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Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

160 points by d_j_s 13y ago

nhangen 13y ago
I'm a PHP/WordPress dev shipping product every single day, but I think I'd probably fail questions like these if I was asked in an interview setting. I don't really worry about functions like these until a need arises, and when it does (and I don't know how to do it), I learn until I do. This is an absurd way to recruit front-end talent and partially explains the so-called talent crunch.
- hackinsack 13y ago
  Nothing against you, as I don't know you or your work, but "shipping product" does not equal doing good work. People ship crappy, buggy code every day. Just because one "ships daily" doesn't mean that what they're shipping is worth anything or means they know what they're doing. I've seen people that have no clue how to write code copy and paste crap they find all over the internet into a file and ship it. It's a slow, buggy and ugly hack, but it shipped. It will come back days later as unexceptably bad by the customer. That's the purpose of these tests. To weed out the people that have no clue how to write proper software that deals with high loads, scalability and performance criticality.
  - sigsergv 13y ago
    Software engineers make product, not code. I'd prefer talented developer with good practical experience in “releasing products” rather than an algo-geek who can only solve stupid hiring quizes. Slow buggy ugly WORKING RELEASED product is a much-much better than ideal clean and effective thing not yet ready for release for a few years in row.
    - hackinsack 13y ago
      Not saying I disagree with that, except for releasing slow buggy code. Why not accept either of those people? There are efficient ways, as described in the article, to interview for people that are great at releasing quality code in a productive time frame. I was simply pointing out that releasing code daily doesn't mean you know what you're doing. If you can't answer at least some of the questions that were in this article, I'd question your ability to write productive code. That's not to say that only questions like that should be a determining factor for ones ability to produce.
      - nhangen 13y ago
        You're right that shipping !== good code, but I wouldn't be able to keep shipping the same product if it weren't somewhat valuable to my customers. The point isn't that I'm a unicorn, but that good developers can exist outside of code challenges. People like me, that are self-taught and work super hard in order to improve our craft...we're not appreciated enough. Everyone wants a rockstar, forgetting that drummers and bass players add a lot of value.
  - emddudley 13y ago
    You're writing as if most companies care about "proper" software. Most don't. They care about shipping.
  - nhangen 13y ago
    Just want to mention also that knowing the answers to these questions does not mean that you'll write bug-free code. Bugs are a product of shipping, and occur regardless of talent or ability to answer said questions.
seivan 13y ago
I'm sorry you had to go through that bullshit. That generally sucks when you're interviewed by assholes who have no idea that the specific platform that you might work on requires. Consider most front-end engineers ALSO to be designers, and I'd suspect thats where I would drive the interview. I would wish the same treatment. Also lol that the interview questions are basically EITHER memorizing formulas and remembering why something was that way or trying to cram down a solution on the whiteboard in the little time you have. The latter is more admirable, but depends on the situation at hand. 5 minutes, white board, using your fingers as eraser.
- Bahamut 13y ago
  I think we are also seeing the rise of the frontend developer, where they spend most of their time on JS, with maybe some time in HTML and CSS - at least, that is what I do for work, although I am fully capable of excelling at CSS as well.
  - greghinch 13y ago
    My career as a developer has been coming up through the role of front-end engineer, really from when that was first being defined as a separate role (2004-2005, around then). In hindsight now, I would never hire myself. Either you're a developer, in which case you should be able to traverse that stack (so for example JS as well as PHP/Ruby/Python) or you're a designer, and you can traverse that stack (so you design, implement your designs in HTML/CSS, maybe a little JS as necessary). But while there is crossover between the two domains, there isn't a separate role in the middle. Trying to fit development workflow around people who just do HTML/CSS/JS ends up creating too many bottlenecks, on both sides: "I'm waiting for designer A to deliver X" or "I'm waiting for back-end person B to deliver Y". When you just have people who work their whole stack, that bottleneck is removed.
    - Bahamut 13y ago
      It gets necessary at some point - it's not cheap finding highly skilled full stack developers, and they're not the most common beasts around. Everyone wants them, but they have their pick of jobs. It's far easier to hire for the positions separately, and if your company is in need of rapid expansion, I'd say almost necessary given the market. While I term myself as more of a frontend developer currently, I also know CSS pretty well (I sometimes fix bugs the UI team can't figure out), and I am currently transitioning to doing some backend work at my current job as well. All developers should strive to be full stack, and designers should strive to know code more, but realistically speaking, not everyone is there yet of course, so you have to focus on developing the talent or hiring it.
bjryan 13y ago
I am honestly a little shocked by this. I am a university student and this past semester I interviewed with around 10 companies in the Bay area, all of which were for Front-End engineering positions. I can only think of one company which did not give me any 'front end specific' questions. I was asked everything from hoisting and closures to explaining how Webkit works and various ways to improve page load time. Are you free to elaborate on what companies you spoke with?
