This was literally part of my first programming assignment in college. Can people really not do this? Isn't fizzbuzz considered too obvious these days? I feel like I must be misunderstanding...
You miss the point. I learned all these tricks in school as well. I loved them. I felt "smart". After working for so many years, I only remember the basic ones. If you ask me the "smart" tricks, I can't get them right out of my head. I can sit down with a piece of paper and may get them after trials and errors after a while. Guess what, the important thing is I know these "smart" tricks exist. If I need them in real work, I can google them out easily. Why need I remember them? In my real work, what I need to get right out of my mind are how our systems work, how MySQL/Postgres/Hadoop/HBase/Kafka/Spark/Linux/AWS/... work, etc.
After working for so many years, I only remember the basic ones.
Several of the examples in the article are the basic ones, though: test, set, clear or toggle a bit. You might not remember the trick for finding the least significant 1 bit, but it's not as if testing whether a number is odd or even is some sort of arcane knowledge. Anyone who has to resort to Google or Stack Overflow for something so simple is going to struggle in large parts of the programming industry.
Agreed. I had to do this first semester freshman year and again in my embedded systems courses. But a very large portion of web developers never went to college or only have a 2 year degree (and, sorry, but most 2 year "Computer Science" degrees glorified really expensive bootcamps).
