[hnarn]

I work with developers and I sometimes joke with them claiming that they’re not “real” developers because they don’t know every function in the standard library and constantly have to look things up. This is such a nonsensical level of expectation on a developer (that they would know all functions by heart) and is also a really dangerous way to work, because it breeds complacency and, in time, deviations from the norm (because the norm changes).

There are many things that perhaps legitimately should make people feel like “impostors” even when they aren’t, but the need to use reference material definitely shouldn’t be one of them.

Unfortunately many people in our business still equate knowledge or competence with “knowing things by heart” which is really unfortunate, because I think at best it tells you very little about the person, and in the worst case you may be hiring someone that through arrogance will make mistakes because they don’t care about double checking crucial parts of their code because they too feel that they “should” know what’s going on.