- philipwalton 13y ago
  Maybe offline. I'm not interested in publicly calling out any companies. I mainly wanted to shed light on the process and my experience. I will say that when interviewing for previous jobs in the past (at smaller companies), I got asked a lot more front-end questions. Maybe it's just a big company problem.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    It's true on the business side as well. Small companies ask relevant questions because they have to - their survival depends on finding someone who can do the job. Big companies, even famous ones, have moved so far beyond their scrappy "gotta survive" days that they have become quite lost in their bureaucracy and arrogance.
- csomar 13y ago
  He interviewed at big co. and (I guess), you interviewed at startups. Maybe that's the difference?
  - bjryan 13y ago
    I interviewed at both. The larger companies were more likely to give me 'programming challenges' or puzzles (usually small mockups) for me to do ahead of times while startups tended to be more conversational and, quite frankly, didn't ask as hard of questions.
ckorhonen 13y ago
This seems fairly typical, and I understand the rationale on both sides. In any kind of engineering role, not just front-end, having domain experience/expertise certainly helps you be more productive from the get go. In a previous company we hired developers with good CS chops but no iOS experience to build our iPhone app - they picked it up, but it took a couple of years and numerous rewrites to get an awesome product. Thats a huge opportunity cost. You'll end up with a better product right off the bat if you hire an expert, especially with technologies which have a ton of quirks and nuances. So why wouldn't you want to hire a front-end expert? In a lot of smaller companies flexibility can trump expertise - having an engineer who is smart and can work across the entire stack is essential in smaller teams. That doesn't mean they won't be primarily doing front-end development, but its helpful if they know their way around the back-end to some extent without hand-holding from other engineers. A good candidate needs to be smart enough to quickly pickup new tools and techniques, and it is important to determine this in the interview process.
- mackey 13y ago
  I was just thinking about the similarities in iOS development. I have worked on a project where the original authors weren't iOS developers but were very competent front end developers, and it wasn't pretty. It doesn't just affect the code, but also things like the build environment and documenation.
codingdave 13y ago
It could have been a sign that they trusted your front-end skill. If I know someone has a skill, I don't waste my time interviewing them to prove it. I try to figure out what else they can do, where they can grow, and how well they would fit in with the team. So I'd pose the question back to you -- did you provide them a portfolio or any code samples that would have made the front-end questions redundant?
- danhoc01 13y ago
  I was thinking along the same lines. I would be curious to see his resume, as the content could potentially influence the interviewer to ask certain types of questions.
- philipwalton 13y ago
  Yes, I provided a detailed resume as well as my Github account for all of these. The problem is it didn't seem like the individual interviewers had taken much time to actually look at what I'd done. If they had, then maybe I'd agree with you, but it seemed like many of them were just going through the motions. It seemed like they interview people all the time.
  - majormajor 13y ago
    "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.
mgkimsal 13y ago
"I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning." False dichotomy. How about a smart person who knows a lot about X and is creative and logical? They do exist. I feel like many interviewers want to categorize someone in to one of those two categories from the outset - "this person already knows a lot about XYZ, therefore, I'd rather look for a smart person who doesn't know XYZ and teach them". Sounds crazy writing it out, but it's the impression I got years ago interviewing. It's also the impression I get from friends of mine who have interviewed in the more recent few months.
- rhc2104 13y ago
  It's more like, "we want smart people, so let's optimize our interview process to find smart people, and give everyone the same interview questions." The problem here is that firms tend to prefer giving "engineering interview problems" to everyone, and do not want to segment interview questions by position.
  - kyrra 13y ago
    Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.
    - Bahamut 13y ago
      Ideally they should be having people in that area of expertise doing the interviewing of the candidate, since they have ready access to the domain specific information to ask relevant questions.
    - justinsteele 13y ago
      Hiring is pretty much the most important thing you do as a company.. if you can't spend an hour per position developing applicable questions for each position, you are setting yourself up for failure.
potench 13y ago
A coworker and I wrote a script that's been through a few iterations based on feedback and tailored to whatever company I'm hiring for. Based on the participants self-rating (1-10) you can ask increasingly more nuanced questions in each area of CSS, HTML, and JS. Here's the front-end interview script I use: https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119 https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119 So far it seems to do a good job at promoting conversation and identifying thoughtful and talented FE developers.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  This is a good list. Can I ask you something though? I've always been curious about the value of questions like these (just to take a sample): > On a scale of 1-10, what is your comfort level developing with HTML, CSS & JavaScript? > How well do you think you work with other fellow developers? > Given a choice, would you rather work alone or in tandem with someone? What are the "correct" answers to these? Or more specifically, in your opinion what are the "wrong" answers? On the first, the problem I see is one of self-reporting. We have seen developers self-report a 9 on something, only for us to determine later based on the interview that they were more like a 5. We didn't put value on either of these numbers, because both were relative - the "9" was presumably relative to his previous job environment, and the "5" was relative to ours. (At another company the person could've been a "2", for example.) Fact is, it doesn't really matter - we were just looking to see if the person can add value, regardless of whether they were a 5 or a 10. On the latter two: we have had "loners" crank out incredible bits of code on their own, and "team people" do the same as part of a larger group. We have also seen people switch between the two "personality types" based on context - the specific project, their team mates for the project, and so on. So we prefer not to ask these types of questions as we don't seem to get any relevant information out of them, but perhaps we're missing something, and so I'm curious as to what your motivations are.
