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Expecting people to know meta tags is ridiculous for all but very specialized roles. It's the kind of thing you rarely touch once it's set up. I'd expect most d

Expecting people to know meta tags is ridiculous for all but very specialized roles. It's the kind of thing you rarely touch once it's set up. I'd expect most developers to be able to guess correct or near-correct answers just from context, which I guess is a test of a certain kind of reading ability. So I suppose that's some kind of signal. But this stuff changes often enough and there's enough subtlety, and very few people touch it very often, that you should be consulting a guide or reference most every time anyway. This is probably a test of some useful ability for developers to have, but it's not knowledge of these things in particular. Also: > <meta name="theme-color" [...] > This is the proper web standards-esque equivalent of the Apple status bar color meta tag. It tells the browser to theme the surrounding UI. Oh, so this is the horrible thing that's infecting my desktop Safari and making it hideous and weird and inconsistent? Interesting.

Alex3917 5y ago
> It's the kind of thing you rarely touch once it's set up. Exactly. Surely being able to actually configure the metadata tags on a webpage correctly must be more valuable than being able to remember what the different configuration options do years later, no?
umvi 5y ago
The author says he doesn't expect perfect answers > Note that since our technical discussion is a conversation. I don’t expect a perfect answer from anyone. If I hear some right keywords, I know that the candidate knows the concept, and I try to push them in the right direction. If I were being interviewed, I would probably say "yeah all those meta tags are metadata for various consumers. The apple related ones are probably for tailoring the page for display on apple devices" Hopefully that's good enough, if I were doing the interview I wouldn't expect more than that.
- brimble 5y ago
  Yeah, the post indicates that the author might be Doing It Right, but then there's stuff like: > Surprisingly, only a few people knew about the dir attribute in my interviews No. Most of those few people who "knew" it are decent-to-good readers with enough context to figure it out, and in this particular case they probably recognized "ltr", then worked backward to get what "dir" means, and were confident enough about that guess to state it as fact. They did all this in less than a second, because, again, they're decent-to-good readers who had the right context for this particular task. If this had been a made-up attribute you'd have gotten nearly as many people who "knew" it, I guarantee. This is closer to a web dev reading test than a direct test of knowledge. Which, again, might not actually be a crazy thing to administer.
  - jspash 5y ago
    But don't underestimate the importance of reading as a skill! It's incredibly frustrating to see devs make stupid mistakes and spend time trying to get something to work when the answer is right in front of their nose. I see this too often. A developer (usually more towards the junior end) who think they can just chug through any problem. Trying this, then that, then google, then that again. When, if they would just stop and think through the problem - and use their eyes - they would see the solution was there all along.
    - filmgirlcw 5y ago
      Totally agree. I’ve definitely made this mistake myself (we all have) and the lesson is definitely to stop, think, read the code and that usually helps with the solution (or at least makes it easier to hone in on what to google)
    - manuel_w 5y ago
      I sometimes see this with C++ compiler errors. People don't even try to understand them. They just change some random things and copy/paste some snippets from Stack Overflow, and finally request help instead of just investing a few minutes to actually understand what the compiler has problems with. Yes, g++ compiler errors are heard to read, but often the needed information is right there.
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    It's a perfectly cromulent attribute!
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    You’re right that this is closer to a reading test than a direct knowledge test, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
ProAm 5y ago
And this is for a furniture rental business...? I think there is a easier way to determine if a candidate has the minimum technical skills required for the job besides a diminutive interrogation about Twitter.
johannes1234321 5y ago
They don't expect candidates to be able to write the "right" set of tags, but they use them as a basis for discussing different topics and recognizing things and maybe doing educated guesses in the meaning are quite useful skills.
iamben 5y ago
> Expecting people to know meta tags is ridiculous for all but very specialized roles. Devil's advocate - is it? You're right, this stuff rarely gets touched, and (aside from changing the colours in the bit you hate!) it's the kind of stuff I'd normally boilerplate between projects. But if you're interviewing for a role and you're not giving them a coding test (yet?) but looking to see how curious they are, how disparate their knowledge is, or just (as you say) how good someone is at guessing from context - isn't this a fun experiment? I'd imagine just seeing how people deal with the answers gives you a good idea as to how they'd approach something when you're working together. Are they guessing? Confidently wrong? Seen it before but don't know what it is? Can roughly talk around it and what it does without exactly knowing? Proficient in it all (and how that relates to what they have or haven't said on their CV - have they under or over sold themselves?!)? I assume you could apply the same sort of test to any domain - test someone on something closely related you don't necessarily need to know and see how they react.
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- bri3d 5y ago
  The problem with these "present a tangental question / loosely unfamiliar but similar" questions is that they become useless when a candidate does know the answer as memorized trivia. At that point you're looking for a signal about "what does the candidate do when presented with something familiar but unknown" but receiving "can the candidate regurgitate an answer." Of course you can then ask a different question, follow-ups, and so on, but you're so far off baseline compared to most candidates that the question starts to become useless.
  - thomasahle 5y ago
    I don't think the point is that every interviewer should ask about Twitters source code, and every interviewee should memorize it. The point is to ask a few randomly sampled knowledge questions to measure how well rounded the candidate is. Taking the "first 10 lines of Twitter" is just one way to sample such questions.
matth3 5y ago
I've not been a frontend dev for well over a decade but I knew the meaning of all these meta tags. Back then I think it'd be pretty rare to find a good frontend developer who couldn't say what these were. Have things changed so much that knowledge of meta tags is specialist now? Assuming this interview was for a front end role that is.
- krapp 5y ago
  >Have things changed so much that knowledge of meta tags is specialist now? Yes. More or less all web development now involves generating HTML with a language that compiles to javascript and a framework. No one even looks at, much less directly interacts with, fundamental web code anymore, and HTML has become esoteric "low level" knowledge like assembly language.
  - matth3 5y ago
    But we've always generated the html using other languages, still needed to have a pretty decent idea of how it works. I find it hard to believe that's all redundant now in quite the same way knowledge of assembly is when your a python dev for example. Like take the open graph meta tags for example, for certain websites it'd be a big oversight to leave them out because you never bothered to learn what they were. I don't know if all this makes for a decent interview. Just blows my mind that people deem it too low level to have to care about, but what do I know anymore, it's been a real long time since I made a web page.
bdcravens 5y ago
It's not a test of their meta tag knowledge, it's a test of how well they can speak to concepts with some context. (For instance, I don't really do anything with Open Graph, and I don't know the meta tag off the top of my head, but I spotted it in this example)
wlesieutre 5y ago
> Oh, so this is the horrible thing that's infecting my desktop Safari and making it hideous and weird and inconsistent? Interesting. FYI you can disable the coloring as well as the "compact" layout that mushes the URL bar into the active tab and hides its <title> https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/safari-macos-turn-off-website-tinting/ https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/safari-macos-turn-off-websi...
- brimble 5y ago
  Yeah, reading TFA prompted me to finally go figure out how to do that :-) Much better. No more wild recoloring of my browser chrome because I switched tabs. > FYI you can disable the coloring as well as the "compact" layout that mushes the URL bar into the active tab and hides its <title> Did that day-1 with the new Safari. That part was wholly intolerable, not just ugly and annoying.
TameAntelope 5y ago
I think expecting people to know things they really shouldn't, and seeing how they react to that lack of knowledge is a very important part of interviewing. I assume this isn't the only question OP asks in their interviews, but I think it's got a couple of good outcomes and returns a lot for the length of time it takes to go through.
kemar 5y ago
- https://htmlhead.dev https://htmlhead.dev - https://github.com/kevinSuttle/html-meta-tags https://github.com/kevinSuttle/html-meta-tags
AdrianB1 5y ago
I am not a developer, never was, but I know most of the stuff in these lines. If I know about it, I expect a front-end developer to know a lot more - the developer is not a monkey pushing buttons in a framework to get a banana and web development frameworks should not be black boxes that nobody using it understands how it works and why. That is a level of superficiality that is terrifying.

