The ones that hired me just asked if I can do the job ;)
Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
41–50 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#42I'm a front-end dev going through the hiring process right now. Here's a list of some of the questions I have been asked in technical interviews:
- What is a clojure?
- What is a callback?
- What is an IIFE?
- How can you use scope to keep a copy of i in a loop?
- What is going on when you click a link to go to a website?
- Difference between classical inheritance vs prototypical
- Difference between object-oriented programming vs functional
- Knowing what 'this' is referencing at different points inside a function/class
- Difference between
, and - Difference between css selectors: '.classA.classB', '.classA .classB', '.classA > .classB' - Difference between 'x is undefined' and 'x is not defined' error messages
Programming problems: - Calculating fibonacci numbers - Depth-first binary tree search - Turning a hashmap with multiple levels of embedded hashmaps inside-out - Handling API response data to create new objects - Creating a login form - Using media queries to make responsive pages - Determine if word is a palindrome - Using recursive functions
Knowing methods to reduce computation time and space with hashmaps and arrays is important. You will also be asked to state the computation time and space of your solutions
Framework-specific questions: - What is the difference between a component and a directive? (AngularJS) - What is the difference between a service and a directive? (AngularJS)
I'm sure there's more I've forgotten.
https://www.interviewcake.com/ and Hackerrank can prepare you for programming problems but outside of the giants you don't often get asked these.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who vets those libraries? And who writes them in the first place?
Not sure I understand the question... are you suggesting the concept of using vetted libraries is somehow faulty? Anyway, the answer is generally "a large community" or "some big company like google or facebook."
I think GP was referring to a situation where no such library exists or the needed modification would be prohibitive. Not that uncommon scenario once you are inventing new kinds of visualizations. Libs like d3js help, but they are pretty low level.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#44You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them. You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag. Even for a front-end developer you should…
> Even for a front-end developer you should have a basic knowledge of data structures like linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc. These often come up in whiteboarding questions.
Most of these have not come up for me ever when interviewing with a strong frontend bent, even at companies like Google. Recursion has come up for me some (mostly for senior or higher positions), and knowing space/time complexity, but otherwise nothing super specific for frontend.
In the past year or so, I've been asked to live code various UI components at a fairly dependable clip, whether it be a typeahead/autocomplete, components with iteration (i.e. containing lists), and aligning various elements horizontally and vertically. Oftentimes these questions lead to various other questions while carrying out the implementations, probing for knowledge on various approaches and various tradeoffs/benefits of each approach.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#45Before Babel, I often used to ask about code organization/modularization, mostly to filter out candidates who haven't been on a big project and have only copied and pasted jQuery snippets together; today I'd ask if you use Babel modules and why/why not. As other people have said, closures will surely come out. A favorite of mine is array functions: map, forEach, filter. Also, promises, callbacks, workers. Finally, xh…
Do you mean ES6 modules?
Yes, ES6 modules. Before that I've used browserify, AMD/RequireJS and half assed in-house solutions.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#46Same way you prepare for any other interview - you don't.
There are a ton of developer positions, after going through about 5-10, you'll know every question they ask you, off the top of your head.
So there's no need to stress or prepare - you'll screw up the first few and it'll get easier going forward.
The mindset you should be coming in with is I'm a new guy, willing to learn and work the extra hours. I don't know everything and will need a little mentoring to get me going - if you don't offer that, that's ok, there's plenty of other places that do.
You're just starting out - you'll get screwed on salary and get worked to the bone for the first few years until you learn to say no. The advice I'd give is have a little more confidence in your inner voice that tells you when you're getting fucked - and know that you're right.
That's more important :)
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#47Before Babel, I often used to ask about code organization/modularization, mostly to filter out candidates who haven't been on a big project and have only copied and pasted jQuery snippets together; today I'd ask if you use Babel modules and why/why not. As other people have said, closures will surely come out. A favorite of mine is array functions: map, forEach, filter. Also, promises, callbacks, workers. Finally, xh…
Why would Babel change drastically the way you organize your code? Isn't it a just compiler?
I really meant ES6 modules, I said babel because it's what made ES6 features actually usable in production.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand how that's possible. For example, in a recent project I needed to implement a path-finding algorithm to draw connections routed around arbitrarily-placed boxes. More recently, efficiently snap a line to the nearest edge from an in-memory set of (again, arbitrarily placed and changing) objects as the mouse moves. I'm having to use and think about some item from that list on a daily basis. Where's th…
This is why SV needs to stop abusing the term "engineer" - because this is indeed work that can be done on the front end, but under no circumstances should you expect front end developers to know how to do this. If you have a specific need, or you're building something very complex, then you probably want an engineer -- most companies (including any of the big ones) typically only need developers. It's good to have e…
Right or you could have a "developer" tinker with stuff and that's how wind up with things like redux
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#49You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them. You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag. Even for a front-end developer you should…
>Stay postive about past employers.
That's a nice thought, but what if your past employer was Oracle? Doesn't honesty count for anything?
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#50If the anecdotes I read here are correct, you should be prepared to implement a red-black tree in C, followed by an A* pathfinding algorithm on the whiteboard. I think the best preparation you can do is to spend several hours reviewing your old projects. For each project, recall and be prepared to explain in depth: - The biggest technical challenge you faced and how your team solved it - The technical tradeoffs your…
How would you use A* pathfinding on a front end web page?