't write a for loop correctly.