Alex3917 5y ago

> It's the kind of thing you rarely touch once it's set up. Exactly. Surely being able to actually configure the metadata tags on a webpage correctly must be more valuable than being able to remember what the different configuration options do years later, no?

umvi 5y ago

The author says he doesn't expect perfect answers > Note that since our technical discussion is a conversation. I don’t expect a perfect answer from anyone. If I hear some right keywords, I know that the candidate knows the concept, and I try to push them in the right direction. If I were being interviewed, I would probably say "yeah all those meta tags are metadata for various consumers. The apple related ones are probably for tailoring the page for display on apple devices" Hopefully that's good enough, if I were doing the interview I wouldn't expect more than that.

brimble 5y ago
Yeah, the post indicates that the author might be Doing It Right, but then there's stuff like: > Surprisingly, only a few people knew about the dir attribute in my interviews No. Most of those few people who "knew" it are decent-to-good readers with enough context to figure it out, and in this particular case they probably recognized "ltr", then worked backward to get what "dir" means, and were confident enough about that guess to state it as fact. They did all this in less than a second, because, again, they're decent-to-good readers who had the right context for this particular task. If this had been a made-up attribute you'd have gotten nearly as many people who "knew" it, I guarantee. This is closer to a web dev reading test than a direct test of knowledge. Which, again, might not actually be a crazy thing to administer.
- jspash 5y ago
  But don't underestimate the importance of reading as a skill! It's incredibly frustrating to see devs make stupid mistakes and spend time trying to get something to work when the answer is right in front of their nose. I see this too often. A developer (usually more towards the junior end) who think they can just chug through any problem. Trying this, then that, then google, then that again. When, if they would just stop and think through the problem - and use their eyes - they would see the solution was there all along.
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    Totally agree. I’ve definitely made this mistake myself (we all have) and the lesson is definitely to stop, think, read the code and that usually helps with the solution (or at least makes it easier to hone in on what to google)
  - manuel_w 5y ago
    I sometimes see this with C++ compiler errors. People don't even try to understand them. They just change some random things and copy/paste some snippets from Stack Overflow, and finally request help instead of just investing a few minutes to actually understand what the compiler has problems with. Yes, g++ compiler errors are heard to read, but often the needed information is right there.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  It's a perfectly cromulent attribute!
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  You’re right that this is closer to a reading test than a direct knowledge test, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

