It comes down to how the standard library makes you do things. I don't think there's any reason why a more stringly-typed way of handling JSON (or, indeed, a more high-level way of using HTTP) is outside of the realm of possibility for Go. It's just that the standard library authors saw fit not to pursue that avenue.
This variability is honestly one of the reasons why I dislike interviews that require me to synthesize solutions to toy problems in a very tightly constrained window of time, particularly if the recruiter makes me commit at the outset to one language over another as part of the overall interview process. It's frustrating for me, and, having been on the other side, it's noisy for the interviewer.
(In fact, my favorite interview loop of all time required that I use gdb to dig into a diabolical system that was crashing, along with some serious code spelunking. The rationale was that, if I'm good with a debugger and adept at reading the source that's in front of me, the final third of synthesizing code solutions to problems and conforming to institutional practice can be dealt with once I'm in the door.)
My favourite tech interview (so far) was similar: "here's the FOSS code base we're working on. This issue looks like about the size we can tackle in the time we have. Let's work on this together and solve it".
I got to show how I could grok a code base and work out where the problem was quickly, and work out a solution to the problem, and how I understood how to contribute a PR. Way better than random Leetcode bullshit, and actually useful: the issue was actually solved and the PR accepted.
I like your story about debugging during an interview. I can say from experience, you always have one teammate that can just debug any problem. I am always impressed to watch and learn new techniques from them.
This has also been my experience, yeah. My interviewers were very interested in watching me rifle through that core dump. (:
Ultimately, it feels to me like selecting for people who both can navigate existing code and interrogate a running system (or, minimally, one that had gone off the rails and left clues as to why) is the right way to go. It has interesting knock-on effects throughout the organization (in, like, say, product support and quality assurance) that are direly understated.
In our case we give some high-level description beforehand (which mentions working with REST apis) and allow candidates to use any language of their choice.
Also in our case the API has typing in form of generated documentation and example responses. I even saw one Go-candidate copying a response into some web tool to generate Go code to parse that form of json.
I can also say that people who chose Java usually have even more problems, they start by creating 3-4 classes just to follow Spring patterns.
This variability is honestly one of the reasons why I dislike interviews that require me to synthesize solutions to toy problems in a very tightly constrained window of time, particularly if the recruiter makes me commit at the outset to one language over another as part of the overall interview process. It's frustrating for me, and, having been on the other side, it's noisy for the interviewer.
(In fact, my favorite interview loop of all time required that I use gdb to dig into a diabolical system that was crashing, along with some serious code spelunking. The rationale was that, if I'm good with a debugger and adept at reading the source that's in front of me, the final third of synthesizing code solutions to problems and conforming to institutional practice can be dealt with once I'm in the door.)