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Front End Developer – Interview Questions

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Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#21

Post by serve_yay »

cozuya wrote: post #17
steakejjs wrote: post #4

This looks like a giant list of trivia that has almost no bearing on the day-to-day effectiveness of the candidate. For example, I don't have the slightest clue what the answer is to probably half of these and a lot of my job is to write javascript that gets run millions to billions of times a day. The "code questions", by contrast, were all ridiculously easy. So, would it really matter if you are hiring someone who…

Call and apply are core concepts to writing good javascript. I would not hire someone (at least for any sort of senior role) that could not tell you exactly how both of them work. Many of the other things on this page are certainly "trivia" that could be addressed by google when they come up, but not those.

Well, they are both exactly the same. The only difference is the particular way each accepts arguments, and it's easy to forget which is which. So yes you should know how they work, but the distinction between them is contingent and difficult to remember.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#22

Post by freshyill »

wnevets wrote: post #10
freshyill wrote: post #7

This has been around for a few years and it's due for some major updates. The CSS questions are becoming very, very dated. > Have you played around with the new CSS Flexbox or Grid specs? Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old ve…

>Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. I dont think that is 100% true quite yet. IE9 for example is still quite popular, not to mention the bugs in modern browsers. http://philipwalton.com/articles/normalizing-cross-browser-f...

IE9's global share is 2.13% and 3.84% in the US. It's 2.38% for the sites I'm supporting.

Here's the simple answer for supporting old IE: http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

But to be more precise, graceful degradation is the answer. I'm building an interface that needs to last for several years, and IE9 is circling the drain. I can't justify making too many decisions around browsers that will be gone soon at the expense of the experience in all the browsers that fully support modern properties now.

IE 8 and 9 will get a degraded experience, but the content will all still be there, and it will look pretty good. But it won't look exactly the same.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#23

Post by mcgaffin »

throw_away wrote: post #6
pacofvf wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just avoid the fizzbuzz questions, they aren't a good benchmark for good developers.

fizzbuzz isn't meant as a benchmark for good developers, it's meant to weed out the obviously bad.

Yes, exactly. I wouldn't hire someone because they can implement fizzbuzz, but if someone fails to implement fizzbuzz I can't imagine that I would want to hire them.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#24

Post by thejosh »

serve_yay wrote: post #20
steakejjs wrote: post #4

This looks like a giant list of trivia that has almost no bearing on the day-to-day effectiveness of the candidate. For example, I don't have the slightest clue what the answer is to probably half of these and a lot of my job is to write javascript that gets run millions to billions of times a day. The "code questions", by contrast, were all ridiculously easy. So, would it really matter if you are hiring someone who…

> This looks like a giant list of trivia that has almost no bearing on the day-to-day effectiveness of the candidate. If you really believe this you would probably be terrible at making web pages. (You're probably better off, but still.) I do agree about call and apply specifically - I write JS every day and often get them switched up. But knowing what FOUC is, or what a doctype is, that's not trivia.

I know what the full term means, but never heard of the acronym before today... So glad I ran across that.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#25

Post by serve_yay »

mkoryak wrote: post #5

I really like this js question (whiteboarding): Implement function foo which takes an integer size, and returns an array of that size where each element in that array is a function that returns the index of that function in the array. Testcase: 42 === foo(1000)[42]() There are 3 different correct solutions. Discuss which solution is better, worse... etc (if they get there) (could probably be worded better, I'm not an…

:(

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#27

Post by jypepin »

steakejjs wrote: post #4

This looks like a giant list of trivia that has almost no bearing on the day-to-day effectiveness of the candidate. For example, I don't have the slightest clue what the answer is to probably half of these and a lot of my job is to write javascript that gets run millions to billions of times a day. The "code questions", by contrast, were all ridiculously easy. So, would it really matter if you are hiring someone who…

Same. I do a lot of live coding interviews, mostly front-end because this is my role, and I found those questions either way too easy, or just useless.

The "trivia" term is well used here.

I usually like more doing simple live coding that implies real life things such as either building a simple html/js page to do some ajax and manipulate some objects, or debugging something broken.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#28

Post by tericho »

serve_yay wrote: post #21
cozuya wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call and apply are core concepts to writing good javascript. I would not hire someone (at least for any sort of senior role) that could not tell you exactly how both of them work. Many of the other things on this page are certainly "trivia" that could be addressed by google when they come up, but not those.

Well, they are both exactly the same. The only difference is the particular way each accepts arguments, and it's easy to forget which is which. So yes you should know how they work, but the distinction between them is contingent and difficult to remember.

Like most JS concepts, to me it's a "use it or lose it" situation. When I have to use them they are fresh in my head, when I move on to another project for 6 months that has no complex modules or uses a framework like Angular, there is no way I'll remember the intricacies. That being said, there is still a different between having used them and simply being aware of their existence, which I suppose could be made clear during an interview.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#29

Post by freshyill »

wil421 wrote: post #11
freshyill wrote: post #7

This has been around for a few years and it's due for some major updates. The CSS questions are becoming very, very dated. > Have you played around with the new CSS Flexbox or Grid specs? Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old ve…

>It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old versions of IE?", well there's another interview question for you. So what is the other interview question? I really haven't dove into flex box because I am stuck supporting IE 9 on both of my projects. If I were to try and implement it on one of these projects it would be a wasted effort when 90% of my users are still using IE 9 on the…

> So what is the other interview question?

The question would be "how do you handle browsers that don't support flexbox?"

My answer would be to use Modernizr to detect lack of flexbox support and write some fallback styles.

If you're supporting an extremely higher than average percentage of users on IE 9, then it's worth basing decisions on this fact. Globally IE 9 accounts for 2.13% of usage and that number isn't going up.

There's no way to really learn this stuff other than to just start doing it. Just write fallback styles to support crappier browsers and remember that pixel-perfect designs across browsers was never a realistic goal.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#30

Post by forrestthewoods »

As an interviewee: "This is what I've in my career. If you'd like to give me money then I can do those things for you."

As an interviewer: "Tell me what you've done in your career. We'd like to give you money to do those things for us."

That's all I really want or need for either side of the table.

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