One possible factor when interviewing an experienced developer: how will they share their experience? Some people want to lecture, but many people do not want to be lectured at.

I once worked with someone who explained to me every day -- and in great detail -- all of the problems that my technical decisions would cause. He wasn't wrong, but it was still a demoralizing experience.

But at least he was only criticizing my decisions, and not my right to make them. In the same way that an older dev does not want to be perceived as incapable of learning new things, a younger dev does not want to be perceived as cavalier or irresponsible, and I have absolutely seen talented people discounted solely because they haven't held a particular title for enough years.

People are complicated, and we make a lot of assumptions about each other that we don't want others to make about ourselves.

> But why do I… ok fine, I’m going to start a localhost.

Is "start a localhost" a generic term? If someone told me to do that, I would probably freeze in embarrassment -- no one has ever told me to do that in such context-independent terms. Since this was about node/JS, did John install express, or some other static file serving module? Or did he have an unrelated tool that makes this trivial?

It's kind of a weird phrase. Would normally "start a server". But yes, generally speaking, it's a one liner to expose $PWD:

python3 -m http.server

here's how trivial it can be:

https://gist.github.com/willurd/5720255 ("Big list of http static server one-liners")

Yup, I've never heard of that particular idiom used to describe the action of spinning up a local server, and it's not really something trivial as to not require some external tooling. So I don't know what's up with that.

> Anybody can expend a lot of time and effort and successfully write a profiler, if they wanted to. Few people make a career in math.

Anybody can expend a lot of time and effort to write a profiler... but few people make a career of it. Anybody can expend a lot of time and effort on math... but few people make a career of it.

> If you're not a native English speaker, you might want to get checked for ADHD, since your post wasn't very coherent.

That's a strange suggestion to make after reading a single HN comment, especially when you're basing it off of your own subjective interpretation of said comment.

I thought the parent made a coherent point that people may avoid hard problems because of the assumption that 1) they need expertise that they don't have and 2) someone else is already working on it. The question raised was: how, in general, do we verify those assumptions?

> I thought the parent made a coherent point that people may avoid hard problems because of the assumption that 1) they need expertise that they don't have and 2) someone else is already working on it. The question raised was: how, in general, do we verify those assumptions?

This is what I meant. Though, I do remember I was a bit fuzzy on how to phrase things and opted for a conversational style instead.

> Anybody can expend a lot of time and effort to write a profiler... but few people make a career of it.

Correct, you generally don't get paid for writing Open Source on your own time.

What was the silly point your were trying to make, badly?