Front End Developer – Interview Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#11

Post by wil421 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

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 their corporate Dells.

How do you learn and develop new skills if your stuck supporting older browsers?

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#12

Post by VLM » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

ritchiea wrote: post #8

Anyone else feel like there is a lot of esoteric information here? For instance: > Are there any problems with serving pages as application/xhtml+xml? I've never had to or considered serving pages as application/xhtml+xml, there's no reason for me to know the answer to this question and I've been working on the front end for ages. If I ever had reason to serve a page application/xhtml+xml I would thoroughly research…

What it needs is the explanation why.

Preface with I'm not a front end guy, but I get the impression this was a major discussion topic around a decade ago. So this specific question is a resume tester, you claim 15 yrs experience on the resume, lets talk about a major gossip or controversial topic from 10 yrs ago that is pretty much irrelevant or uncontroversial today so someone with only 5 "real" years experience would have no opinion about the topic.

Also give the candidate a little BS, and evaluate the response. In programmer land if you ask a candidate what the first line '#!/usr/bin/perl' means in a CGI script and if the candidate keeps cool then thats good, but if the candidate responds like the intro scene of the movie Bladerunner then its probably not so great of a candidate regardless of anything else.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#13

Post by Alex3917 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

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…

> So, would it really matter if you are hiring someone who doesn't remember the difference between .call and .apply off the top of their head?

A good developer might not remember the answer to half of these at any given time, but if they at least knew the answer at one point then that should be enough to give a decent answer to most of these questions. E.g. 'They are two ways of calling a method, one involves passing the parameter list as an array, the other involves passing the parameters as positional arguments.'

Similarly, I don't remember offhand exactly how to fix a FUOC, all the nuances of the javascript 'this' keyword, or all the rules for resolving CSS specificity, but I could still probably answer all of those questions well enough to pass an interview. Unless the interviewer is super OCD, just saying something like, "There is an angular setting that can prevent most cases of FUOC, and if that doesn't work then you can manually hide the element until the page loads" should be good enough.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#14

Post by thejacenxpress » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

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…

Completely agree. I saw some red flags while going through this. The buzzfizz problem I've heard many a time over is a fun exercise problem but not a good interview question. Also many of the questions seem unrelated to todays standards. The HTML questions ask "difference between quirks and standards mode". Last time I used quirks was with IE6. Also "what are the limitations of XHTML". Don't honestly think I've ever used XHTML in my 4 years as a developer.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#15

Post by AustinG08 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

Man, the hardest questions for me to answer was the first one: "what did you learn yesterday/this week"? I do so much reading and research in my free time and then to realize how hard it was for me to summarize what it was exactly that I learned. Maybe I just read this stuff for the short term stimulation. When it comes to comprehension and retention maybe I'm not getting out of it what I thought I was. Maybe I should start asking myself what I just learned after everything I read and take some notes o_O

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#16

Post by thatmiddleway » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:15 PM UTC

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…

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 retention. I'd argue that it's the difference between someone who works on a single product and a contractor who has to work on something new every hour/day/week.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#17

Post by cozuya » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

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.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#18

Post by tericho » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:23 PM UTC

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 started as a back-end developer (well, a software developer) and have made my way towards the client over the years. With my background in engineering (eg. learning how things work) I can confidently answer most of the questions. But I can see how modern "front-end developers" would have trouble with a LOT of them since today it's more about getting things to work than how or why.

That being said, I think it's a great list to work from. I would expect you can arrive at a fairly good understanding of a candidate's abilities based on how they answer the questions rather than if they can answer them all.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#19

Post by at-fates-hands » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

>> This stuff is integral, not optional, these days.

While I agree with your point, most companies I've worked for in the last few years or so are light years from using build systems and preprocessors. Case in point is my current employer. I've struggled for the last year to convince them to use SASS and Gulp to speed stuff up. At every turn, I've been discouraged to implement them.

Re: Front End Developer – Interview Questions

#20

Post by serve_yay » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 5:24 PM UTC

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.