Absolutely. That's why I paid my smart classmates to do all my take-home tests in school; it's an efficient, effective way to get the right answers!
I don't know if you interview people, but I do, and it's hard. I try hard to come up with questions that probe people's knowledge in specific ways and help discriminate between large ranges of ability. It's fucked up to try to ruin the information I'm getting by cheating without telling me.
If you hold the principled position that looking everything up during an interview is a reasonable way to demonstrate your competence, then you should come out and tell me that's what you're doing, so that I can make a decision which isn't based on lies of omission.
Yeah, but I fired the last guy who billed me for that time he needed to re-discover the quadratic equation.
An interview should evaluate the skills one needs for the job, not puzzles that make you feel smart. Were I interviewing someone, I would happily accept an answer something along the lines of "that's been solved already, I would use an existing library so I can move on and solve my real problem" with regard to bitwise operators.
The goal is obviously to figure out how good people will be at solving real problems. But it's not realistic, practical, or fair to come up with an unsolved problem for each interview.
I'm replying to the parent, who seems to think it's principled in the sense that it is the best way to operate in the real world, therefore he will do it in an interview.
I don't know if you interview people, but I do, and it's hard. I try hard to come up with questions that probe people's knowledge in specific ways and help discriminate between large ranges of ability. It's fucked up to try to ruin the information I'm getting by cheating without telling me.
If you hold the principled position that looking everything up during an interview is a reasonable way to demonstrate your competence, then you should come out and tell me that's what you're doing, so that I can make a decision which isn't based on lies of omission.