ktavera 13y ago
I've had similar experiences in the last month of interviews i've been through. I was asked how i'd design a secure backend API in asp.net, various algorithm questions, some basic javascript questions ("what is a closure?", "what does the var keyword do?", etc") and other very non-specific things. At the end of most of my interviews when they ask if I have any questions about the positions I tend to have to ask "Is this a Front end Developer position you just interviewed me for?" Not once have any of the interviewers been front-end devs, only SVP of Development or Director of Design or some other inflated title. I want to talk about problems i've had building Angular or Knockout apps or or cross-browser JS/CSS issues.
- walshemj 13y ago
  Interesting so I hope you said get ready to spend a fuckload of cash on state of the art secure key stores as this is the only way to properly build a secure back end.
cleverbaker 13y ago
Those are excellent suggestions in the "My Suggestions" section. Thanks for the article.
usingpond 13y ago
Similar in NYC. I remember an interview where I was asked to bit-shift in Javascript, for the sake of itself. I've also had good experiences though--I liked one where I had to build certain UI components and get my code evaluated in real-time.
- lgieron 13y ago
  Since it's just *2 (right shift) or /2 (left shift), I'm pretty sure they wanted to quickly test how are you with general programming knowledge.
  - nanidin 13y ago
    In javascript, the number type is just number. To truly bit shift with this method, you'd need to convert the bitwise representation into a number, perform the given operation, handle the corner case of odd numbers when dividing, and the convert it back into some representation of bits. Trying to judge people with questions like this seems like a misguided endeavor. Yes, it's probably valuable to know that bitshifting is roughly equivalent to *2 and /2. But that's more like trivia - the chances you'll actually use that in real life is really low. I've had to work with people that think bitshifting is an appropriate optimization for division/multiplication by even numbers. I then have to explain overflows, underflows, and the fact that the compiler will compile it to shifts if appropriate anyway, so don't sacrifice readability in the name of micro-optimization.
mikeya 13y ago
You'd hope that before they bring you in they know that you know basic front end stuff. To be honest most front end tech is simply memorization of standards and idiosyncrasies between browsers. Anyone can go through and figure this stuff out via a simple google search. On the other hand taking say data from a Ajax call and sorting it or filtering it with custom logic takes some creative problem solving to do it gracefully. Interviewees always forget to figure out why they interviewer and company is asking these questions or requiring particular knowledge. Next time just ask them!
meritt 13y ago
You were interviewed by back-end engineers. That's what they knew. My question is why didn't you leave the interview upon seeing it was a waste of time?
- philipwalton 13y ago
  To be honest, I was actually having a good time. I'm one of the crazy people who likes interviewing. I think it's kind of thrilling. Also, they flew me up there, so what was I gonna do?
- dylandrop 13y ago
  Because he needs a job?
- rhizome 13y ago
  My experience is that interviews only appear to be wastes of time in hindsight. They are not zero-sum, and due to the nature of the beast there is no way to figure out that you're scoring an "F" rather than a "B+".
camus2 13y ago
A bit off topic,but is there a website that gather common computer science interview questions with solutions ? thanks.
- millerm 13y ago
  I saw this on Reddit yesterday. http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/ http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/ So, perhaps this can get you started. I plan on getting a copy of: http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/098478280X http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-... too.
- 9999 13y ago
  http://codingforinterviews.com http://codingforinterviews.com http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.html http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.htm...
vikas5678 13y ago
I have friends who have politely refused to answer or indulge the interviewer in the algorithm questions labyrinth. As someone being interviewed, you should atleast try to divert the interview toward your strengths. On the flip-side, if a company is interviewing you for a front-end position and not asking enough DOM, CSS questions, they're doing it wrong.
philipwalton 13y ago
Related, I just found out that Darcy Clarke put this list together of good front-end interview questions. I would have included it in the article if I'd known about it ahead of time. https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questions https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview...
- krsunny 13y ago
  "Whats your favorite feature of internet explorer" I think I see what she did there..
  - rimantas 13y ago
    Well, you can play around and talk about good things which wer e born in IE first: XMLHTTPRequest, .innerHTML, etc.
