> So I had learned already that names don't constitute knowledge... That's caused me a certain trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything... What [my father] forgot to tell me was that the knowing the names of things is useful if you wanna talk to somebody else.
It's been sort of 18 years since I started using another heuristic - if you can google for something, don't bother requiring a candidate to know it. Not an exact principle, but somewhat like that .. in that I'm more curious about how a person thinks in an interview than what he/she knows.
This change in me was triggered when a candidate came in for a dev interview and we were doing the usual whiteboard problem thing back then. Someone on the panel asked "what would you do if you faced this problem on the job" and he said "I'd google for the solution". I recall not being able to make up my mind about whether to hire him right there or send him away :) .. but that was something I hadn't realized back then so the issue was not with him but with me. The lesson stayed.
So .. on the topic, if the candidate didn't know ACID .. an opportunity to google followed by a detailed discussion on it would work for me.
It actually might be more informative. If a candidate, that had never heard the term "ACID", was able to Google it and talk intelligently about it I would be most impressed and it would probably earn them a next step. In fact, that might be a good practice to try out. Find a related term that the candidate wasn't familiar with and have them research it. Give them X minutes to reason about the term and then have a discussion about it. This is a thing we all do, every day. You can't possibly know everything so you must know how to find out about new things and how to think about them.
Yes indeed. The names are relevant for communication (i.e. to become a part of a "discourse community" [1]), but are not indicative of one's competence at a topic. They kind of go hand in hand often due to arranged education, but that's not essential.
Names also come handy when you need to search for something and search engines are not powerful at taking your description of what you're searching for.
> So I had learned already that names don't constitute knowledge... That's caused me a certain trouble since because I refuse to learn the name of anything... What [my father] forgot to tell me was that the knowing the names of things is useful if you wanna talk to somebody else.
I think an interview might count :)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc