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Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

I get at least 5 phone calls from recruiters a week, being a contractor. The amount of times i get someone that asks me something like:

  Recruiter: "We're looking for someone with React experience, do you have that?"
  Me: "Yes"
  Them: "Ok, how about Javascript?"

I want to explain to them but i end up just saying yes to every acronym on their list since they've no idea what they're asking for.

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Actual recruiting call:

"I have an opening for someone with mesosphere and machine learning experience."

"Well, I don't have any of those, but I have used docker a little bit."

"Great, I'd like you to interview."

It's funny because in a different context, that's exactly a sequence of questions that I as an engineer would ask:

> Do you have experience with React?

> Okay, do you have experience writing pure, vanilla JavaScript? Absent a framework like jQuery or Backbone or Angular?

The second question can often screen out people who simply maintain framework apps rather than those who actually know JS.

Are you assuming that people who haven't maintained a vanilla JS app don't actually know JS?

Not at all. I'm getting at the fact that many frontend devs don't know JavaScript, they just know cut-and-paste jQuery or how to fiddle with/maintain React/Angular components in a large app.

I doubt you can really just cut-n-paste jQuery in any nontrivial web app...

Correct, and that's one way to decisively filter out people who haven't worked on a nontrivial web app.

Exactly. A nuanced question like that is beneficial... but it has to be clear that there is that nuance.

As I posted in another comment in this thread, I can actually truthfully answer that with "Yes, No". I've got plenty of React experience, but in Clojurescript and not Javascript.

I would obviously fail the interview, rightfully, since I wouldn't be much good on a Javascript team using React. But I do know React.

(Okok, in reality, I'd learn. Its not that I don't know any JS at all, I do, but I avoid it as much as possible so when I write JS, its pretty bad hacky JS, and I can read it)

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