At least in the US, lawyers, surgeons, & civil engineers all have accredited testing to even enter the profession, in the form of the bar exam, boards, and FE & PE tests respectively. So they do have such theoretical tests, but only when they want to gain their license to practice in a given state. Software doesn't have any such centralized testing accreditation, so we end up with a mess.

The major difference between software devs and lawyers, surgeons, and civil engineers is that the latter three have fairly rigorous standards to pass to become a professional (bar, boards, and PE).

That could exist for software too, but I'm not sure HN folks would like that alternative any better. Like if you thought memorizing leetcode questions for 2 weeks before an interview was bad, well I have some bad news.

Maybe in 50-100 years software will have that, but things will look very different.

You ain't interviewing your plumber or accountant come on and I have millions of other examples.

Accountants have to sit for the CPA exams (four of them), and depending on the state may have required graduate course load. And also you should interview your CPA, because a lot are not very good at whatever specific section of accounting you need (e.g. tax filing).

Plumber is probably the closest to what you're getting at. They are state licensed typically, with varying levels of requirement. But the requirement is often just like "have worked for 2-4 years as a trainee underneath a certified plumber" or whatever. That would be closest to what I'm guessing you would be recommending?

Also relevantly: the accountant and plumber jobs that are paying $300k-$500k+ are very rare. There exist programming jobs that pay what a typical plumber makes, but don't have as many arcane interview hoops to jump through.

"don't think about triggering a focus change event on your browser, it gets reported)."

So .. my approach would be to just open dev tools and deactivate that event.

Show of practical skill or cheating?

Switching to devtools also triggers a focus change and is detectable by other means (such as repeatedly invoking a debugger statement).

One can type in devtools withouth having the focus on dev tools, but indeed, to track down the event, one has to loose focus for a while. But after you find out what line of js is needed, then you can just inject that without dev tools with greasemonkey for instance.

But probably a general solution exists ... and there are actually extensions that will do that in general.