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"I'm known for hiring the best engineers". BUT if you're really known for hiring the best engineers, please show us your accomplishments! You just told us you look for trivia which means you're great at hiring engineers who are good at language trivia. That set has a pretty small overlap with "best" engineers. "Best" itself has a small overlap with "useful" engineers.

Your trivia knowledge is great to impress like minded people but irrelevant if the problem space doesn't depend on it.

PS: Someone could consider you a pretty junior engineer if you ship: "if(!!1 && b.some(e=>e>6)){

foo();

}"

because the you're increasing the risk of error in a codebase that would likely be maintained by people of varying skills. You write code to solve problems and you write code so regular earth humans can grok it and manipulate it to solve problems.

Writing code with a high risk of introducing problems and misunderstanding does not signal senior in many domains.

This is not trivia. For better or for worse truthy evaluation is a fundamental part of the language which is what this code snippet appears to be primarily testing.

> best engineers

Precision is different from recall.

You're asking trivia. I'd rather ask questions that can't be studied for, only practiced through years of experience.

I also sometimes hire people who don't know JavaScript, yet.

Don't see how you could consider the question they posed to be trivia for someone who knows javascript? Abuse of truthy evaluation is very rampant. All the JS codebases I've worked on are filled with `if (!myArray.length)` and etc. I would be very sad if anyone with a year of JS experience couldn't get this problem.

By trivia, I mean it can be thoroughly explained in a paragraph or two.

Separately, if it's the kind of thing that can be learned in less than a year of experience, it's not helpful for determining whether someone should be hired as a senior engineer.

Wait, what?

You're saying "you shouldn't have to study for an interview because you either have the experience or you don't" and then you're equating being able to answer a trivia question with experience.

The irony is extremely rich. Being able to answer any particular question cannot measure if someone has the requisite experience. The only thing it tells you is that they can answer that question.

Your judgement of them based on your question is extremely subjective and doesn't tell you whether they "REALLY know the subject" or not. You are just testing your own biases which may yield good results, but call a spade a spade.

> When I do interviews I make sure the candidate is aware that studying will be a pointless endeavor and if I can tell your answers come from one of the interview prep books I'll end the interview early. My interviews ask questions that will tell me if you REALLY know the subject. For example if JavaScript is a requirement I'll throw this at you

How can you tell if someone had simply memorized a few pieces of JS trivia and is regurgitating it to answer your question? The code is not that complex or "totally weird".

I've never written a line of Javascript in my life but that test looks trivial.

    a.filter(x=>1)

guessing that arrow looking thing is syntax sugar for a lambda that always returns a 1, then it's implicitly cast to boolean true in the filter, so nothing gets filtered out and b ends up just the same as a.

!!1

not not 1 -> true

    b.some(e=>e>6)

at least one element of b greater than 6, clearly true

so both arms of the && are true, so foo() gets called.

I don't think this is a very good test if someone like me can pass it just by making educated guesses.

It's rational for most candidates to study interview prep books because that is what the majority of companies want. Not saying I like it, but why would you want to filter out candidates who are just using basic common sense?

I think it's a combination of a lot of interviewers priding themselves when they "stump the chump" and a possibly subconscious optimization to find folks who won't upset the status quo.