  - whileonebegin 13y ago
    The ability to emulate different versions of IE. Of course, the only reason this is necessary is because of the many breaking changes that the different versions created.
  - davedx 13y ago
    "I can book my holidays and put my hours in on the company's intranet"? :D
- jianshen 13y ago
  Great list! I remember coming across this other "Learn Front-end" list: https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks on HN a little while ago and thought it was a great example of just how scattered Web-FE education still is. Everyone has their own favorite "book" and there's no K&R that you just pick up and read.
sergiotapia 13y ago
Concerning that they ask you computer science questions when you will be working on the front end. What if you were to ask CSS and Javascript questions to a DBA? Do you see how absolutely ridiculous that sounds?
- Jgrubb 13y ago
  More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficiently solve problems I wouldn't have been able to solve a year ago. I have had the exact same experience with the author of the article regarding a total absence of actual front-end related questions, though. Not sure how to feel about not getting those gigs.
  - krsunny 13y ago
    Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?
    - sergiotapia 13y ago
      His silence is highly amusing to me. :)
      - Jgrubb 13y ago
        Your condescension is highly distasteful to me.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        krsunny 13y ago
        Who was he talking about? Me? If so, I upvoted the reply, what more do I need to do?
hawkharris 13y ago
One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the author, I'm much more drawn toward the CS-related tasks of the job such as writing JavaScript. To be clear, I have an enormous amount of respect for people who enjoy the design aspects. Writing CSS, using Photoshop, etc., requires a lot of skill. My point is simply that there is a divide among those front-end developers who are drawn toward programming and those who are drawn toward layout and design. 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. This might make the expectations of a front-end development position much clearer, allowing for a simpler interview process.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > 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?
  - _random_ 13y ago
    > What more do you think is needed? Hiring managers knowing the difference...
  - eliah-lakhin 13y ago
steven777400 13y ago
We were hiring a non-senior full-stack developer recently and I noticed there were no "frontend" questions on the list, so I added what I thought would be a question that any developer with frontend experience could answer, and would also pave the way for some more interested discussions for an advanced candidate. The question was something to the effect of "In JavaScript, what is the value of 'this' in a method?" I would have accepted an answer as simple as "The value of 'this' depends on how the method is called" or even "The value of 'this' confuses me because it's often not what I expect." It was a disaster. We may as well not have asked the question at all. Nobody seemed to even be aware of anything about it.
- matwood 13y ago
  I don't even write JS much and I know 'this' is a trap question.
  - byroot 13y ago
    It's not a trap. It's just required knowledge. Saying you're a Javascript developer without understanding the behaviour of `this`, is like saying you're a C developer without understanding what a pointer is.
- byroot 13y ago
  I always include something around `this` behaviour in my interviews if the position is Javascript related. You cannot possibly have a decent experience in JS without have been bit by this. And I'm always amazed by the amount of developers that just do not understand how it works, and bind every possible methods.
  - ac2u 13y ago
    Likewise, I ask it also. When someone has spent the last 3 years as a "JavaScript developer" and doesn't have a basic grasp of context in JS, them it's a red flag.
  - badman_ting 13y ago
michaelochurch 13y ago
I'm almost entirely backend, but I can relate to the travails of interviewing in the Bay Area and dealing with unprepared interviewers. The engineers were like anywhere else-- and a fair proportion of them were very good-- but there are just a lot of arrogant people in the managerial ranks of the Valley. After you get an offer and you get to the negotiation phase, most Bay Area firms try to lowball you because-- even if you're from an objectively better place like NYC or Austin-- obviously everyone wants the privilege of working in California. (Expensive housing even in the suburbs, nightmarish traffic, and the most aggressive homeless population in the U.S. Where do I sign up?) Then there was one silly game company (which, presumably unrelatedly, is now being sued) that wanted me to sign a full NDA just to do a coding test. Not an NDA over the material of the test (which I would have signed) but one that included a one-year non-solicit covering all employees of that firm. I could be generalizing negative experiences, but it seems to be like they didn't prepare for your interview (recognizing that you were a front-end engineer) because of that obnoxious (and completely false) assumption that, if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area. Obviously they had enough interest to take time out of their day, but not enough to prepare. In New York, there are a lot of startups that are of low quality; but the arrogance of Silicon Valley is unparalleled. Wall Street's reputation would have you expecting it to be worse but, by and large, it's not.
- thecage411 13y ago
  I haven't really seen the assumption that "if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area." I have seen sort of the opposite, though -- if you are experienced, you likely have a family and there is no way in hell you are moving to the Bay Area.
badman_ting 13y ago
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.
- _random_ 13y ago
  Times when Rails development was considered an out-of-box thinking have clearly passed...
