Stu Thompson wrote, “There is a stunningly large population of people who describe themselves as ‘professional software developers’ who have not the faintest idea about recursion, bit masking, hexadecimal maths…or how to code a simple for loop that does something like FizzBuzz.”
FizzBuzz, sure, any programmer should know how to write that. Bit masking though? That example just goes to show the wide range of expertise involved in programming, not all of which is required to be a successful or skilled programmer.
I don’t think I’ve used bit masking (and I can’t even remember what it is, exactly) since college. But Stu goes on to say talk about asking for SQL examples in interviews, and here not only would I be able to demonstrate inserts and updates - of course - but left joins, cross joins, multi-table deletes, whatever.
FizzBuzz is an acceptable test because it is non-domain specific, the same cannot be said for all other types of programming knowledge.