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Front End Developer – Interview Questions

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Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#51

Post by megaframe »

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…

> I would have ended up teaching them how to do the bulk of the job had we hired them.

Is that really a bad of thing? If they're good programers and quick to pickup new technologies wouldn't you be better off getting them, training them, and when they succeed making sure you're compensating them enough to keep them onboard?

If what you wanted was someone completely versed in all your technologies and systems to just pickup and do the task, I'd say get a contractor who has the skills you need.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#52

Post by lsdafjklsd »

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.

I agree, but I'll say that it wasn't until I started writing non-ember application code (switching to react + immutable.js + pure functions) that I needed things like call / apply / bind on the regular. So writing framework code can really insulate you from needing these things, not implying that that's a bad thing, but personally writing regular javascript has been a breathe of fresh air.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#54

Post by spacemarine »

thejosh wrote: post #24
serve_yay wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(Flash of Unstyled Content)

But the point of having a list of questions is that you dont expect a candidate to know all of them. You should make that clear up front so that a candidate does not feel flustered if they dont know something.

If you make a test and you expect someone to answer everything then your test has to either be way too hard or way too easy. Remember in school those tests that were really hard and the highest 'uncurved' grade was a 60%? Those are awesome tests.

Why are they awesome? Because it opens up the range of a candidate to see where they are at in their career and development.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#55

Post by ivanhoe »

IMHO this can go as an example of a totally wrong way to formulate questions. Interview questions should be about the general concepts, not the tiny details, leave that for quiz shows. You want to know if the person understands how things work, not to test her memory. People can always google out the details that they can't remember, as long as they know what to do with this info...

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#56

Post by jambox888 »

dkrich wrote: post #9
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…

I was thinking the same thing. I've built manys a website in pretty much every front-end language imaginable and I would struggle to answer many of these. Yet I feel little shame in saying that I believe myself to be a very competent programmer. What is the significance of having memorized a bunch of arbitrary terms? If you don't know what the difference is between and that doesn't mean you aren't a competent develop…

Or you knew what those terms meant at some point, but your brain cleared them away when you didn't use them for a year to make more space for the next crazy thing you have to learn.

I don't know if the "Google effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect) is real but I sure as mittens have to google for syntax all the time. maybe not Google, man pages work or Python has help(csv.reader) or whatever.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#57

Post by EC1 »

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…

Any company that asks me a series of mundane questions in a conference room is not who I want to work for. It implies senior management has automated the engineers out of the job and are left with a "template".

I want a take home assignment with a due date. That's all. What else do you need?

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#58

Post by ojbyrne »

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…

The primary purpose of the "giant list of trivia" method of interviewing is to give you cover to only hire people who have "cultural fit" - i.e. look the same, speak the same, and act the same as the people interviewing.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#60

Post by EC1 »

cozuya wrote: post #41
forrestthewoods wrote: post #30

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.

Without asking technical questions, how would an interviewer weed out the people who say the former but can't actually back it up? Because if the above is the entire hiring process, your junior developers aren't going to have to be concerned about their imposter syndromes, because they'll be working along side actual imposters.

Employment probation. We fired a few people right off the bat within 3 months because they very clearly bullshitted us. One guy fucking used notepad to code. I'm not joking.
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