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Absolutely. And I’ll also say that as an interviewer, I appreciate someone who can BS though something like this. Because part of the job is BSing through a lot of stuff.

If someone can get stuff done on the front-end and back-end at a senior level, who cares what they've memorized? I used to memorize all sorts of stuff. The only advantage it gave me was occasionally sounding smart, which it came at the expense of learning actually interesting things, like how to pick a useful database schema.

I don’t think of this as rote memorization tho. This is about, can you read, identify, and explain the different parts. Now, you might not think that is a good test to see if someone is competent or not — and I’m not going to pretend it is perfect. But as these things go, I don’t think it’s a bad starting point.

I could explain nearly every one of those ten lines (and again, I’d have to see to full origin-trials line to know for sure, but I’d say there is a 70% I could infer/BS the answer), not because I’ve memorized anything but because I’ve spent years writing and reading this sort of thing.

Now, if you asked me to write the first ten lines perfectly without any mistakes or use of code completions or boilerplate, I would almost assuredly fail. To me, that’s a stupid memorization test. But asking someone to explain why something is there and what it does, I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.

But for the job in question, this kind of stuff isn't memorisable factoids.

Knowing what these 2 tags are for is fundamental, the wording of the attributes are vaguely self-descriptive, and recognising CSS from HTML is instinctive.

You can't "get stuff done" without being able to at least bullshit the basics.

You don't know this stuff because you have "memorized" it, like with flash cards or something as some kind of memorization exersize. You know it because you know web technologies.

It's weird to use "memorization" as basically a synonym for "remembered". Being a good developer is not just copy-and-pasting things from google, it involves actually understanding some technologies. Understanding technologies is not "memorization".

And BS-ing through it is exactly one of the red flags I'd be looking for as an interviewer.

I don't want people who tell me "it's all under control" and "I know this" and then the result is a disaster. I want people who tell me "I know X and Y but I'll have to look up Z". Tell me that you don't know but are assuming, then show me your reasoning skills by "BS-ing your way through it".

Absolutely. I think about this as, one of the things we communicate with our speech is our confidence. (Likelihood that some claim we make is correct). Speaking confidently about something you don’t know is epistemic lying. And seeing a candidate lie to me is a red flag in an interview.

It’s also really stupid. An interviewer wouldn’t ask a question like this unless they knew what every line of code shown does. By all means say “I think this does X, but I’m not sure”. But if you boldly tell me it does X when I know for a fact you’re wrong, that will go badly for you.

Yeah, I had some great results in the past with "I'm not familiar with that, but if I were to take a guess I'd say ...". Shows you're not a bullshitter and is capable of reasoning about stuff. Good qualities for people I want to work with.

Also, if I have the least bit of doubt about what I'm going to say, I always start with "not really sure about that, but ...". Might seem weird at first sight to be a candidate who is not sure about anything, but it shows you can recognize your own lacks(and look it up if needed), shows you're humble, and usually scores some extra points when you still get most answers right even if you were not so sure.

Meh. Anyone at a sufficiently large/established company might be senior and never touch these. It's not like those tags need attention very often.

The main thing here is that a senior engineer could:

1. Know how to find out what each of those mean (junior engineer level work)

2. Most importantly, be able to come up with a good set of meta tags after some research (mid-to-senior level)

Being able to B.S. your way through reading the tags tells me nothing. It's like asking language API trivia questions.