Alternative scenario:

Soldier B: Soldier A asked a JavaScript question instead of a software engineering question. He's not a real soldier, shoot him

Ima guess it's javascript-ese to turn a json object into a string, perhaps for serialization. But no clue, coding for decades but always hated js, I guess my way through with a linter and IDE when I absolutely, positively, cannot find an alternative, which seldom happens.

honestly, this is used for debugging. Why not just pass the object as value to the console.log()

Web developer, or business developer. A lot of inter-system communications these days is in JSON, whether there is any JavaScript involved or not.

of course MIT uses their own JSON primitives

Oh shit didn’t notice the typo. Probably the all caps didn’t help.

Don't ask - if he told you then he'd have to kill you...

when i last did interviews we didn't do live coding, but chatted to applicants about things they liked about their preferred language (this was a consultancy position). people who actually like to program tend to have loads of opinions. juniors moreso. the less engaged people were with those questions, the worse the solution the their take-home task tended to be.

a friend of mine interviewed a candidate who apparently visibly froze after every question, like it was a quiz. turns out they were being fed answers from people off-screen and those people hadn't expected casual conversation. they were found out when they forgot to mute.

cat = dict(name=‘Garfield’, color=‘orange’)
str(cat)

Can I have that job?

When imposter syndrome meets an actual imposter!

Subtle hint that this is not for them.

i agree but hate to add the caveat that it (well, typescript) these days is by far the language that i’m most productive in, with the fewest bugs

it took me a long time to admit that to myself

it’s still a human rights violation

I've heard both. Personally, I will continue to pronounce it "Jay-Sawn" until I hear a damn good reason for why I should stop.