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How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

codemonkeyism.com

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

#11
post #5

I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist. Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - i…

I get your point. The people I work with who know about "obscure techniques" are sometimes better UX designers than the people who don't know. That is because they actually know the barriers of what's doable in the browser. Living on this edge is not easy as all techniques evolve all the time.

When I talk with people I don't want them to recite these solutions. I want to see if they know their ressources.

Re: How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

#13

... wow, I haven't been paying close attention to the web development community. CSS frameworks are really considered an essential building block now?

At least in my little corner of the front-end dev community, CSS frameworks are considered helpful in some cases, but not a good fit in most cases.

One of the situations where they can be really helpful, though, is in developing a functional prototype. The code is going to be a bit bloated, but most of it is meant to be thrown away in any case.

Re: How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

#16
post #5

I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist. Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - i…

Being a front-ender myself (don't think I'm at 'hero' status yet though ;)), these questions look the same to me as a job listing requiring I have 'expert level' experience with a kitchen sink list of front & back end web acronyms.

You should be able to get a pretty good idea on my capabilities by looking at my code/projects and how I handled the challenges of building them, not how well I can answer whether to use CSS hacks or conditional stylesheets (because there's not one correct answer anyways).

Re: How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

#19

  Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?
  A: cleardiv
  clearfix (better one)
WTF? I'd expect floats, faux columns, display: table-* , *-column-count being the answer but get some cleardiv/clearfix instead. I never liked those, especially cleardiv. Often you can do simply reusing next element (#footer {clear:both}), but sometimes that's not enough, alas.

In my opinion any competent frontend developer should know these, not enough for the hero. On the other hand, to be able to interview hero you should be at least on that level yourself, which is not the case there, imho.

Re: How to Recruit a Frontend Hero

#20
post #7

To me this looks like an endless series of 'gotcha' questions that for the most part are either in the totally obvious or terribly obscure category.

Agreed. I'm not even sure what this means: Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?

It means "If the design calls for having text flow across side-by-side columns (like in newspapers or magazines), what ways are there to code it?"
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