[Mawr]

You happen to remember a particular piece of knowledge, so you project that expectation onto others. Theory of mind.

> yes, we expect professional software developers to have basic maths skills

Skill != knowledge. "What is a prime number" can be looked up and understood by any competent programmer in <5 minutes.

> "what is a prime number" is taught to 7 year olds, it's not vector calculus

Then it's reasonable to expect that an interviewee would be able to learn it as well, given the same resources. It does not however follow that an interviewee would inherently have that knowledge, just because 7 year olds are taught it.

Bottom line is, you're making too many assumptions about complete strangers.

[rini17]

If they know "prime number" is some technical term to look up. They might confuse it with amazon prime or anything else depending on context. You waste time explaining, they get indignant they are supposed to coding not do maths, complete mess.