They usually answer confidently right away. It's one thing if you're nervous in interviews, it's another if someone asks you a novice-level question about your area of expertise and you give an answer that is objectively wrong.

Judging by your posts in this thread, have you considered the problem might be that you (and many other companies) hire people based on their ability to answer theoretical questions (which also happens to be while under a lot of pressure), rather than their ability to code? I'd like to think there are plenty of candidates that have open source projects that showcase their coding skills, or that have made impressive side-projects.

It's not really a theoretical question though. It's a very concrete example of the most common operation you would need to perform in a front end developer role. And none of the applicants we've seen have side projects or code on github. If you know of a method to ascertain someone's ability to code in a professional environment in a one hour interview, I'm all ears!

Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment and it feels like you expect to hire experts in some random framework instead of good software engineers. I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing or have done basic pixel dev applying that don't meet your bar.

I'm getting tired of replying to troll-ish posts, but:

> Honestly you don't seem to be a well put together environment

That is a pretty bold and unfriendly statement to make based on very little information.

> you expect to hire experts in some random framework

We're hiring front-end developers to work on a react and redux application, which is kind of a de-facto standard for single page applications these days. We have an app with a highly dynamic UI that requires immediate user feedback and must work offline. I don't think we're misapplying the technology.

> I'm not surprised you're only getting code monkeys who have used your framework in passing

Again, we're interviewing people with several years of professional experience using react and redux listed on their resumes. We're also not tailoring the interview process to only react and redux specific questions, but if someone claims to have been paid to write react apps for three years, I'm going to ask them some questions about writing react apps.

Even so, you shouldn't underestimate people's ability to have a meltdown during the pressure of an interview.. I won't comment on the React question, since I've never used it and don't know what a 'reducer' is.. but even the truly bizarre for-loop you posted is likely to cause confusion to some people during the interview. If I saw it while I felt the pressure of an interview, then I'd possibly feel confused and would need a couple of minutes to understand what was happening. This would no doubt reflect poorly on me, which is unfortunate because when I don't feel the pressure of the interview then I can instantly understand (and laugh at) the code.

I believe you'd have much better results if you ascertained the applicants technical ability before the interview, and instead spent the interview getting to know the person, to see if (s)he had a positive and friendly personality. If none of your applicants have side-projects or code on GitHub then perhaps you're searching the wrong places, and/or failing to properly promote the position (especially if some of your developers are earning 2xxK). I'm sure if you posted the position in HN's 'Who's Hiring' and included a 100+k salary, then you'd get flooded by talented developers that have open source code/impressive side-projects. And if somebody with an impressive resume doesn't have that, then you can just request a small take-home assignment that's related to the work you do. If you'd like to avoid getting flooded with resumes', then you could also just reach out to the developers you find interesting on GitHub.. considering your salary range then I imagine you'd have a very high interest rate.