> If you have awareness of something, you can make decisions based on that awareness without necessarily having a deep understanding. When you have no awareness

> If you have awareness of something, you can make decisions based on that awareness without necessarily having a deep understanding. When you have no awareness is when the big issues arise. I think in many cases, it's that even just having a vague awareness of something prompts you to double-check more often or to do something about it when you aren't really sure. As an example, I find myself reading about the pros and cons of various PostgreSQL index types over and over again. It isn't really all that important for me to retain every detail about them for immediate recall but knowing that there's enough of a difference motivates me to read the documentation or run a quick web search before shooting myself in the foot. I tend to think that testing people on this kind of deep knowledge isn't really helpful nor is it indicative of how developers really operate. What you need to test them on is what steps they would take when they aren't really sure and how they learn from it.