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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I was consulting for a startup once and the owner asked me to create an examination he could use to screen front-end "developers". Question #1 asked the applicant to create a modal dialog without using Javascript. He told me that question filtered out several candidates.

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This is incredibly short sighted and defeats the purpose of an interview. You’re not trying to trick the interviewee with a gotcha question, you’re trying to find ones with the top skills. Who cares if they can open a modal without JS, when you’re building a front end app, guess what, you’re gonna use JS to open the modal. Building on my point about gotcha questions, I recently had a React interview and 3/4 of the interview was about currying functions in JS, something that’s never ever done in a Reqct app.

Plenty of people who represent themselves as "front-end" "developers" know a good amount of Javascript, or at least some frameworks, but barely know HTML and CSS. This question (and some of the others) filtered out those people.

It filtered out people who didn't know how to use HTML and CSS to render a modal, which is a very specific and not-widely-used HTML/CSS technique.

It filtered out people without a good general knowledge of HTML and CSS and the creativity and problem-solving skills to apply that knowledge.

There's nothing problem-solving about it - they either know some obscure CSS tag or they don't. You're not really testing any skills at all with the question.

I don't think knowledge of the :target pseudoclass is an especially useful filter. It's not without its uses, but it's not exactly part of the core toolbelt either.

If a software developer needed to implement such a feature given those constraints, they could gain the necessary knowledge with a two-minute internet search. Knowledge and information are common and easily acquired, critical thinking and creativity are not. I strongly recommend an interview process that screens for the latter, not the former.

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