6 ms·

Front End Interview Handbook

72 points by yangshun 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago
Perhaps you can add something about ARIA tags (accessibility). Much of the web could improve in terms of accessibility.
- blitmap 6y ago
  A subject not covered nearly enough!
- rado 6y ago
  Amen
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  Aria tags are useful, but properly used semantic HTML elements are better.
D_B_Koopa 6y ago
This is already quite dated. Most of the content is geared towards the state of JS in 2013-2015.
- makapuf 6y ago
  Can you write a quick list of missing concepts ?
  - wildrhythms 6y ago
    I interview for front-end at a big company (actually a different title, but effectively front-end engineers) and we explicitly do not ask trivia questions, which is what this guide focuses on. I might ask warm-up questions like "a customer says they click a button on the page and nothing happens, how do you investigate?" and that's it. The entire rest of the interview (1hr) is spent on a coding problem where we both walk through and discuss solutions, and I let them code and we talk about their code. I truly believe that experienced engineers can learn 1000x more about someone's skillset in the first 5 minutes of them coding than any amount of trivia questions.
  - D_B_Koopa 6y ago
    it's more that obsolete concepts like var, AMD and Common.js are focused on. These techniques are obsolete & lead to fragile code especially when blended with newer concepts like native js imports, let and const.
- flywheel 6y ago
  It really depends on the job - I'm interviewing jr. devs, and a lot of these questions are good for testing their basic knowledge. Not every front-end job is about cutting-edge javascript.
grapheq 6y ago
This looks like a great checklist when you're implementing a multi-lingual site for example. But for a developer interview, this is just terrible. This is not the way to find out if someone can and has experience to build complex shit that is easy to manage(also by others). This whole assessment model is totally deprecated (if it ever worked at all).
cnorthwood 6y ago
This just seems to be a list of answers to common "trivia" questions, which are becoming much less popular in interviews, and often are just one part of it, rather than a guide to a whole interview
- badlucklottery 6y ago
  The JS section isn't bad but I agree on most of the HTML and CSS sections.
_the_inflator 6y ago
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoers do you follow? Do you work on Open Source or private projects in your spare time? What is the current version of ECMA, Framework etc. and when does the next come out? Name 3 of the last things you learned this year as a developer. These questions really make enthusiasts shine. If I had to choose motivation over knowledge, I would always opt for highly enthusiastic people over knowledge people. Former will easily surpass the later. Besides that I like this idea. Very good!
- mcny 6y ago
  > I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. I'm sorry but enthusiasm and motivation can die pretty quickly. I mean I am just a contractor but when I see my manager hit a wall trying to do basic things like getting another co-worker's computer unlocked too a whole day of fighting IT and getting another 8 GB of RAM for our desktops which had 8GB RAM took well over four months, our request for SSD instead of 5400 rpm hard disk couldn't be accepted because the company has a contract with HP and is only allowed to buy from HP, and when IT changes a configuration that brings down your internal website application, it takes for plus hours of emails back and forth for them to revert their change of the config file, the enthusiasm and motivation will eventually die. It is still possible to stay motivated. For example, I play with some web stuff in my spare time but I doubt it is possible to stay motivated at work for any length of time.
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  I used to think this way, but now I do front-end (mostly) interviews at a gigantic company and I don't give two shits about motivation. Can you write HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively, manipulate the DOM, write styles, and dip into a Python/Java backend on a rare occasion? Hired. Most front-enders I interview can't even add, remove, or edit a div without a framework helping them bind an object to the DOM.
readme 6y ago
Lets be honest: if you can copy and paste from w3 schools you can probably be a front end web developer.
- lhnz 6y ago
  Are you talking about building a 90s-style website or something like Figma?
  - readme 6y ago
    I wish people would only build 90's style sites. The way things are going is bad, here are some example sites that I find particularly difficult to use: - new reddit (old reddit is much, much better) - parley (yes, the "free speech" twitter) has a terrible UI. it takes like a year to post a tweet and you wait like 30 seconds for some dynamic spinning progress dialog to go away The web was not invented as an application development platform. I think we have gone too far with web applications. Good web apps are simple and have low complexity. Once you start trying to make it really "modern" and fancy you're shooting yourself in the foot because of all the browser quirks. The more you use heavyweight frameworks, the more complex and crufty your work becomes. With that said I do see the appeal because there aren't many good desktop UI frameworks either. I've worked with Qt enough to know it's plenty frustrating. On the other hand, if it's so easy to make a portable web app, why do we have things like Electron that ship a browser with your web-app, aside from native experience? Wait, did I dare say: native experience, is valuable? We are well past peak web app, we are even past peak mobile app. What even makes an app, an app? Is it that it's tailored to a smaller purpose than more general applications? Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not. Is it good software, yes. Is Vim an app? I don't think I'd call it that. How about 'cat'? Nah... Apps are tailored to a specific business purpose rather than a more general use case. Apps are a fad, but good software tools are not a fad. Build good tools, don't build apps (unless you're paying the bills)
    - lhnz 6y ago
      > Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not. Yes. Visual Studio Code is a good example of a high-quality web app built by front-end developers. 'App' is a shortening of 'Application' popularised by iOS. The state of the art in UI Engineering, is everything that used to be done in C++, but on the web/cross-platform using a mixture of JavaScript and WebAssembly. Anyway, my point is that you are shitting on front-end development, yet there are front-end engineers out there developing high-quality software, and it is difficult: it requires a lot more ability than just copy-pasting from W3 Schools.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thekaleb 6y ago
I think that it would be good for this to have questions about HTTP as well, such as status codes, caching, and content negotiation.

