I think that both this question, and beachstartup's question about speeding up a website, are totally decent interview questions, for a intermediate-to-senior web developer.
But if anyone thinks that either of these questions is testing "critical thinking skills", or "problem solving", then I would like to hear in what way. Both of those seem to me to be pretty much archetypal "verbatim-recall questions".
Experience and exposure and education and ability to brute-force recall all of the above is valuable. But it's pretty much the exact opposite of what beachstartup said (s)he was testing, and there is zero "problem solving" in the "what happens when you hit return in a browser" question.
I'm a little bewildered how anyone could confuse these diametrically opposed aptitudes.
True. It takes all kinds of questions to get a good impression.
But I'd just like to protest, my answer was not 'brute-force recall'. It was simple experience. See, I've written code at all of those levels. None of it was booklearning.
I'll start by noting that this sequence of comments is just nit-picking, and if that bores anyone, stop reading. That disclaimer disclaimed...
I don't honestly care if it was booklearning or not, and I don't see what it has to do with my kvetch. I'm happy to believe you that it was learned from experience.
What does "brute-force recall" mean to you? To me it means that you are only repeating things that you knew before the question was asked, as opposed to dynamically generating new knowledge during the time that you answer. Whether you originally got that knowledge from books, or from experience, or from Mr Spock doing a mind meld, it's still memory, as distinct from problem-solving or critical thinking or perhaps more generically we might name "wit" as the counterpart of memory.
Again, I'm absolutely not knocking this form of knowledge; memory without wit is perhaps inflexible, but wit without memory is impotent. Memory is a good thing. Memory makes up the much greater half of expertise; this is why seniors get paid more than juniors (would you rather hire an IQ180 noob who knows nothing about the problem, or an IQ120 worker with 20 years of relevant experience?).
But I'm getting pedantically wound up about this minor nit: both you and beachstartup gave examples of interview questions that are tests of memory, and framed them as tests of problem-solving. If problem-solving is the thing you want to test, those are terrible interview questions for that particular purpose.
But if anyone thinks that either of these questions is testing "critical thinking skills", or "problem solving", then I would like to hear in what way. Both of those seem to me to be pretty much archetypal "verbatim-recall questions".
Experience and exposure and education and ability to brute-force recall all of the above is valuable. But it's pretty much the exact opposite of what beachstartup said (s)he was testing, and there is zero "problem solving" in the "what happens when you hit return in a browser" question.
I'm a little bewildered how anyone could confuse these diametrically opposed aptitudes.