  - badman_ting 13y ago
    Yep, just another orthodoxy now, for some.
ritchiea 13y ago
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.
ktavera 13y ago
As a follow-up to my earlier comment, i'm doing a phone interview right now and the first interviewer started off with questions about how IIS internals worked and some obscure C# questions. I immediately asked him "Is this a front-end position or not? I know C# and .net MVC but i'm focusing my career on Angular" his reply "I honestly don't know, they just told me to call you and ask you a series of questions on advanced C# development" Job posting title "Senior Frontend Developer with AngularJS"
- _random_ 13y ago
  It seems that JS MVC frameworks change every year, maybe they decided that asking questions on the flavour-of-the-month is not an indicator? Would expect some JS questions though.
  - ktavera 13y ago
    As a bonus, finally got to talk to the hiring manager a second ago and he informed me that there would be NO javascript or front end development in this role, just converting Crystal Reports into some other obscure reporting system. So I ended the call promptly with a "Thank you for your time and good bye"
Osiris 13y ago
Are algorithm questions really that useful when looking for a candidate? I find myself being really nervous about applying to other jobs because I'm not formally trained in CS. My job and side projects are mostly web sites that require knowledge about how to architecture software but I very rarely write complex algorithms. If something comes up where I need to optimize something I can usually spend some time Googling for some insights on how to improve it, but it's been 15+ years since I've written a sort algo. The idea of being forced to come up to a solution to an unknown problem on the spot makes me feel inadequate.
- millerm 13y ago
  I'm a full stack developer. Currently focusing on iOS. Interview questions should really depend on the expectations of the type of software being developed. I've been to a couple interviews lately and this has been the first time (in my career) that I have been tested (with time constraints too, mind you). I was either pointed to a whiteboard, or sat in a room with nothing but a couple sheets of blank (unruled) paper, a non-erasable pen, and a list of ~10 algorithms questions with a few to be implemented and their running time, and memory footprint to be explained. I was not prepared, at all. I have been developing software for about 17 years. Do you have any idea how many times in my career I have been asked to write a heap sort, a trie, or create a power set? Never. So, I had forgotten some of the specifics of how to implement them. Let alone on paper. A quick note... My handwriting is atrocious. I'm 41 and I am extremely embarrassed as to how bad it is. I can play classical guitar, but I screw up everything I write or attempt to draw. I thought it was a dyslexia thing or something, but I don't seem to have enough of the symptoms for that. That's pretty much why I liked using a computer when I was younger; I could fix my mistakes. So, needless to say, when I am asked to write stuff down I kind of freak out. Anyway, there is a reason I have reference materials and the Internet. If I don't remember the specifics of something, I go look it up. I know what a lot of data structures and algorithms are, but I just don't bother memorizing all their specifics. I know what to look for. I read the description and can decide what the best thing to do is. Sure, I remember the basics of the major algorithms and data structures, and some of their their Big O characteristics. Implementing these isn't really what I do on just about any given day. So, what have I been doing about it? I've been spending the last couple weeks going back over the "Algorithms" book (http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/) and grabbed all the videos from the Coursera courses on the same book/topic. I admit it's all my fault. I have written a lot of very successful applications over my career. These have fulfilled requirements for power generation, real estate, healthcare, search engine, and marketing companies. Using higher level abstractions (like using an OO language) with industry tested APIs for sorting, lists, trees etc.. kind of makes you push that stuff to the side because for 95% of the development, that kind of low level detail is just not necessary. Now, of course, this really depends also on what type of development you do. Sure, if you are writing a lot of C code, you may need to manually write these structures. Or, if you are writing low level code (game event loops, collision detection, file system stuff, you know) that needs to run as optimally as possible, sure. A lot of us write applications that take in data, and spew it back out. Heck, a lot of developers are forced to write just a hell of a lot of SQL queries and they'll never see a data structure beyond a class file, an array list, and a result set. Again, I am attempting to better myself now. I don't know how long it will be before I can answer some of the more crazy questions I have been asked though. TL;DR I was not prepared, at all.
joeblau 13y ago
Great writeup. This is pretty much the same experience that I had when I moved to San Francisco. I got a lot of "college memorization" questions. Basically, you could read a book, memorize the answer and come up with it. I was also interviewed by some young guys out of Stanford who asked me a question that they probably spent a few weeks in class working on that I had 45 minutes to figure out. When I look at the interview process, it seems more like a battle than an actual interview, but it is engineers we are dealing with. When I do interviews, I want to know that you can program, but I care more about whether or not I can work with you.
fistofjohnwayne 13y ago
I think these problems stem from the job posting. Like the author, I've come to love interviewing and I've conducted a good deal of interviews myself. I've noticed that a job titled "front-end developer" with a poor description casts too wide a net and wastes everyone's time. If I see that you mentioned design experience and Backbone in your job posting and then you quiz me on Rails and database queries I'm going to feel like I'm attending amateur hour. However, if you state that data structures, algorithms and all that other great CS stuff is fair game in the job posting or the follow-up emails – then go ahead. Don't envy the front-end developer. At this point we have to be prepared for anything.
