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Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

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Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#22

Post by philipwalton »

meritt wrote: post #19

You were interviewed by back-end engineers. That's what they knew. My question is why didn't you leave the interview upon seeing it was a waste of time?

To be honest, I was actually having a good time. I'm one of the crazy people who likes interviewing. I think it's kind of thrilling.

Also, they flew me up there, so what was I gonna do?

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#23

Post by vikas5678 »

I have friends who have politely refused to answer or indulge the interviewer in the algorithm questions labyrinth. As someone being interviewed, you should atleast try to divert the interview toward your strengths. On the flip-side, if a company is interviewing you for a front-end position and not asking enough DOM, CSS questions, they're doing it wrong.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#25

Post by greghinch »

Bahamut wrote: post #20
seivan wrote: post #3

I'm sorry you had to go through that bullshit. That generally sucks when you're interviewed by assholes who have no idea that the specific platform that you might work on requires. Consider most front-end engineers ALSO to be designers, and I'd suspect thats where I would drive the interview. I would wish the same treatment. Also lol that the interview questions are basically EITHER memorizing formulas and rememberin…

I think we are also seeing the rise of the frontend developer, where they spend most of their time on JS, with maybe some time in HTML and CSS - at least, that is what I do for work, although I am fully capable of excelling at CSS as well.

My career as a developer has been coming up through the role of front-end engineer, really from when that was first being defined as a separate role (2004-2005, around then). In hindsight now, I would never hire myself. Either you're a developer, in which case you should be able to traverse that stack (so for example JS as well as PHP/Ruby/Python) or you're a designer, and you can traverse that stack (so you design, implement your designs in HTML/CSS, maybe a little JS as necessary). But while there is crossover between the two domains, there isn't a separate role in the middle. Trying to fit development workflow around people who just do HTML/CSS/JS ends up creating too many bottlenecks, on both sides: "I'm waiting for designer A to deliver X" or "I'm waiting for back-end person B to deliver Y". When you just have people who work their whole stack, that bottleneck is removed.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#26

Post by hackinsack »

nhangen wrote: post #2

I'm a PHP/WordPress dev shipping product every single day, but I think I'd probably fail questions like these if I was asked in an interview setting. I don't really worry about functions like these until a need arises, and when it does (and I don't know how to do it), I learn until I do. This is an absurd way to recruit front-end talent and partially explains the so-called talent crunch.

Nothing against you, as I don't know you or your work, but "shipping product" does not equal doing good work. People ship crappy, buggy code every day. Just because one "ships daily" doesn't mean that what they're shipping is worth anything or means they know what they're doing. I've seen people that have no clue how to write code copy and paste crap they find all over the internet into a file and ship it. It's a slow, buggy and ugly hack, but it shipped. It will come back days later as unexceptably bad by the customer. That's the purpose of these tests. To weed out the people that have no clue how to write proper software that deals with high loads, scalability and performance criticality.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#27

Post by csomar »

bjryan wrote: post #4

I am honestly a little shocked by this. I am a university student and this past semester I interviewed with around 10 companies in the Bay area, all of which were for Front-End engineering positions. I can only think of one company which did not give me any 'front end specific' questions. I was asked everything from hoisting and closures to explaining how Webkit works and various ways to improve page load time. Are y…

He interviewed at big co. and (I guess), you interviewed at startups. Maybe that's the difference?

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#28

Post by walshemj »

ktavera wrote: post #11

I've had similar experiences in the last month of interviews i've been through. I was asked how i'd design a secure backend API in asp.net, various algorithm questions, some basic javascript questions ("what is a closure?", "what does the var keyword do?", etc") and other very non-specific things. At the end of most of my interviews when they ask if I have any questions about the positions I tend to have to ask "Is t…

Interesting so I hope you said get ready to spend a fuckload of cash on state of the art secure key stores as this is the only way to properly build a secure back end.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#29

Post by philipwalton »

codingdave wrote: post #6

It could have been a sign that they trusted your front-end skill. If I know someone has a skill, I don't waste my time interviewing them to prove it. I try to figure out what else they can do, where they can grow, and how well they would fit in with the team. So I'd pose the question back to you -- did you provide them a portfolio or any code samples that would have made the front-end questions redundant?

Yes, I provided a detailed resume as well as my Github account for all of these. The problem is it didn't seem like the individual interviewers had taken much time to actually look at what I'd done.

If they had, then maybe I'd agree with you, but it seemed like many of them were just going through the motions. It seemed like they interview people all the time.

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