I'd forgive an entry-level candidate (straight out of college) for not knowing about the modulo operator. We had one who solved it correctly using floor/ceiling.
If they're claiming 3+ years of experience though, I'd say not knowing about modulo is a red flag. It means they're being dishonest about their actual experience, or those 3+ years of experience are very narrow, and/or they're not terribly curious about the field.
Re:Fizzbuzz isn't a coding test
by swivelmaster on Sunday September 30, 2012 @02:40AM
(#4592204)
I once had a candidate claiming to be a senior PHP programmer solve fizzbuzz by doing something like this:
if (strpos($i/3, ".") != null)
or something like that. I was sad.
I googled to see whether this was creativeness or just copying stuff from the net, and came across http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.arithmetic.p.... It states:
"Operands of modulus are converted to integers (by stripping the decimal part) before processing."
=> 4.5 % 1.5 is zero, as is 4.6 % 1.9. So, in the world of PHP, there may be logic in that strpos approach. As far as I can tell, it certainly isn't much worse than http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?76114-Work-... advocates.
And no that is not worth much. I know almost nothin about PHP, and prefer to keep things that way.
I've had a surprising number of candidates who did not know about the existence of the modulo operator. Not just "I completely forgot about it", but more like "what's the % sign mean?".