Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was thinking the same thing. I've built manys a website in pretty much every front-end language imaginable and I would struggle to answer many of these. Yet I feel little shame in saying that I believe myself to be a very competent programmer. What is the significance of having memorized a bunch of arbitrary terms? If you don't know what the difference is between <script> and <script defer> that doesn't mean you aren't a competent developer. It means you've never needed to know that to this point to successfully build a web app to meet a business need. If I'm hiring somebody I'm much more interested in whether they can actually build shit in a smart way when asked to do so, and with minimal guidance. We live in an age with ample internet access and a plethora of on-demand information resources. Why must we pretend that we don't?

As Colonel Frank Slade says in Scent of a Woman when asked by his nephew why he always gets his job title wrong- "Because it's not important for me to get it right."

If you don't know what the difference is between <script> and <script defer> that doesn't mean you aren't a competent developer.

No, but it does mean that you don't know about deferred script execution and possibly do not have a lot of experience in optimising page performance.

Hardly the end of the world, but if you're looking for a senior developer you might really want that skillset.

Or you had other ways of indicating scripts were meant for processing after the document had been parsed (which might be smart or even essential depending on your support targets).

That might have been something that senior devs only did 5-10 years ago, rather than something senior devs do now, though if that's the case one might wonder exactly what we mean when we say "senior."

Even if you chose a different implementation in the end, you'd still be aware of what defer is.

I've seen it for the first time.

But it didn't seem too obscure to me. Deferring execution is a known technique, so I would have probably guessed it right or switched it up with async.

No, but it does mean that you don't know about deferred script execution and possibly do not have a lot of experience in optimising page performance.

Perhaps, but as with any question like this, it's a foolish interviewer who draws such a broad conclusion from such a narrow data point. For example, as it happens I do know what <script defer> does, but that includes the fact that it can't be used reliably before IE10, which is why I've never actually used it on any production site. Not having encountered that particular functionality would therefore have made absolutely no difference to any project I have ever worked on, nor had any relevance to any senior people I was hiring to work on them with me.

Or you knew what those terms meant at some point, but your brain cleared them away when you didn't use them for a year to make more space for the next crazy thing you have to learn.

I don't know if the "Google effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect) is real but I sure as mittens have to google for syntax all the time. maybe not Google, man pages work or Python has help(csv.reader) or whatever.

All these questions test my google skills, not necessarily my front end skills.

I was stuck in many even though I write JavaScript everyday.

When I was younger, I knew how do simple things like checking the length of an array or joining a list of strings together or dividing two integers with various kinds of rounding/truncation. I could have told you instantly the correct syntax to do this in every language I knew.

Today, I probably couldn't tell you with bet-my-life-on-it confidence how to do those things in any language I know. There are a lot more languages, about half a dozen of which I currently use in professional work several times per week, but the five-second documentation search to check the right syntax* is completely auto-pilot behaviour now.

This was quite a disturbing realisation the first time I noticed it, but I've since concluded that with modern on-line help systems, general awareness of what tools will be available and what kinds of tricky issues to look out for is far more practically useful than being able to reliably recite specific details for specific contexts five seconds faster than a search would have told me.

*In the case of JavaScript, please allow five seconds for the initial search, followed by another thirty seconds checking sites like MDN or caniuse to see what is actually likely to happen in real browsers and whether some mundane functionality amazingly still needs a polyfill or other library-based alternative to work sufficiently portably. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com