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Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

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Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#31

Post by jonahx »

maccard wrote: post #28
jonahx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's the disconnect here - are we talking about different kinds of front-end work? Yeah I would assume so. Of course if know the job requires such knowledge, you should interview for it. But I'm thinking of more average front-end work, where you'd be building forms or dashboards or ordinary websites. It sounds like you're building a complex application that just happens to be hosted in a browser. Although even t…

Who vets those libraries? And who writes them in the first place?

Not sure I understand the question... are you suggesting the concept of using vetted libraries is somehow faulty? Anyway, the answer is generally "a large community" or "some big company like google or facebook."

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#32

Post by sesm »

corecoder wrote: post #18

Before Babel, I often used to ask about code organization/modularization, mostly to filter out candidates who haven't been on a big project and have only copied and pasted jQuery snippets together; today I'd ask if you use Babel modules and why/why not. As other people have said, closures will surely come out. A favorite of mine is array functions: map, forEach, filter. Also, promises, callbacks, workers. Finally, xh…

Do you mean ES6 modules?

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#33

Post by smoe »

jonahx wrote: post #12
zzzmarcus wrote: post #6

You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them. You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag. Even for a front-end developer you should…

> Even for a front-end developer you should have a basic knowledge of data structures like linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc. I would never care about these if I was specifically hiring a front-end dev. I've never once seen any of them come up in the context of front-end work in my entire career. And in fact an interviewer asking questions about…

I think it is always good to know what kind of skills a candidate has besides what will be his average work, but could add to the skill set of the team and might come in handy.

Be that knowledge of data structures, algorithms, ui design, ux, project management or advertisment. Especially in startups where you can't afford dedicated teams for every aspect.

If the team is already strong on the design/ux front, I might favor a candidate with better cs fundamentals. And if my team mostly consists of the latter, I might favor a "worse" programmer but one who knows and cares about typography, color harmony, paper prototyping etc.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#34

Post by icc97 »

For general programming questions I found https://www.interviewbit.com/ very good. It is both a tutorial and programming questions at the same time.

I was asked to describe the important properties of a hash map in a telephone interview. The interview contained less technical questions but various developers asked me about all areas of my CV. There was also a HTML/CSS/JS coding exercise to create a small application to a spec that they gave.

So expect to get questions on anything that you've put in your CV. If you're not familiar enough with it - take it out of your CV.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#35

Post by citeguised »

It heavily depends on the company and area I'd say.

At my company, an IT-Consultancy in Germany, the junior-position-baseline is a solid understanding of HTML and CSS, and at least a basic grasp of Javascript. For mid-level-positions I expect "fluency" in all of those areas, plus a good knowledge of standard-tools and accessibility. I also look for a good foundation in either design or CS, depending on the interviewees background.

The interview is the same for every level, though we look for different things of course. We ask the applicants to set up a basic front-end-file-structure and to start coding a design we created specifically for interviews. During that we ask them to think aloud and talk about the reasons they do things the way they do.

The second exercise is a palindrome-function in JS (or on the whiteboard for juniors).

They seem like simple tasks, but you wouldn't believe how many interviews we had where the person couldn't even code an img-tag from mind.

I understand that at Valley-Companies/Start-Ups, Frontend-Development includes many more advanced topics than in our case.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#36

Post by seanwilson »

jonahx wrote: post #12
zzzmarcus wrote: post #6

You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them. You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag. Even for a front-end developer you should…

> Even for a front-end developer you should have a basic knowledge of data structures like linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc. I would never care about these if I was specifically hiring a front-end dev. I've never once seen any of them come up in the context of front-end work in my entire career. And in fact an interviewer asking questions about…

> I would never care about these if I was specifically hiring a front-end dev.

I would find these things very relevant if you were working on apps that deal with large datasets as picking the wrong data structure can lead to slow execution. It's also good to know what the limits of the candidate's knowledge is.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#37

Post by ShellfishMeme »

mathgeek wrote: post #22
valeriemettler wrote: post #2

In my experience, closures are a topic that always comes up. It is also important to know how to handle a closure inside of a for loop. I've been asked about "this" binding, coercion, and CSS specificity. I've had to solve problems that required me to know about how to use stacks, trees, and nested for loops. Other topics that have come up are how to architect an app, concurrency, memoization, building out and handli…

> In my experience, closures are a topic that always comes up. Opinions will differ, but IMHO closure is a great concept to divide those who know JS at a conceptual level (or at least have crammed for the interview) from those who don't.

I agree. We always put the little 'for loop that creates a list of functions that spit out the current number of the iteration' exercise first in all of our interviews. Generally, when people solved that one fast, they also did well in the rest of the interview and if they struggled there, they also had a hard time coming up with an elegant solution for most of the other tasks.

What I also like about it is that a closure isn't the only way to solve it. You can use `let` for example to make sure the variables are block scoped, or use `bind` to partially apply a function with the number.

So in the end it's a conceptually very simple exercise that can give you a very good insight into how much the candidate knows about how JS actually works.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#38

Post by ebbv »

It really depends on the job you're applying for. If you're applying for a job at a company that provides SaaS on a particular software stack that's gonna be really different than applying at a work-for-hire web development house. There's really not enough information here for me to give you any kind of useful advice. If you'r qualified for the job you should know the basics that are applicable to just about any front end web developer job.

I'd try to find out as much as you can about what the company you're applying to does so you can get familiar with that stuff.

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#39

Post by andrew3726 »

maccard wrote: post #28
jonahx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where's the disconnect here - are we talking about different kinds of front-end work? Yeah I would assume so. Of course if know the job requires such knowledge, you should interview for it. But I'm thinking of more average front-end work, where you'd be building forms or dashboards or ordinary websites. It sounds like you're building a complex application that just happens to be hosted in a browser. Although even t…

Who vets those libraries? And who writes them in the first place?

People knowing about algorithm+implementation details? Definitely not front-end developers. (Not trying to implicate that front-end devs can't do it... you get the point)

Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

#40

Post by grosbisou »

corecoder wrote: post #18

Before Babel, I often used to ask about code organization/modularization, mostly to filter out candidates who haven't been on a big project and have only copied and pasted jQuery snippets together; today I'd ask if you use Babel modules and why/why not. As other people have said, closures will surely come out. A favorite of mine is array functions: map, forEach, filter. Also, promises, callbacks, workers. Finally, xh…

Why would Babel change drastically the way you organize your code? Isn't it a just compiler?
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