EDIT: to clarify, when I say “problems with HTTP” I mean actually understanding the protocol. Many people for example are unaware of the power of the Cache-Control header and all the things it can do. I used to ask people in interviews what the Content-Type header is for and enough senior engineers didn’t know that I simply stopped asking not to make them feel bad. It’s truly shocking how many people will go decades operating on muscle memory, never bothering to understand what’s actually happening when their code runs.
No, never. If the role needed someone with specific expertise or if CORS was a “hot item” for day to day development, then sure. But I’ve found that I usually don’t need to ask very complex questions to figure out if someone has skills or not.
Not OP. I'm starting to think that basic/mid level depth understanding of CORS is one of those canary-like items to judge if someone has a good grasp of web/http technologies. The other one is text encoding. You'd be surprised how many people don't know the difference between unicode and say utf8. It's all "black magic" to them at the end of the day.
It absolutely is. Especially when it "doesn't work" (not configured correctly.) Can someone look at a browser log and figure out what's going on? It's not just a front end issue, either. I've seen backend engineers set up crazy CORS configurations for internal APIs that would've been better served with a proxy off of a single origin. I even ran into an "architect level" guy that had no understanding of how that would even work. "You can POST without CORS???" seriously...
Sounds like confirmation bias. I know CORS and I know the difference between utf8 and unicode and I'm smart. Therefore anyone who doesn't is a dumb dumb.
EDIT: to clarify, when I say “problems with HTTP” I mean actually understanding the protocol. Many people for example are unaware of the power of the Cache-Control header and all the things it can do. I used to ask people in interviews what the Content-Type header is for and enough senior engineers didn’t know that I simply stopped asking not to make them feel bad. It’s truly shocking how many people will go decades operating on muscle memory, never bothering to understand what’s actually happening when their code runs.