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Senior roles require that you can break down large problems into digestible chunks. "gotcha" questions don't tell an interviewer how good you are architecting,

Senior roles require that you can break down large problems into digestible chunks. "gotcha" questions don't tell an interviewer how good you are architecting, or how well you understand the language. "gotchas" are usually easily Google-able too. I've asked a lot of code structure questions. JS really easily turns into spaghetti code if a dev isn't careful. I like to test candidates on whether they make code understandable with clean closures, modules, files, etc. I'll also ask about which libraries they used, why they used them, and what they liked/disliked about the library. Also, "because that's what the code base was in, and there was no reason to change it" is a legitimate 'why'. For language specific things: - How closures, scopes, and prototypal inheritance work is important. This is often tested with nested callbacks. - Web API design - HTTP methods (Not as important if a candidate's background is in RCP, GraphQL, or something that doesn't use HTTP methods RESTfully)

shados 8y ago
I completely agree with your core point. I really hate gotcha questions too (and have come close to walk out of interviews over them quite a few times). On the other hand, ""gotchas" are usually easily Google-able too." isn't that simple. You don't know what you don't know. We're in a world now when even some extremely senior devs don't know the tools they use. A lot of it can be blamed on the whole "if you know one language you can learn any other in an afternoon!" tenet. Having so few people these days with vertical/deep knowledge of the tools they use gets really annoying when trying to deal with major production issues and no one in the room can debug them in a timely manner. Almost makes me think that some form of "tech guru" role should start being a thing, and THOSE people could be interviewed with the stream of obscure gotchas...because sometimes you need a tech guru.

shados 8y ago

I completely agree with your core point. I really hate gotcha questions too (and have come close to walk out of interviews over them quite a few times). On the other hand, ""gotchas" are usually easily Google-able too." isn't that simple. You don't know what you don't know. We're in a world now when even some extremely senior devs don't know the tools they use. A lot of it can be blamed on the whole "if you know one language you can learn any other in an afternoon!" tenet. Having so few people these days with vertical/deep knowledge of the tools they use gets really annoying when trying to deal with major production issues and no one in the room can debug them in a timely manner. Almost makes me think that some form of "tech guru" role should start being a thing, and THOSE people could be interviewed with the stream of obscure gotchas...because sometimes you need a tech guru.