Not usually, no.
I heard about this once for a company that did a test before job interviews. The applicant was given a sheet with a list of instructions to follow on the company's web site. The first step listed was "Type in companyname.com on the browser's URL bar". If the applicant typed in "www.companyname.com" instead of "companyname.com" the interview ended there and they were not hired.
That is absurdly draconian.
Anyone who's ever worked in any IT or tech job will tell you it makes sense. Technical instructions need to be followed verbatim. Throwing in things or leaving them out because of habit or because you feel that's how it normally should be done results in things not working. For an example, check this out, which is probably one of the most browsed pages on the web:
https://maps.google.com
And now click on this:
https://www.maps.google.com
And now you see why adding www. before a URL if not specifically specified is not an acceptable web browsing habit.
Your test is dumb. If you asked me to visit google.com, I would have typed
http://www.google.com. If you asked me to visit maps.google.com, I would have typed
http://maps.google.com because I know better. But I still will type www when it can be there because that's.. not implicitly the wrong thing to do. I know it's wrong when a subdomain is present. It also takes me three hundredths of a second to type.
Poll
