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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

I never doubted you were. That's why I'm saying you're not serious if you say you don't know these things that you obviously do. I'm 100% sure you'd ace the first ten lines of Twitter's html question.

I want to hire you, not someone who's never really thought about what's going on. These questions are just a trick to force someone to step out of the box and go deep into some fundamental web concepts. It's not about memorizing some HTML tags, it's about knowing why they exist.

edit: This is just in the hypothetical scenario I'd be hiring a senior frontend web developer. You generally only need maybe 30% of those, the rest I can get trained on developing features within 3 months after finishing a 10 week bootcamp. I wouldn't bother asking them how UTF-8 works, I just explained what the word "encoding" means to a junior who'se been outpacing me for the past 3 months. The person who reviews their merge request should definitely know what UTF-8 is.

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And, if I was trying to hire someone and had this type of conversation with them and they stormed off in a huff, I would be grateful. I don't want to employ people who can't get out of their own mental demesne to have the conversation that I, as an employer, want to have, and I for sure as hell would not want to hire someone who got upset that I asked them questions that they consider beneath them during the interview where the point is for me to figure out how much value you bring.

The ground is beneath you too but you would fall to your roasty death in the center of the planet if it wasn't there, and if you have a gaping hole in your knowledge base then identifying and resolving it before some portion of the companies' success is resting on your too-narrow shoulders is a good idea.

It's also about your communication style. If you know what an HTML tag is for, can you clearly explain it in language that's easy to understand? If you don't know what it does, do you just say that, or do you try and bullshit your way through the answer?

You can't be serious. I save someone a million dollars a year knowing how to properly index and query DynamoDB, not about what <doctype HTML> means or whatever. Or when preflight requests in CORS are too expensive to be worth the overhead vs alternatives. Or the advantages and disadvantages of a REST API following jsonapi.org vs GraphQL.

Nobody cares about text-size-adjust and other such nonsense. It doesn't materially change anything.

I save someone a million dollars a year knowing how to properly index and query DynamoDB, not about what <doctype HTML> means or whatever.

If someone said that to me in an interview my next question would be "Why did you apply for a senior frontend dev role then?"

Nobody cares about text-size-adjust and other such nonsense.

Senuor frontend devs do care about that, because it affects the display quality, accessibility, and readability of a web app on a mobile device. If you get text size wrong on a site like Amazon or Twitter you could push tens of thousands of people to stop engaging with the site. Imagine if the "Buy Now" text on a button overflowed because the font was too big so it read "Buy no" instead. That would have an impact on revenue.

I think this is just one of the many questions. No body is expecting the interviewer to spend hours quizzing you on twitters HTML. But a 5 to 10min discussion on HTML tags and their applicability seems right for a web-developer interview. If nothing else, it shows that the candidate knows tags other than `div`, `span`, `form` and `style`.

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