I have always read that, interviewers ask candidates to be good with their syntax. Is it really that important? Because, if the concepts are clear and, as every language has different syntax, syntactical errors shouldn't be a big problem. Or is it?
There are two types of interviews, from whatever I've seen - design interviews and algorithmic interviews. In the former, you're just brainstorming, suggesting ideas and working through a usually tough problem.
The second type of interview is the algorithmic interview. While most people would just be looking for pseudo code here, it's not uncommon to be asked write code that'll actually work. Now, when you're in an interview, you are obviously going to use a language that's familiar to you. You just need to the basic syntax, IMHO.
For instance, I've been working with NodeJS for two years now, but if someone asks me to read from STDIN at this very moment, I will have to google the syntax for it. No interviewer is going to judge you for that.
I don't know if it's important, but I try to do it anyway.
Coincidentally, I went for an interview today. They had a few questions that I had to answer on a white board. In PHP, I indented my lines, ended them with the obligatory ; and even went back and corrected spacing and re-wrote entire lines to make it look good on the whiteboard.
Did it help? We'll see I guess - but I like my code to look good, be it as actual code or brain storming on a whiteboard.
Yes! you do have read right, but there are some catch.
And yes i agree with your opinion that concepts are more important than the syntax._
Siddarthan Sarumathi Pandian
Full Stack Dev at Agentdesks | Ex Hashnode | Ex Shippable | Ex Altair Engineering
Mev-Rael
Executive Product Leader & Mentor for High-End Influencers and Brands @ mevrael.com
By "being correct" probably people mean to write a good code and good code means the code people can easily understand and maintain and not that there are no mistakes (especially if you been writing code on whiteboard). Software writing is about linguistics and writing on the first place.
After all every technical interview is about understanding:
by asking you telling how you would solve X or by writing a simple pseudo solution or code in programming language of your choice. However, at the end there is usually a bigger coding test.
Unfortunately, it depends on what company needs and interviewer him/herself.
Whenever I interview people I always want to know mostly the person behind those skills because skills you can learn if you have grit, passion and focus. Motivation, passion, right attitude, constant self analysis and learning matters more then talents, yet any professional I ask one simple question regardless is it developer, designer, salesman or whoever: