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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

#111

Post by char »

Just wanted to share that I had a very similar experience interviewing as a front-end engineer last year, and had made many of the same assessments about the process as you have.

It is interesting that the company I ended up at-- while they did ask some standard algorithm and 'how do you think' type questions-- there were also many questions probing my front-end skills, including some quick JS coding problems. The interview just felt SO different than anything else.

Thanks for posting this!

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

#112

Post by whileonebegin »

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..

The ability to emulate different versions of IE. Of course, the only reason this is necessary is because of the many breaking changes that the different versions created.

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

#113

Post by jonny_eh »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #101
jonny_eh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Jo…

How about your average moron with an engineering degree like me?

In Canada, there's a very strict definition for engineer. If you don't have an engineering degree from an accredited university, and a professional designation, you cannot call yourself an engineer. They take it very seriously since it's a regulated profession.

Obviously everyone is free to draw their own lines (outside of Canada at least).

I always thought an engineer was someone who puts scientific or mathematical theory into practice and to solve technical problems. I'm ok with someone giving themselves the title of engineer if they do that for a living. On the other hand, they should not call themselves a "Professional Engineer" without the proper accreditation.

They also drive locomotives, for some reason.

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

#114

Post by millerm »

tgflynn wrote: post #81
millerm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a full stack developer. Currently focusing on iOS. Interview questions should really depend on the expectations of the type of software being developed. I've been to a couple interviews lately and this has been the first time (in my career) that I have been tested (with time constraints too, mind you). I was either pointed to a whiteboard, or sat in a room with nothing but a couple sheets of blank (unruled) paper…

It's not "all your fault". The problem is that there is a belief in the industry that 15-30 minutes of technical interviewing tells more about a candidate than that person's entire career history. I have seen no actual data to support this belief. I think someone who has a history of having built successful applications is far more likely to be qualified than someone who happens to have a good memory for algorithmic…

One of my favorite quotes:

"Never memorize something that you can look up."

--Albert Einstein

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

#115

Post by davedx »

sbank wrote: post #63
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…

From the top of my head, from someone who currently seeks work as a full stack (Rails) developer: I would ask if you by "method" mean function defined on an object. If so, this refers to the method's object. If not, this can take on 5 values. In the global scope it is the global object; in a constructor it is the newly created object; in a function (not defined on an object - and also goes for functions defined withi…

Not quite right. :-) JavaScript is not truly OO. You can have a prototype method called from a callback and find that 'this' will not necessarily be the value of the object it was prototyped onto.

It's really tricky, and I often have to .bind functions after I've noticed they're not working.

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

#116

Post by rhizome »

justinsteele wrote: post #76
kyrra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.

Hiring is pretty much the most important thing you do as a company.. if you can't spend an hour per position developing applicable questions for each position, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Yet, time and time again, these posts come up and the comments contain a not-insignificant of anecdotes about hiring processes that resulted in high failure rates in interviews, so they hire someone kinda smart anyway and teach them the concepts that other interviewers failed to answer satisfactorily in the interviews. Why ask at all, then?

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

#117

Post by spamizbad »

greghinch wrote: post #25
Bahamut wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

My experience interviewing "Full-stack" developers indicates that it can be a vanity title devs assign to themselves to be more marketable. Unfortunately, I've found their skillsets to be very lop-sided.

Typically, I'd interview full-stack developers with lots of front-end experience and skills (based on their projects and code samples) with very limited backend experience or skills, or they were backend engineers who knew the ins-and-outs of robust, scalable backends, familiar with AMQP etc, but couldn't horizontally center div or modify the prototype of an object in JavaScript (let alone know that JS used prototype-based inheritance).

And then of course there's the 3rd dimension to full stack which is DevOps.

If you're just starting out you need people who can do all 3, even if they're kinda mediocre at some of the parts. But when you grow, and your product starts maturing, you need expertise in all areas to really have a polished product. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck with something that either has a really polished front-end but a dog-slow and unreliable backend or vice-versa.

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

#118

Post by davedx »

philipwalton wrote: post #45
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…

Post author here. I agree 100% that HTML and CSS are not programming languages. However, any application that you build on the front-end is going to require your JavaScript code to interact with the HTML and CSS, so a solid understanding of how all the pieces fit together is crucial. I can't tell you how many times I've seen back-end engineers hack together a 100+ line JavaScript solution to a problem when one line o…

The problem is, it's even more subtle than that. Sometimes, the right way to do something is by setting classes (or even, god forbid, inline styles) on the DOM using JavaScript, and sometimes it's better to use CSS. Sometimes it's debatable which way is better.

It's definitely a tricky area of development, that's for sure; pitfalls and subtleties abound.

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

#119

Post by davedx »

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..

"I can book my holidays and put my hours in on the company's intranet"? :D

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

#120

Post by lightblade »

millerm wrote: post #114
tgflynn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "all your fault". The problem is that there is a belief in the industry that 15-30 minutes of technical interviewing tells more about a candidate than that person's entire career history. I have seen no actual data to support this belief. I think someone who has a history of having built successful applications is far more likely to be qualified than someone who happens to have a good memory for algorithmic…

One of my favorite quotes: "Never memorize something that you can look up." --Albert Einstein

Then again, you probably should memorize it after looking it up for the 10th time.
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