In general, don't pretend to be someone you are not. If you don't know something, just say "I don't know this, but I learn quickly". Being flexible, open-minded and easy-adapting is much more important today than knowledge of specific languages, algorithms or frameworks. Google knows everything, you only need to be able to ask it right questions and handle the answers. So, just be ready to prove that you are such kind of person.
Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
51–60 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#52You 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've said it before and I'll say it again: "Ask every developer I've worked with at every job I've had in the industry questions related to these topics on the spot and 95% will fail."
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#53Most modern production quality software systems there days are implementing fibonacci algorithms as part of their core business rules, controlled via a red/black tree. Usually it's held together by a fizzbuzz architecture so as a minimum you should be able to whiteboard fizzbuzz. You should understand all these things well, and really if you are doing modern software development these things hould be day to day tasks anyway so they should be top of mind.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#54You 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…
An interview shouldn't be purely theoretical, but I disagree that there's no place for this stuff.
As an incredibly simple example that comes up all the time, if you get back a collection of items from an API do you store them in a hash keyed by id or in a list? If you can't reason about how e.g. lists are ordered but a hash has O(1) access, and use that to decide which is better in a particular case, you won't be a very strong front-end dev.
Not to mention if you need to dig into performance issues, e.g. dropping frames in animations or something.
I've also seen a lot of frontend bugs related to not thinking about/dealing with asynchronicity well. That's not a data structure problem per se, but you need a working knowledge of some basic CS concepts like threads, concurrency patterns, queues, etc.
I think the key in interviews is that this stuff shouldn't be evaluated like a school exam, where you need immediate recall of all the terms without stumbling. It's all about being able to work towards the right answer and it's fine if that involves a bit of asking or googling to double-check your ideas.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#55You 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…
Agreed. Front-end developers should have experience using libraries that encapsulate collections, trees, sets, hashes, etc... and know when to use certain data structures.
But unless they're being hiring to develop a library, they don't need to have these algorithms memorized.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#56I had to demonstrate how to inverse the value of an immutable object hashed data stream whilst ensuring that the dilithium matrix array was phase decoupled.
Seriously just be yourself, don't over think it. If you don't know something, don't be afraid to so, but you're keen to learn if it is something useful. You can't know everything, no one can, just be confident in the things you do know. Nothing worse than a faker, you'll be caught out anyway, you're going to be judged on your strengths not your weaknesses, unless the employer is crappy, and you wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#57JavaScript:
-Variable hoisting
-Es6/Es2016
-Experience with react, angular, or another modern js framework
-Do you understand build tooling? Webpack? It's becoming a standard.
Css:
-Given a task of basic ui animation, are you still using js or have you adopted css transitions and animations?
-Do you have experience with sass or less? Opinions?
Html5:
-Know it.
Http2
-How will this affect your life as a front end developer?
Tradecraft:
-What can you do when working with designers to make handoff easier?
-When is something good enough to ship?
-how do you learn a new, complicated code base?
Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 clo…
Would that exercise be the following? I'm not sure I understand what's being tested.
const f = (k) => {
const funcs = [];
for(let i = 0; i i);
}
return funcs;
}
const test = f(4);
console.log(test[0]()); // 0
console.log(test[1]()); // 1
console.log(test[2]()); // 2
console.log(test[3]()); // 3Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 clo…
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Re: Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?
#60I'm a front-end dev going through the hiring process right now. Here's a list of some of the questions I have been asked in technical interviews: - What is a clojure? - What is a callback? - What is an IIFE? - How can you use scope to keep a copy of i in a loop? - What is going on when you click a link to go to a website? - Difference between classical inheritance vs prototypical - Difference between object-oriented…
you meant closure ?