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Comment by 0xmohit | Hacker News Reader

Open book exams are known to be tougher!

I don't mind giving candidates access to language reference manuals, man pages and such.

May be so. These were pretty easy questions, though. Like 'What steps/commands would you use to reset the password on a [Make] [Model] managed switch through the serial port?' Very easy to Google.

Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.

> Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google.

Never underestimate anybody.

I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.

You mean never overestimate anybody. Or maybe, "You can never underestimate anybody."

I meant what I read somewhere long time back:

  Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

This rings a bell right now. :-)

Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP.

I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful.

It took me embarrassingly long to realize I got the HTTP header fields for SOAP from something wrong I googled -- it worked when I copied the header line from old code I wrote before... :-) :-(

My approach with Stack Overflow is to never copy-paste but always re-type by hand. This forces me to understand each line of code and its behavior (and double-check any errors). I can't recommend this enough.

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