NDizzle 13y ago
SF Tech Interviews. By recent college grads FOR recent college grads.
ra3 13y ago
>"A correct answer to this will demonstrate both an understanding of basic computer science principles as well as a deeper knowledge of what jQuery is doing behind the scenes." How does the referenced jquery statement represent basic CS principles? OOP? Definitely not that.
- whatevsmate 13y ago
  The referenced jQuery statement gives the candidate a chance to speak on: selector complexity (id look ups vs traversing to find descendant elements), first-class functions (passing a function reference to the .on() method), regular expressions (to add class names to an existing class attribute in older browsers that don't have .classList property on elements). There are probably other things but those are just a few off the top of my head.
proksoup 13y ago
The two CSS questions I ask (but skip depending portfolio quality): 1) Make these two discs sit next to eCh other. What other ways you could do that? Why each way bad/good for what? 2) center this. Other ways? Bad/good about each?
edw519 13y ago
I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning. This! That one sentence pretty much addressed all of your questions and concerns. So instead on hacking the apparent process, read that sentence again and get it. This is pretty much an absolute truth in almost any industry for almost any skill. It's especially true in tech because: - "X" will be different in 2 years anyway. - "X" will be VERY different in 4 years. - Well funded companies want long-term talent. - Start-ups seeking their place want long-term talent. - Companies with long-term vision want long-term talent. - A jack of all trades is usually better than a master of one. - If it's so complicated to learn, it's too complicated to use.
- rondon 13y ago
  I've done very little HTML,CSS but I feel confident that I could become proficient as a front-end dev. But it is going to take months. I assume you are saying that these companies are hiring based on expected performance at 1+ years. They don't expect the person who gets the job to be making major front end code changes the first month?
- pmiller2 13y ago
  How does one go about identifying these companies that are willing to invest in smart people who might not have experience in LibraryVersion 2.1.9 or something?
sbilstein 13y ago
I was full stack at my old job, so I do phone screens for front end engineers now. It's incredible how many people claim "front end" and fail at basic JS, HTML api, or page optimization questions yet do well at algo questions. I am far from an CSS expert but if we didn't ask questions like "how would you optimize the static content of the page?" I'm sure we would end up hiring OK general devs who actually don't know anything about front end.
mcintyre1994 13y ago
I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'm a student so anything about interviews interests me a lot. For the Bacon Number question, I'm struggling a bit to get my head around a good way to do it. My immediate idea is to derive a graph where nodes are actors and an edge between 2 actors means they've been in 1 or more films together. I believe the shortest path between them and Bacon could then be found by breadth-first search. It looks like that graph would be quite slow to derive though - my naive pseudocode being something like: for bucket in hashtable: for actor in bucket: if actor not in graph, add a node for actor for other_actor in bucket (up to actor): add an edge between other_actor and actor That looks pretty slow without deriving a running time, so I'm guessing there's some optimisation that can be made from the current structure of the hashtable. Could anybody give me a pointer in the right direction please?
- llimllib 13y ago
  A simple upgrade to your algorithm would be bidirectional search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_search This image from Norvig's AI may help explain it better than the wiki page: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~a159302/lesson3/fig03_17.gif http://www.massey.ac.nz/~a159302/lesson3/fig03_17.gif
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    That seems like an interesting alternative to BFS, thanks.
- lostdog 13y ago
  There's no need to construct the graph. The dictionary already is a graph.
  - mcintyre1994 13y ago
    I appreciate that, but I don't see a way to efficiently do a breadth first search or some similar search routine that will find the Bacon number on it. I mean, surely you need at some point to be able to follow edges from an actor - and that's really inefficient in this format?
necolas 13y ago
Hey. I work at Twitter. I think that at certain companies the "front-end" role is not as specialized as assumed, and you tend to interview for a specific team that has an opening, rather than for a generic position among a hoard of similar developers. Having said that, I'm surprised there was only one CSS question, and the suggestion to combine questions with front-end specific knowledge might be a good way to ease into the interview.
bredren 13y ago
My understanding is that this is type of 'shallow' technical interview in SF with notable companies is not limited to front-end. A good friend recently interviewed at multiple well known and respected internet companies for an Android position. This guy is perhaps a global authority on Android. Technical questions were of the computer science type, and did little to illustrate the substance of value the companies were actually trying to hire for. Rather than take the time to understand whether he really, really knew Android, they wanted to see if he could traverse nodes in a tree. Two companies even asked the exact same non-Android specific question.
