> they will be required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node location to another.
Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker class, which I have previously used, though I couldn't write a working implementation on a whiteboard without briefly consulting MDN for a refresher. If you're just filtering candidates based on if they've memorized the ever-growing web standard, you're going to lose a lot of good candidates.
Yes, that is the entire point of why something like that is a good filter. It is stupendously simple and trivial to demonstrate live in code. The REPL of the browser console even helps with suggestions. Yet, 95% of people writing JavaScript would rather commit seppuku than try it live during an interview.
Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker class, which I have previously used, though I couldn't write a working implementation on a whiteboard without briefly consulting MDN for a refresher. If you're just filtering candidates based on if they've memorized the ever-growing web standard, you're going to lose a lot of good candidates.