Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

I interviewed at a well-known place here in Portland and they seemed really disappointed that I didn't already know Rails. That was surprising to me, since like the author, I am more familiar with the mindset that you prefer smart people rather than people who know technology X. Beforehand I spent all this time reviewing data structures, algorithms, etc, but they just cared about Rails. I also got one of those goofy OO-design questions about Human inherits from Animal. Not at all what I was expecting.

> strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science.

They are non-Turing-Complete programming languages, and part of that is having limited control structures. "Design patterns" aren't a language feature, have nothing to do with being a programming language (architecture has design patterns -- in fact, that's where the term comes from), and CSS and HTML both have design patterns (and piles of books describing them.)

> As more sites gravitate toward complex JavaScript-driven web apps, it may be useful to ditch the general term "front-end," differentiating C.S.-oriented front-end developers from those who prefer visual design.

There's already a distinction commonly made between "front-end developers" vs "designers". What more do you think is needed?

I had a similar experience with a well known bay area company. I was interviewing for a front end job and they gave me a live coding interview with a recursion question about assembling trees from strings (or maybe vice versa).

I had spent the majority of my time preparing for the interview preparing for front end stuff. I stuffed my brain with Javascript quirks and made sure that the stuff I already knew I could articulate really well. And I gave myself a quirk algorithms review because I knew that is something the Bay Area values.

I struggled with the first question. They asked me if I was interested in a non-dev job because apparently they liked my personality and thought I may be a good cultural fit. It struck me as odd that they liked me enough to inquire if I'm interested in other positions, but only gave me one chance to show them I could be a frontend candidate and the sole interview question wasn't even frontend oriented.

"It seemed like they interview people all the time."

I bet you hit the nail on the head.

At my current job, I've had weeks where I've been on an interview loop every day. At that point, I'm not going to spend much time looking at your github code in depth beforehand each day. Especially when it's a candidate whose area of expertise isn't the same as mine, so I wouldn't know what to look for. Ideally we'd be better able to match interviewers with interviewees, but if we had enough people to be doing that, we wouldn't be in the mad hiring rush that ends up with a developer doing five interviews in a single week around career-fair season. ;)

(My last job was a much smaller company where each hire was weighed a lot more, and we absolutely would've looked at all that stuff there.)

However, I always start off asking about a specific project from the candidate's resume, usually the one that I think sounds most interesting to me. Depending on how long they take to explain it, or how interested they seem to be in explaining it, I'll follow up with a more open-ended question of what their most interesting or challenging project was -- if you can sell me on that project, it's just as big an influence on me me as the coding or design question that I'd also ask.

But I have coworkers who don't ask about other projects like that, which I think kinda sucks.

> What more do you think is needed?

Hiring managers knowing the difference...