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Discussion on: Should interviewees be allowed to search for answers?

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David Wickes

The best engineers are problem solvers, not fact memorizes

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When I'm hiring I'm looking for the right attitude to solving the problem in hand, and a suitable approach.

For instance, I wouldn't instantly judge a developer if they didn't know how to create and use an HTTP client in a given language. But if they didn't know that they needed a client, or that it was called a client, I'd worry. If they don't know how to make a POST request to send a form, that's fine - but I'd want them to know that that's what they need to do, to tell me that, and then to search for how to do it.

What I look for is a developer who doesn't get stuck, doesn't panic, reads their stack traces, and does something rational as their next step (I loathe developers who just flail around changing things until it works). And searching for an answer on the web is a very rational thing to do.