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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly common disease on the internet. And I ding interview candidates who have to look up basic syntax like a for loop (I have no problem if they need to reference random APIs or advanced syntax though).

Being fluent in your professional vernacular is very important for productivity. And a closed test is the best, scalable way we have to test this.

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You won't succeed on any advanced test, with or without reference materials, if you haven't mastered the underlying basics. There would be too much to look up. You can't simplify fractions in a reasonable time if you need to look up everything in a multiplication table, for example, and it's true for everything that builds on that. It's the same for any topic: there comes a point where you can't succeed on Google alone.

You can Look up Mathematical induction but if it's the first time to solve one in the exam you won't succeed.

I've been coding for 30 years and I still have to look up syntax for case/switch statements. You ding me?

Seriously, that's just not super valuable information to have stored in your mind like that.

Sure I could, it'd be fine, but why store the entire syntax structure in my mind rather than a pointer to the location where I can find it in its most updated form?

I'm sorry, but what?

They have been coding for quite a while and are saying that they still look up the syntax for case/switch statements, because they cannot remember it off the top of their head. I am in the exact same boat, except with about a third of their experience coding.

I would definitely ding someone and think less of them if they claimed to be a senior engineer but couldn't remember how to write a switch statement in Java/C++. If you have to look things up you work slower and you don't understand nuances of e.g. what types can be used in switch statements in what language which limits your design skills.

Do cases fall through? Do I need to have them sequential? Can I put additional conditions on it? What if I have a case multiple times?

There is a surprising amount of complexity behind switch/case.

Shoot, some syntaxes haven't even been around long enough to have a for-loop documentation page hit the front page of a google search of "{language} for loop". As an agency developer I've got like 6+ languages/markup syntax knowledge required of me any given year, they just keep making new ones and I have to keep learning them.

My current requirements, just this month, are:

  * Python
  * PHP
  * Javascript
  * React and Vue
  * TypeScript (but not in every JS project!)
  * Blade templating
  * Liquid templating
  * Whatever Algolia uses for it's inline templating
  * Bash
  * C# (games!)

And if you want you could throw in arbitrary configuration syntaxes for all the infrastructure as code insanity that comes with it all, some of those have loops.

Sure, but why is someone asking you to use Algolia templates in an interview?

It was just to illustrate how much arbitrary knowledge is required in modern stacks. We could be talking about totally different industries though, perhaps you're hiring senior C developers and it'd be weird if they didn't know the syntax yet.

For apps and web development, I wouldn't fuss too much about specific language syntaxes since if I were to cull my applicants based on language experience I'd be throwing away plenty of talented developers. I'd hire a talented Python developer for a job writing JS for example, if they're applying then they're willing to learn it.

Fair enough. In my interviews I tell candidates to code in the language they’re most familiar with. Hopefully someone has memorized a for loop in their go to language.

Aha, that's a pretty fair approach then.

I assume the doctor is having all your symptoms recorded, are you against that being automatically put into an expert system to list possible diseases? One that knows the failure rates of tests so can give more accurate chances of having X Y but not Z is actually something that has X Y and Z, but the Z test is only 90% accurate?

By scalable you mean cheap.

An actual test would be: design a whole system/experiment to do a thing, in 3 hours.

Can't look up basic things, you'll be too slow.

But then it can't be auto marked, so isn't cheap.

Exams: The very last time in your life you won't have internet access.

Doctors google rare disease symptoms sometimes, however, and it's seen as a legitimate thing to try if you're truly stumped by a mysterious illness.

And in the days before the internet, they likely had a bookshelf full of reference manuals.

True story: when I became a programmer in the 1990s, I used to buy the printed manuals for the Java APIs as they were released. At one of my first interviews (for a Perl job), I was given the Camel Book as reference for the (handwritten) programming test.

And just as often they don’t. I went to the ER for a seizure, and basically after paying $5,000 the advice I got was “well that drug has seizures as a side effect, so stopping take it and find a new one.” Absolutely no investigation in to why this happened, if there’s a class of drugs I should avoid, nothing.

Huh, sounds like you might have been better off if "[your] emergency room doctor [looked it up] on the internet".

Well I can’t find any information on the general internet about this, beyond what the doctor said. One would most likely have to synthesize several different areas of knowledge to come up with a plausible hypothesis.

The business world has a jargon term, "solutions provider". The idea is that they strive to not just provide you a tool, but to fully solve your problem, to make it entirely go away. It's often just a buzzword, but like most buzzwords, there's a kernel of useful truth in the middle of it.

The medical industry is not a solutions provider. You should view them as a useful tool, but one that still leaves you with the responsibility to utilize the useful tool to solve your problems.

I am not making a normative claim here; I'm making a descriptive one. The medical system is an incredible toolset, but you need to be ready to assemble it into a solution. Maybe it should be a solutions provider. Maybe it's really discriminatory against the people who won't or can't operate this way. No argument. But it observably isn't a solutions provider today, whatever "should" be.

In this particular case, if you care you should have scheduled a followup with a different doctor. ER doctors don't do that sort of analysis.

Then you can test on time. If it is expected to remember the term without internet give them few second after showing the question. Remembering the answer in 30 seconds is not better than being able to google it.

> I don’t want my emergency room doctor looking up a fairly common disease on the internet.

That ship sailed a long time ago.

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