Sounds like the author was aiming for something to put on his resume: e.g., "Author of 25 libraries on NPM, some with more than 500K downloads." etc...
I think you're seriously overestimating quality of the average programmer candidate.
Someone who understands what NPM is, has written and published working code (even stupid code) is miles ahead of the curve already.
Most companies in the world, especially non-software companies, don't go for 5% hacker gurus. Attracting someone vaguely competent is already a blessing.
No, I don't think I am. I've conducted many dev interviews. Gurus can often be prima donnas, difficult to work with in a team, btw.
Interviewed enough "C++, 3 years" people who couldn't even describe a class, or give the most basic description of OO, to have no illusions of some of the standards out there. Similar for other languages. Similar for how much having a degree is worth. I used to be surprised such people tried it on, as there was no way they'd walk out of the hour looking anything but stupid, but it happened often enough to stop surprising. Of course I've also experienced code produced by such types, and worked with a couple.
If you're going to publish something then make the world a better place not pollute it with pointless stuff.
Spending more time publishing this package than most basically competent developers would spend writing the four lines is not going to mark you as "miles ahead of the curve" in my eyes. If you're an 18yo fresh out of school without degree, seeking trainee role, I'd look on it favourably.
In JavaScript, the API could be fairly complex. Thing is, JavaScript doesn't have arrays of numbers. So, what should the function do if the array passed in contains a null, an undefined, a string such as "7", "012", "008", or "2+3", a function, another array, a hash, etc?
I can easily see this grow into a function accepting options indicating such things as "null values are zeroes", "ignore null values", "evaluate string arguments", etc, or maybe into a factory that produces customized averaging functions.
For example, average([null,1,2,3],[4,5]) could either be 3 (the average of all numbers), 2.5 (sum of numbers divided by number of 'root' items), undefined (input format error), 3.25 (average of average of [1,2,3] and average of [4,5]), etc.
And what if it gets passed arrays of equal size? "average([1,2,3],[7,4,5])" could easily be interpreted as a vector average, and produce [4,3,4]
Silly? Yes, but if you want to write a robust library in JavaScript, you have to think about what to do with all these kinds of input.
And of course, there are the simple variants of harmonic mean, arithmetic mean, and geometric mean, and several others (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average)
...and this example is none of those things, and untouched in 2 years.
If an interviewee did respond with some or all of the points you raise he'd have turned a potential negative into a positive point. This instance is the simple arithmetic mean with no consideration of anything.
I stand by my original comment. Nine times out of ten an average is going to be resolutely unexceptional, one time in ten or less it's the core of a well-crafted solution with a decent reason for being.
IMO the behavior of "average" should be unspecified if it's passed anything but a single nonempty array of numbers. Making it even a tiny bit more robust is wasted work. Moreover, it's harmful because it encourages sloppy calling code.
Right, that's a different philosophy. You can use JS as a dynamic language with DWIM qualities, like SQL. But I prefer to write JS code as if it were a typed language without nulls, and use tools to enforce that. I think that approach will win.
Im of the mind most employers are looking for "have you done stuff" "can you do stuff". Veey rarely are they looking for anyone extraordinary, simply a tool that works
I doubt something like 'wrote npm package that averages stuff' would be relevant without fluffing it up to impress the non-tech hiring manager. Still would ring alarm bells with devs though.
That plus perhaps some kind of dopamine kick these people get out of this whole charade... Sindre Sorhus keeps describing himself as an "Open Source addict", after all.
