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Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

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Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#11

Post by krat0sprakhar »

jasonthevillain wrote: post #10
rfrey wrote: post #3

If 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…

Asking a front-end developer to write a red-black tree is insane. Is anyone actually doing that?

I'm pretty sure the OP is making a joke.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#12

Post by jonahx »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #6

You 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.

I would never care about these if I was specifically hiring a front-end dev. I've never once seen any of them come up in the context of front-end work in my entire career. And in fact an interviewer asking questions about them would be a huge red flag for someone who prioritizes nerd-cred over actual business needs, and is therefore likely to make poor decisions.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#13

Post by Justen »

I'm in the process of doing this and was told I needed to know sorting algorithms (among other things) so I made a barebones redux project to stuff it into. Not sure if this is your case but if it helps, take a look: https://github.com/Outc4sted/AlgorithmAtelier/blob/master/sr...

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#14

Post by malisper »

rfrey wrote: post #3

If 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…

> you should be prepared to implement a red-black tree in C, followed by an A* pathfinding algorithm on the whiteboard.

I don't know about that, but you should at least know the algorithms necessary to traverse the DOM.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#15

Post by blueside »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #6

You 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…

Can somebody provide a real example of where you'd need to use "linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc" in your typical everyday front end angular/react/ember project?

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#17

Post by jameslk »

Having gone through this situation before, my biggest mistake while performing this type of interview was not actually having candidates build something with the team. Frontend development is usually very visual and UX-oriented, so it's important to see what they can build and their attention to that type of detail. There's plenty of knowledge questions that can filter candidates down by experience, but until you get them working in your setting, you won't be able to see whether they can build something you actually want and get along with others in a team-oriented way. My suggestion is to give them a small project they can build during an interview with you/your team.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#18

Post by corecoder »

Before 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, xhr throttling.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#19

Post by eschutte2 »

jonahx wrote: post #12
zzzmarcus wrote: post #6

You 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. I would never care about these if I was specifically hiring a front-end dev. I've never once seen any of them come up in the context of front-end work in my entire career. And in fact an interviewer asking questions about…

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 the disconnect here - are we talking about different kinds of front-end work?

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#20

Post by jonahx »

jameslk wrote: post #17

Having gone through this situation before, my biggest mistake while performing this type of interview was not actually having candidates build something with the team. Frontend development is usually very visual and UX-oriented, so it's important to see what they can build and their attention to that type of detail. There's plenty of knowledge questions that can filter candidates down by experience, but until you get…

Couldn't agree with this more. When I originally read the OP's question, I assumed he was asking how to prepare as a candidate, and you gave a great answer for how to prepare as an interviewer -- the question is ambiguous and even on re-reading I'm not sure which he meant.

To add to your answer, having them build a clone of a simple game in 1-3 hours, especially when they have to balance a bare bones look with more features versus a slicker look with fewer features, and deciding which to cut and what's important to them and how they think about it -- all that can be revealing.

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