davedx 13y ago
I interviewed for a long-term "Frontend engineer" role in June for a large cable company here in the Netherlands. I've been a full-stack developer for the past 3 years or so, and before that I was in game development, and before that still, I wrote enterprise middleware. My frontend experience going into this interview was almost entirely jQuery, with the exception of one 2 month freelance project where I had a crash course in AngularJS. I was asked a ton of technical frontend questions, and I was able to answer them at a conceptual level but not from experience. I got the job, and I think what was important was my broader experience as a programmer, not the answers to specific frontend questions. The thing is, real frontend programming of large JavaScript applications is a brand new field. There are lots of people with lots of jQuery experience (it's telling that this article deals with jQuery as an example of frontend development), but not so many with serious JavaScript programming experience outside of a library or framework. I think because of this, companies are just being realistic when they interview for frontend positions based on general programming knowledge and experience. Maybe in 5 years they will drill down more, as the pool of expert frontenders expands.
char 13y ago
Just wanted to share that I had a very similar experience interviewing as a front-end engineer last year, and had made many of the same assessments about the process as you have. It is interesting that the company I ended up at-- while they did ask some standard algorithm and 'how do you think' type questions-- there were also many questions probing my front-end skills, including some quick JS coding problems. The interview just felt SO different than anything else. Thanks for posting this!
_greim_ 13y ago
I believe the mindset behind this behavior is A) they take it for granted that you're proficient in your stated area of expertise, B) they're not necessarily proficient in your area of expertise, so wouldn't be able to assess your skills anyway, C) algorithm knowledge is hard to fake, so your false positive rate for hardcore engineers will be low, even if your false negative rate will be ridiculously high. Google's publicly available prep material reinforces this third point, even if they don't say it explicitly. They recommend books, point you toward places where you can learn the concepts, and tell you if you fail once, try again in a few months.
drhayes9 13y ago
I do lots of front-end work and have tended to do front-end phonescreens for the past few years. I'm a huge fan of Steve Yegge's five essential phone screen questions: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... Good breadth, no one gets bounced for not knowing a couple of the answers, great way to get a larger picture of what the candidate knows (or doesn't!). Designers-turned-JSers tend not to do so well on data structures and bits and bytes. After the five questions, I move to HTML/CSS questions: inline vs. block, what does float really do, the display property, valid values for display besides "none", visibility: hidden vs display: none, position, absolute vs. relative (with relative offset parent questions thrown in). For the JS portion, I ask scoping, closures, global object, the values of "this" based on calling context. I like front-end engineers who are also, y'know, engineers. I like working with people who I can say "that distributed system has performance characteristics akin to a hashtable" and they know what I mean.
mikeleeorg 13y ago
As a former front-end engineering manager that has screened, interviewed, and hired tons of developers for large corps and small startups, I hear this guy's frustration and have felt it myself. I've often stepped into interviews for other departments and teams that had no FE developers to give them a hand. At the same time, I've come across far too many developers who assume "front-end" only meant HTML, CSS, and jQuery. NOTE: Not JavaScript, but jQuery, which are very, VERY different things. The author does himself a disservice by citing a jQuery example instead of a general JavaScript one. I get how prevalent jQuery is, but if you can't describe some of the inner workings of JS to me, then I may weed you out. That's just my preference though; other hiring managers differ. In my particular cases, we needed FEs that knew JavaScript and server-side scripting languages - to the extent of being able to write some presentation-layer logic if necessary. So whenever I've coached technical hiring managers who have no experience with front-end development, I'd tell them to go right ahead and ask questions on general programming logic. Even if the candidate's verbal answer is incorrect, the thought process behind trying to answer it can be helpful. FYI, the type of phone screen questions I would ask are: + Why is a doctype significant? (HTML) + What is the box model? (CSS) + Describe the event model. (JavaScript) (You'd be surprised at how many purported front-end engineers get these wrong.) These were accompanied by general programming logic questions. They all designed to assess the developer's ability to communicate and explain, and not the developer's technical skill. For that, I looked at code samples and the results of a take-home code exercise. And the specificity and difficulty of the questions would depend on the stage of the interview and level of candidate's experience. The "What is the value of 'this' in a method?" question is a great one too.
- thekingshorses 13y ago
  This guy hired me based on my FE skills even though I didn't had any development experience. It was my first job as a FE engineer. I won't be able to get a job based on algorithm/standard CS interview questions.
mVChr 13y ago
I have been a front-end engineer for over a decade, and if I were hiring for a position a decade ago I would understand and agree with your points. However, with the breadth and depth of skills required for great front-end engineering today, I would feel very uncomfortable hiring someone who only had the arcane skills required to "get the job done" on the front-end. If hiring for a smaller company, I would be concerned about this person's ability to contribute to more than just the tasks in their silo. If hiring for a larger company, I would be concerned about this person's potential for future growth. Also, it's usually apparent from projects or employment history that someone can do what's required on the surface for front-end work, so why would I waste interview time going over details and minutiae in that area? I'd rather take the opportunity to find out if they're a solid engineer as well.