72 points by yangshun 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago

Perhaps you can add something about ARIA tags (accessibility). Much of the web could improve in terms of accessibility.

blitmap 6y ago
A subject not covered nearly enough!
rado 6y ago
Amen
schwartzworld 6y ago
Aria tags are useful, but properly used semantic HTML elements are better.

D_B_Koopa 6y ago

This is already quite dated. Most of the content is geared towards the state of JS in 2013-2015.

makapuf 6y ago
Can you write a quick list of missing concepts ?
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  I interview for front-end at a big company (actually a different title, but effectively front-end engineers) and we explicitly do not ask trivia questions, which is what this guide focuses on. I might ask warm-up questions like "a customer says they click a button on the page and nothing happens, how do you investigate?" and that's it. The entire rest of the interview (1hr) is spent on a coding problem where we both walk through and discuss solutions, and I let them code and we talk about their code. I truly believe that experienced engineers can learn 1000x more about someone's skillset in the first 5 minutes of them coding than any amount of trivia questions.
- D_B_Koopa 6y ago
  it's more that obsolete concepts like var, AMD and Common.js are focused on. These techniques are obsolete & lead to fragile code especially when blended with newer concepts like native js imports, let and const.
flywheel 6y ago
It really depends on the job - I'm interviewing jr. devs, and a lot of these questions are good for testing their basic knowledge. Not every front-end job is about cutting-edge javascript.

grapheq 6y ago

This looks like a great checklist when you're implementing a multi-lingual site for example. But for a developer interview, this is just terrible. This is not the way to find out if someone can and has experience to build complex shit that is easy to manage(also by others). This whole assessment model is totally deprecated (if it ever worked at all).

cnorthwood 6y ago

This just seems to be a list of answers to common "trivia" questions, which are becoming much less popular in interviews, and often are just one part of it, rather than a guide to a whole interview

badlucklottery 6y ago
The JS section isn't bad but I agree on most of the HTML and CSS sections.

_the_inflator 6y ago

One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially motivation. I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard? What blogs/authoers do you follow? Do you work on Open Source or private projects in your spare time? What is the current version of ECMA, Framework etc. and when does the next come out? Name 3 of the last things you learned this year as a developer. These questions really make enthusiasts shine. If I had to choose motivation over knowledge, I would always opt for highly enthusiastic people over knowledge people. Former will easily surpass the later. Besides that I like this idea. Very good!

mcny 6y ago
> I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is enthusiasm and motivation. I'm sorry but enthusiasm and motivation can die pretty quickly. I mean I am just a contractor but when I see my manager hit a wall trying to do basic things like getting another co-worker's computer unlocked too a whole day of fighting IT and getting another 8 GB of RAM for our desktops which had 8GB RAM took well over four months, our request for SSD instead of 5400 rpm hard disk couldn't be accepted because the company has a contract with HP and is only allowed to buy from HP, and when IT changes a configuration that brings down your internal website application, it takes for plus hours of emails back and forth for them to revert their change of the config file, the enthusiasm and motivation will eventually die. It is still possible to stay motivated. For example, I play with some web stuff in my spare time but I doubt it is possible to stay motivated at work for any length of time.
wildrhythms 6y ago
I used to think this way, but now I do front-end (mostly) interviews at a gigantic company and I don't give two shits about motivation. Can you write HTML, CSS, and Javascript effectively, manipulate the DOM, write styles, and dip into a Python/Java backend on a rare occasion? Hired. Most front-enders I interview can't even add, remove, or edit a div without a framework helping them bind an object to the DOM.

readme 6y ago

Lets be honest: if you can copy and paste from w3 schools you can probably be a front end web developer.

lhnz 6y ago
Are you talking about building a 90s-style website or something like Figma?
- readme 6y ago
  I wish people would only build 90's style sites. The way things are going is bad, here are some example sites that I find particularly difficult to use: - new reddit (old reddit is much, much better) - parley (yes, the "free speech" twitter) has a terrible UI. it takes like a year to post a tweet and you wait like 30 seconds for some dynamic spinning progress dialog to go away The web was not invented as an application development platform. I think we have gone too far with web applications. Good web apps are simple and have low complexity. Once you start trying to make it really "modern" and fancy you're shooting yourself in the foot because of all the browser quirks. The more you use heavyweight frameworks, the more complex and crufty your work becomes. With that said I do see the appeal because there aren't many good desktop UI frameworks either. I've worked with Qt enough to know it's plenty frustrating. On the other hand, if it's so easy to make a portable web app, why do we have things like Electron that ship a browser with your web-app, aside from native experience? Wait, did I dare say: native experience, is valuable? We are well past peak web app, we are even past peak mobile app. What even makes an app, an app? Is it that it's tailored to a smaller purpose than more general applications? Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not. Is it good software, yes. Is Vim an app? I don't think I'd call it that. How about 'cat'? Nah... Apps are tailored to a specific business purpose rather than a more general use case. Apps are a fad, but good software tools are not a fad. Build good tools, don't build apps (unless you're paying the bills)
  - lhnz 6y ago
    > Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not. Yes. Visual Studio Code is a good example of a high-quality web app built by front-end developers. 'App' is a shortening of 'Application' popularised by iOS. The state of the art in UI Engineering, is everything that used to be done in C++, but on the web/cross-platform using a mixture of JavaScript and WebAssembly. Anyway, my point is that you are shitting on front-end development, yet there are front-end engineers out there developing high-quality software, and it is difficult: it requires a lot more ability than just copy-pasting from W3 Schools.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thekaleb 6y ago

I think that it would be good for this to have questions about HTTP as well, such as status codes, caching, and content negotiation.