Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by Dirlewanger » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:31 PM UTC

jonny_eh wrote: post #61

hawkharris wrote: post #31

One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the autho…

I always assumed that the term "engineer" in "front-end engineer" implied software engineering capability. Although, like usual, it's dangerous to make assumptions.

In the context of software "engineering"/programming, the term engineer has been bastardized to the point of losing all meaning. To call someone who programs at all an engineer is, in my opiinion, embarrassing, especially when juxtaposed with actual engineers (e.g. mechanical, acoustical, aerospace etc.) who went through a hell of a lot more to be able to be called an engineer than a 4 year CS program. People like John Resig, Jeremy Ashkenas can lay claim to being software engineers. Your average moron just out of college? Don't think so.

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

#102

Post by scrabble » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:32 PM UTC

nicholas73 wrote: post #93

scrabble wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of knowledge is super basic, so yes, I'd expect anyone interviewing for a front-end position to know the meaning of 'this.'

The answer the interviewer was looking for seems to expect knowledge of how 'this' is different in Javascript versus other languages, and how things can go wrong. That is different from simply knowing that 'this' refers to an object. Since this is for a junior position, conceivably an applicant could be a recent CS grad with no formal JS training, and hacked some projects on a side or job. And thus never by happensta…

To be clearer, I wasn't just referring to the fact that 'this' refers to an object, but the complexity inherent in the term in JS.

You can run into this problem by doing something as basic as using it in a click handler if you don't know that it's there.

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

#103

Post by rimantas » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

krsunny wrote: post #67

philipwalton wrote: post #24

Related, I just found out that Darcy Clarke put this list together of good front-end interview questions. I would have included it in the article if I'd known about it ahead of time. https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview...

"Whats your favorite feature of internet explorer" I think I see what she did there..

Well, you can play around and talk about good things which wer e born in IE first: XMLHTTPRequest, .innerHTML, etc.

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

#104

Post by whatevsmate » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:33 PM UTC

ra3 wrote: post #65

>"A correct answer to this will demonstrate both an understanding of basic computer science principles as well as a deeper knowledge of what jQuery is doing behind the scenes." How does the referenced jquery statement represent basic CS principles? OOP? Definitely not that.

The referenced jQuery statement gives the candidate a chance to speak on: selector complexity (id look ups vs traversing to find descendant elements), first-class functions (passing a function reference to the .on() method), regular expressions (to add class names to an existing class attribute in older browsers that don't have .classList property on elements). There are probably other things but those are just a few off the top of my head.

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

#105

Post by BSousa » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:35 PM UTC

steven777400 wrote: post #33

We were hiring a non-senior full-stack developer recently and I noticed there were no "frontend" questions on the list, so I added what I thought would be a question that any developer with frontend experience could answer, and would also pave the way for some more interested discussions for an advanced candidate. The question was something to the effect of "In JavaScript, what is the value of 'this' in a method?" I…

Can I ask where (location) was this?

I have trouble understanding how someone would call himself a JS developer and not knowing it.

I'm not at all a JS developer (even though lately I've been knees deep in nodeJS code) and most of my experience is away from the browser, but even I knew this. I was responsible for hiring at a previous company and I did see some people passing as Senior SQL developers without knowing how to do a join correctly, but I always passed it as a local thing (culture here is as long as you graduated you don't need to learn anything new) but not in other more competitive places.

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

#106

Post by bonemachine » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:35 PM UTC

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…

That generally sucks when you're interviewed by assholes who ...

Assholes, no. They're human beings with blindspots. Just like 100% of the rest of us out there.

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

#107

Post by wturner » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

lemonberry wrote: post #97

wturner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing Javascript for a few years and recently answered a few StackOverflow questions. One was regarding "this".If anyone wants to hire my ass feel free to contact me. One of my techniques for learning has been by going on interviews and flopping, then going back and learning all the interview question material on my own time. Wash and repeat.I've been doing this bullshit since the first day I started teachi…

This is a great, great idea. Thank you for the tip.

It only works if you have a shit ton of humility. The problem is there is really no other way I've found to acclimate oneself with the assumptions and culture of the discipline in a manner that is real-world and cuts through the small talk/cruft .

Your welcome btw...have fun :/

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

#108

Post by bredren » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:36 PM UTC

My understanding is that this is type of 'shallow' technical interview in SF with notable companies is not limited to front-end.

A good friend recently interviewed at multiple well known and respected internet companies for an Android position. This guy is perhaps a global authority on Android. Technical questions were of the computer science type, and did little to illustrate the substance of value the companies were actually trying to hire for.

Rather than take the time to understand whether he really, really knew Android, they wanted to see if he could traverse nodes in a tree. Two companies even asked the exact same non-Android specific question.

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

#109

Post by jianshen » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:38 PM UTC

philipwalton wrote: post #24

Related, I just found out that Darcy Clarke put this list together of good front-end interview questions. I would have included it in the article if I'd known about it ahead of time. https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview...

Great list!

I remember coming across this other "Learn Front-end" list: https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks on HN a little while ago and thought it was a great example of just how scattered Web-FE education still is. Everyone has their own favorite "book" and there's no K&R that you just pick up and read.

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

#110

Post by davedx » Mon, Dec 23, 2013, 6:39 PM UTC

I interviewed for a long-term "Frontend engineer" role in June for a large cable company here in the Netherlands. I've been a full-stack developer for the past 3 years or so, and before that I was in game development, and before that still, I wrote enterprise middleware.

My frontend experience going into this interview was almost entirely jQuery, with the exception of one 2 month freelance project where I had a crash course in AngularJS.

I was asked a ton of technical frontend questions, and I was able to answer them at a conceptual level but not from experience. I got the job, and I think what was important was my broader experience as a programmer, not the answers to specific frontend questions.

The thing is, real frontend programming of large JavaScript applications is a brand new field. There are lots of people with lots of jQuery experience (it's telling that this article deals with jQuery as an example of frontend development), but not so many with serious JavaScript programming experience outside of a library or framework.

I think because of this, companies are just being realistic when they interview for frontend positions based on general programming knowledge and experience. Maybe in 5 years they will drill down more, as the pool of expert frontenders expands.