Honor system based frontend interview is inherently flawed

[andrlime]

"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]

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]

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

[egelja]

There’s ways to do it fixed size

[egelja]

It's horrible but you have to pixel size everything

@hongZhou443 confirm this is possible right?

[hongZhou443]

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]

@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 #2 (comment)

[andrlime]

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.