linuxmemes

I fell backwards into programming and did it for years before ever needing or encountering a mod operator. It never really came up in statistical programming (SAS) and since I wasn't a CS major I don't think I even learned about it until taking online programming classes for fun. But I know I was a pretty damn good SAS programmer. I never had any issues solving any problems in my field programmatically, but I took a few leet code tests and was completely puzzled before taking said CS classes. The algorithms and common problems just never remotely came up. I never found fizzbuzz particularly relevant in statistics and data CRUD.

Now maybe since SAS is procedural and not OO you'd say it doesn't have typical "programming language features", but I could easily see that experience being common in all kinda of business side programming like R, VBA, maybe JavaScript or Python, etc.

...but anyway obviously I'm not saying its not a good thing for a dev shop to interview on, and if they want someone classically trained then it's probably a perfect question. My quibble is just that you might need to widen your definition of who programs.