In 2007, FizzBuzz sat at the top of the inbound funnel and did one cheap, brutal job: it caught the applicants who could not write trivial code before anyone spent an hour on a call. AI killed that filter. Today every application ships plausible code, and the expensive hire is no longer the person who cannot write a program — it is the person who cannot tell whether a program is correct.
FizzCheck is the old idea rebuilt for the new failure mode: a five-minute spoken code review that tests whether a candidate can read code against intent. No scheduling, no interviewer hours. A browser, a microphone, five minutes — and a scorecard that quotes the candidate’s own reasoning back to you.
We are working out what it takes to put a filter like this back at the front of an inbound funnel. If you hire engineers and your funnel could use one, we would like to hear from you.
FizzCheck is a two-week experiment and, like the original FizzBuzz, a negative filter. It will not find your next staff engineer. It might tell you something about the bottom of your funnel.