These questions make me angry by being so fucking dumb. No I don't know off the top of my head what splitting on an empty string does and if you give a shit whether I do that tells me all I need to know about whether I want to work for you.
Front End Developer – Interview Questions
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#122This 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…
Completely disagree. While some of the questions had me look to the internet, most I was able to answer. I think that the more time you spend in the DOM, the more you run into these things and they become part of your knowledge set. Working on the same application day in, day out may not enforce this kind of knowledge, while having to create, work on and maintain a variety of applications will enforce knowledge reten…
Congratulations to you for having memorized many unnecessary-to-remember things then, I guess. I have a good memory for detail and have "spent a lot of time in the DOM" and most of the questions I skimmed I had no off-the-top-of-my-head answer for.
I could answer pretty much all of them in under a minute of Googling. Which tells me a) that I don't actually need to know the answers to them in real life, and therefore that the questions measure dumb ephemera; and b) that the questions are more a test of random chance ("oh yeah, I ran across that once" makes you more impressed by me?) than they are of developer skill.
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
How often do you use call and apply? I've been a JS developer for a long time, have written a lot of JS code, and rarely need to use call and apply. Unless you're writing all your code from scratch and not using any frameworks / util libs (which you should) you won't need them very often.
Agreed I can't even recall the last time I used call or apply. We might have only a handful of cases out of roughly 200,000 JS lines of code.
Perhaps that is why y'all have 200k LOC of javascript :)
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#124This 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'm not sure I agree, actually. There were definitely several questions here I couldn't answer, but I definitely feel as if I should be able to answer them if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end (I'm primarily a back-end developer and have been for most of my career). I don't see anything here that seems absurdly trivia-esque. The coding questions were easy but I think coupled with the JS and even jQuer…
>if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end
This is the important clause.
Imagine looking for a backend developer. A candidate with twenty years of experience shows up. Looking at his resume, you see the chronological buildup of terms: HTML, XHTML/DHTML, JS, JQuery, Prototype, mootools, YUI, Ember, Knockout.js, Angular, Om.
"Well, this is an impressive resume, but we're really looking for someone with more experience on the back end."
And then you cut the interview short, because you need to finish up that letter to Congress about the talent shortage.
I don't know if there's an everyone-wins answer here, but this sort of thing is why devs go into management.
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> doesn't remember the difference between .call and .apply Simply getting the names mixed up and needing to look them up is one thing, but if the unfamiliarity stems from a general unfamiliarity with those methods and their respective use cases, then it would be a red flag for a "senior dev" sort of position.
I like to associate `.apply` with "Array", and `.call` with "Columns". f.apply(this, arrayOfArgs); // Array f.call(this, arg1, arg2, arg3); // Columns
I have a similar association, but use "Commas" in place of "Columns".
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#126This 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…
All these questions test my google skills, not necessarily my front end skills.
I was stuck in many even though I write JavaScript everyday.
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree, actually. There were definitely several questions here I couldn't answer, but I definitely feel as if I should be able to answer them if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end (I'm primarily a back-end developer and have been for most of my career). I don't see anything here that seems absurdly trivia-esque. The coding questions were easy but I think coupled with the JS and even jQuer…
>if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end This is the important clause. Imagine looking for a backend developer. A candidate with twenty years of experience shows up. Looking at his resume, you see the chronological buildup of terms: HTML, XHTML/DHTML, JS, JQuery, Prototype, mootools, YUI, Ember, Knockout.js, Angular, Om. "Well, this is an impressive resume, but we're really looking for someone with more…
Surely one is capable of customizing the interview based on the candidate?
I'm operating under the assumption here that the candidate has already been working professionally as a front-end developer. Do you really think it's unreasonable to expect someone who's professionally doing exclusively front-end development for a minimum of 40 hours a week to do at least somewhat well on these questions?
I didn't mean to imply that one should completely rule out people who've worked in other domains. But if a full-time exclusively front-end developer is applying for a front-end position, I do not find the idea of asking questions about front-end development to be unreasonable.
For what it's worth, in your example, if I needed someone to work through some very hairy distributed computing problems and someone with 20 years of experience applied who had never once in their entire career worked with distributed computing, yes, I'm going to take that into account. Why shouldn't I? No, that doesn't mean I'm going to immediately rule them out, and I certainly don't think there's a talent shortage, but if someone else applies with 20 years of experience in distributed computing, I'm going to lean towards them initially.
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I agree, actually. There were definitely several questions here I couldn't answer, but I definitely feel as if I should be able to answer them if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end (I'm primarily a back-end developer and have been for most of my career). I don't see anything here that seems absurdly trivia-esque. The coding questions were easy but I think coupled with the JS and even jQuer…
>if I were going to work exclusively on the front-end This is the important clause. Imagine looking for a backend developer. A candidate with twenty years of experience shows up. Looking at his resume, you see the chronological buildup of terms: HTML, XHTML/DHTML, JS, JQuery, Prototype, mootools, YUI, Ember, Knockout.js, Angular, Om. "Well, this is an impressive resume, but we're really looking for someone with more…
[deleted]
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#129This one is a joke right?
"What's your favorite feature of Internet Explorer?"
Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions
#130This one is a joke right? "What's your favorite feature of Internet Explorer?"
Alt+F4 or "the X button", shurely?
(I'd probably answer with HTAs - handy, compact way to distribute small JS-based tools/apps if you work in a Windows-based office and can eat the IE9 restrictions)