An Interview Question that Actually Works
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An Interview Question that Actually Works
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Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#2Had me confused for a bit. Keeping it at the bottom is trivial. Just put it last in the html markup - right before .
What you meant to say seems to be "at the bottom of the screen", which prompts more questions than answers.
Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding your intentions entirely, since you state that your naïve solution was to use position:absolute. But then in the next paragraph, you talk about position:fixed. Was the absolute-part a typo?
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#3My 2 cents: This is a horrible interview question. It tests arcane knowledge that takes about 15 seconds of googling, kind of like the varchar2 question in this blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html .
It doesn't really tell you if the interviewee can code, and it probably doesn't tell you much about how they think. Developers should be asked to write code and design systems, whether large scale services or libraries.
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#4Had me confused for a bit. Keeping it at the bottom is trivial. Just put it last in the html markup - right before . What you meant to say seems to be "at the bottom of the screen", which prompts more questions than answers. Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding your intentions entirely, since you state that your naïve solution was to use position:absolute. But then in the next paragraph, you talk about position:fix…
The position:fixed reference was a typo. Good catch!
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#5Stop the madness.
"While working on our new developer portal a UI bug led me to my new favorite interview question:"
...
"Questions like the sticky footer riddle tend to reveal great engineers. Great engineers understand that simple questions often have surprisingly complex answers. More importantly, a great engineer is not afraid to say they don’t know the answer."
What are the limits of the modern misnomer "engineer"?
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#6Interview questions should test the thinking ability of the candidate. You should be looking to see how they solve problems. This is mindless trivia, the answer should be "by googling".
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#7Had me confused for a bit. Keeping it at the bottom is trivial. Just put it last in the html markup - right before . What you meant to say seems to be "at the bottom of the screen", which prompts more questions than answers. Then again, maybe I'm misunderstanding your intentions entirely, since you state that your naïve solution was to use position:absolute. But then in the next paragraph, you talk about position:fix…
The position:fixed reference was a typo. Good catch!
I'm still confused though, since the linked jsFiddle uses position:absolute. Clearly that would never work - That's pretty basic html/css wisdom. I would expect position:fixed to do work though, although your post suggest that that might not be the case on all platforms. I guess I wouldn't realise that until I began testing on a broader range of devices than the normal development stack holds.
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#8This has to be one of the worst interview questions I've ever heard. It's mindless trivia and basically slices people into two groups: people who have had to do this before and people who haven't.
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#9My 2 cents: This is a horrible interview question. It tests arcane knowledge that takes about 15 seconds of googling, kind of like the varchar2 question in this blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html . It doesn't really tell you if the interviewee can code, and it probably doesn't tell you much about how they think. Developers should be asked to write code and design systems, whether lar…
Agreed. I read the article, expecting some sort of twist at the end, but it never came.
Re: An Interview Question that Actually Works
#10The problem with this question is there is no way to explore a candidate's thought process. They either know it because they just so happen to have needed a sticky footer or they don't. They could guess, but like the author says the intuitive solution isn't going to be right anyway.
Also, obviously this question is biased towards front end developers.