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northwesternfintech / ISA-Interview-Problems-Fall-2023

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Honor system based frontend interview is inherently flawed #2

Open andrlime opened 8 months ago

andrlime commented 8 months ago

"Do not look at background.css" will just encourage people to look, I have a two phased (easy) solution in mind, though it doesn't completely prevent cheating:

  1. Use openpgp to decrypt CSS fetched from some remote server
  2. Host the css file on a remote server, e.g. written with Express (literally will take 15 minutes max), and have env variables on that remote server to decrypt with every GET request

Upsides:

  1. Cool, as we get to encrypt and decrypt stuff
  2. Easy, as it really only takes an hour max to implement
  3. Makes cheating a little bit harder, so any candidates that pass either by just doing the interview or cracking the encryption are probably very smart either way

Downsides

  1. Interviewees can just inspect element. I'm sure there's a way to get around that but I haven't figured it out yet. What I mean by this is, when you inspect element, the CSS is at the bottom of the screen (in Chrome for example).
egelja commented 8 months ago

Oh I saw this in the Hackerrank for IBM (for some reason)

make the background an image or pixel sized elements and put the foreground in a container the same size.

andrlime commented 8 months ago

Oh yeah I did that for Visa, but the image sizing could be wacky and that could lead to undefined behavior

egelja commented 8 months ago

There’s ways to do it fixed size

egelja commented 8 months ago

It's horrible but you have to pixel size everything

@hongZhou443 confirm this is possible right?

hongZhou443 commented 8 months ago

You do not have to use any determinate sizing units. This is also not meant to be taken remotely. Supervision is not assumed and a high tech solution is not needed.

egelja commented 8 months ago

@hongZhou443 commented on Oct 16, 2023, 3:56 PM CDT:

You do not have to use any determinate sizing units.

Ok sure.

This is also not meant to be taken remotely. Supervision is not assumed ...

You seem to have contradicted yourself.

Originally posted by @hongZhou443 in https://github.com/northwesternfintech/ISA-Interview-Problems-Fall-2023/issues/2#issuecomment-1765262812

andrlime commented 8 months ago

If supervision is assumed, then I don't see any issue with what is being done right now, but if supervision is not assumed, then we should probably do what @egelja said and make the background into an image.