I recently was interviewing for front-end developer positions, and had an interesting experience. I was made to take a written test, which might have it’s place, but to me, not when yre writing code. Excuse, me… typing code. And going to be typing code. All day. It’s like giving a driving test on a bicycle. It just doesn’t apply. Theory questions make sense, but don’t make me hand-write code.
But my bigger point is about understanding the world we now live in. I believe in honesty but I also got to the point in the interview when I knew I didn’t want the job, so I got a little cocky. When asked a question like, “What’s jQuery’s method to trigger all bound event handlers on an event?” I wrote, “I don’t know. I would google it.”
I wound up answering about half the questions like that. And I feel I was being honest.
My not knowing something should not necessarily reflect on my performance. Okay, I’ll conceded there’s a baseline. “What’s a variable?” answered with, “A small rodent like creature…” says I don’t know what I’m doing. Or maybe I’m just that cocky. But there’re a lot of functions I don’t carry around in my head, especially the advanced stuff, the stuff I don’t use every day. Which is just what I encountered on the test, because they wanted an “advanced” programmer. A good, “advanced” programmer, in my opinion, is as good as their references, and it’s really all about applying knowledge. You can know all the chords but it doesn’t mean you can play guitar.