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by vmasto
3241 days ago
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> From now on I'm going to include at least one of these in each interview I'll be conducting - for extra points of course. There's absolutely 0 benefit from an engineering standpoint in having type coercion memorized in JavaScript. I'd personally immediately terminate every interview that posed such questions ({} + [] + '' or whatever). I mean no offense, but I'd ask you to reconsider. People who ask trick/puzzle questions and hacks in interviews do not understand (or haven't thought deeply enough) how to properly screen JS developers which eventually goes through to the team itself. There are at least a dozen more interesting topics to question on if you want to assign extra points than useless stuff that should never be into production in the first place. |
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I would argue there is one:
tl;dr: Planning for the worst from the people who tend to generate code which is, in one word, bad but which they managed to push to production.
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When you know you're going to work with people who are not familiar with this concept, but still managed to shoehorn some code that looks a lot like these examples.
Recent case: A local front-end server for development purposes and an SPA with a login form. The server checks for certain, hard-coded credentials and if they match lets the user through. Problem was, if you didn't get them right at the first try the proper credentials stopped working until you reloaded the page.
How did that happen? There's an extra field in the form that is initialized to an empty string, but if the form is reset(on login failure) it is set to null, while the server checks for: field == '', because somebody assumed this would be enough.
Null is falsy, but it's not equal to other falsy values. People who don't know that are usually left scratching their heads.
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Anyway no offense taken and I'd be happy to hear some suggestions on how I could improve this process. Usually when I ask a "trick" question I give a warning beforehand indicating, that this is not something which is going to affect their score negatively. I found that normally people like this part and are often curious about the proper answer.
EDIT: One thing I would like to note is that I conduct interviews for the project which I'm currently in, so I'm going to suffer the consequences of any bad decisions on my part eventually.