If you're applying for a job as a full-time software developer, you should be able to write something that is comprehensible without having a syntax reference.

If you're applying for a job as a full-time software developer, you should be able to write something that is comprehensible without having a syntax reference. I straight-up tell people I don't care if you use the wrong method name (in Python is it ends_with() or endswith? toupper, to_upper, or upcase?). Heck, I even tell them I don't care what language it is as long as it's not too weird. A few months back I interviewed someone who was currently employed as a software engineer at a major company in Silicon Valley, who couldn't even figure out how to write a tiny little program which kept track of state across method calls. I told him that he could store the state in global variables, make an object to track the state, or anything else he wanted; still couldn't make any progress outside creating a single stateless function. I was truly puzzled.