ProAm 5y ago

And this is for a furniture rental business...? I think there is a easier way to determine if a candidate has the minimum technical skills required for the job besides a diminutive interrogation about Twitter.

johannes1234321 5y ago

They don't expect candidates to be able to write the "right" set of tags, but they use them as a basis for discussing different topics and recognizing things and maybe doing educated guesses in the meaning are quite useful skills.

iamben 5y ago

> Expecting people to know meta tags is ridiculous for all but very specialized roles. Devil's advocate - is it? You're right, this stuff rarely gets touched, and (aside from changing the colours in the bit you hate!) it's the kind of stuff I'd normally boilerplate between projects. But if you're interviewing for a role and you're not giving them a coding test (yet?) but looking to see how curious they are, how disparate their knowledge is, or just (as you say) how good someone is at guessing from context - isn't this a fun experiment? I'd imagine just seeing how people deal with the answers gives you a good idea as to how they'd approach something when you're working together. Are they guessing? Confidently wrong? Seen it before but don't know what it is? Can roughly talk around it and what it does without exactly knowing? Proficient in it all (and how that relates to what they have or haven't said on their CV - have they under or over sold themselves?!)? I assume you could apply the same sort of test to any domain - test someone on something closely related you don't necessarily need to know and see how they react.

deleted 5y ago
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bri3d 5y ago
The problem with these "present a tangental question / loosely unfamiliar but similar" questions is that they become useless when a candidate does know the answer as memorized trivia. At that point you're looking for a signal about "what does the candidate do when presented with something familiar but unknown" but receiving "can the candidate regurgitate an answer." Of course you can then ask a different question, follow-ups, and so on, but you're so far off baseline compared to most candidates that the question starts to become useless.
- thomasahle 5y ago
  I don't think the point is that every interviewer should ask about Twitters source code, and every interviewee should memorize it. The point is to ask a few randomly sampled knowledge questions to measure how well rounded the candidate is. Taking the "first 10 lines of Twitter" is just one way to sample such questions.

matth3 5y ago

I've not been a frontend dev for well over a decade but I knew the meaning of all these meta tags. Back then I think it'd be pretty rare to find a good frontend developer who couldn't say what these were. Have things changed so much that knowledge of meta tags is specialist now? Assuming this interview was for a front end role that is.

krapp 5y ago
>Have things changed so much that knowledge of meta tags is specialist now? Yes. More or less all web development now involves generating HTML with a language that compiles to javascript and a framework. No one even looks at, much less directly interacts with, fundamental web code anymore, and HTML has become esoteric "low level" knowledge like assembly language.
- matth3 5y ago
  But we've always generated the html using other languages, still needed to have a pretty decent idea of how it works. I find it hard to believe that's all redundant now in quite the same way knowledge of assembly is when your a python dev for example. Like take the open graph meta tags for example, for certain websites it'd be a big oversight to leave them out because you never bothered to learn what they were. I don't know if all this makes for a decent interview. Just blows my mind that people deem it too low level to have to care about, but what do I know anymore, it's been a real long time since I made a web page.

bdcravens 5y ago

It's not a test of their meta tag knowledge, it's a test of how well they can speak to concepts with some context. (For instance, I don't really do anything with Open Graph, and I don't know the meta tag off the top of my head, but I spotted it in this example)

wlesieutre 5y ago

> Oh, so this is the horrible thing that's infecting my desktop Safari and making it hideous and weird and inconsistent? Interesting. FYI you can disable the coloring as well as the "compact" layout that mushes the URL bar into the active tab and hides its <title> https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/safari-macos-turn-off-website-tinting/ https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/safari-macos-turn-off-websi...

brimble 5y ago
Yeah, reading TFA prompted me to finally go figure out how to do that :-) Much better. No more wild recoloring of my browser chrome because I switched tabs. > FYI you can disable the coloring as well as the "compact" layout that mushes the URL bar into the active tab and hides its <title> Did that day-1 with the new Safari. That part was wholly intolerable, not just ugly and annoying.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I think expecting people to know things they really shouldn't, and seeing how they react to that lack of knowledge is a very important part of interviewing. I assume this isn't the only question OP asks in their interviews, but I think it's got a couple of good outcomes and returns a lot for the length of time it takes to go through.

kemar 5y ago

- https://htmlhead.dev https://htmlhead.dev - https://github.com/kevinSuttle/html-meta-tags https://github.com/kevinSuttle/html-meta-tags

AdrianB1 5y ago

I am not a developer, never was, but I know most of the stuff in these lines. If I know about it, I expect a front-end developer to know a lot more - the developer is not a monkey pushing buttons in a framework to get a banana and web development frameworks should not be black boxes that nobody using it understands how it works and why. That is a level of superficiality that is terrifying.