wanderr 13y ago
Note: I work for Grooveshark, which is in Gainesville, FL, about as far away from San Francisco as you can be in the continental US...so what I'm about to talk about might not be like what is going on over there at all. When we bring someone in for an interview, we generally already have a pretty good idea of their technical skill level. Part of the filtering process is asking to see their work, either code samples or a portfolio. For frontend engineers it is especially easy to see their work since you can load it up in the browser, inspect, interact with the console, etc. If we are impressed by their work, the interview is 90% making sure they are a good personality fit, 10% making sure the work we looked at was actually theirs. We probably end up asking slightly more frontend-specific questions than the author experienced, but probably not much. We find that this process generally works quite well, but a few people that we gave offers to did tell us they were surprised because they felt they had bombed the interview, assuming that since we didn't get into a lot of nitty gritty technical stuff or ask them to write code on a whiteboard, that we had already decided we weren't going to hire them.

160 points by d_j_s 13y ago

I'm a PHP/WordPress dev shipping product every single day, but I think I'd probably fail questions like these if I was asked in an interview setting. I don't really worry about functions like these until a need arises, and when it does (and I don't know how to do it), I learn until I do. This is an absurd way to recruit front-end talent and partially explains the so-called talent crunch.

hackinsack 13y ago
Nothing against you, as I don't know you or your work, but "shipping product" does not equal doing good work. People ship crappy, buggy code every day. Just because one "ships daily" doesn't mean that what they're shipping is worth anything or means they know what they're doing. I've seen people that have no clue how to write code copy and paste crap they find all over the internet into a file and ship it. It's a slow, buggy and ugly hack, but it shipped. It will come back days later as unexceptably bad by the customer. That's the purpose of these tests. To weed out the people that have no clue how to write proper software that deals with high loads, scalability and performance criticality.
- sigsergv 13y ago
  Software engineers make product, not code. I'd prefer talented developer with good practical experience in “releasing products” rather than an algo-geek who can only solve stupid hiring quizes. Slow buggy ugly WORKING RELEASED product is a much-much better than ideal clean and effective thing not yet ready for release for a few years in row.
  - hackinsack 13y ago
    Not saying I disagree with that, except for releasing slow buggy code. Why not accept either of those people? There are efficient ways, as described in the article, to interview for people that are great at releasing quality code in a productive time frame. I was simply pointing out that releasing code daily doesn't mean you know what you're doing. If you can't answer at least some of the questions that were in this article, I'd question your ability to write productive code. That's not to say that only questions like that should be a determining factor for ones ability to produce.
    - nhangen 13y ago
      You're right that shipping !== good code, but I wouldn't be able to keep shipping the same product if it weren't somewhat valuable to my customers. The point isn't that I'm a unicorn, but that good developers can exist outside of code challenges. People like me, that are self-taught and work super hard in order to improve our craft...we're not appreciated enough. Everyone wants a rockstar, forgetting that drummers and bass players add a lot of value.
- emddudley 13y ago
  You're writing as if most companies care about "proper" software. Most don't. They care about shipping.
- nhangen 13y ago
  Just want to mention also that knowing the answers to these questions does not mean that you'll write bug-free code. Bugs are a product of shipping, and occur regardless of talent or ability to answer said questions.

seivan 13y ago

I'm sorry you had to go through that bullshit. That generally sucks when you're interviewed by assholes who have no idea that the specific platform that you might work on requires. Consider most front-end engineers ALSO to be designers, and I'd suspect thats where I would drive the interview. I would wish the same treatment. Also lol that the interview questions are basically EITHER memorizing formulas and remembering why something was that way or trying to cram down a solution on the whiteboard in the little time you have. The latter is more admirable, but depends on the situation at hand. 5 minutes, white board, using your fingers as eraser.

Bahamut 13y ago
I think we are also seeing the rise of the frontend developer, where they spend most of their time on JS, with maybe some time in HTML and CSS - at least, that is what I do for work, although I am fully capable of excelling at CSS as well.
- greghinch 13y ago
  My career as a developer has been coming up through the role of front-end engineer, really from when that was first being defined as a separate role (2004-2005, around then). In hindsight now, I would never hire myself. Either you're a developer, in which case you should be able to traverse that stack (so for example JS as well as PHP/Ruby/Python) or you're a designer, and you can traverse that stack (so you design, implement your designs in HTML/CSS, maybe a little JS as necessary). But while there is crossover between the two domains, there isn't a separate role in the middle. Trying to fit development workflow around people who just do HTML/CSS/JS ends up creating too many bottlenecks, on both sides: "I'm waiting for designer A to deliver X" or "I'm waiting for back-end person B to deliver Y". When you just have people who work their whole stack, that bottleneck is removed.
  - Bahamut 13y ago
    It gets necessary at some point - it's not cheap finding highly skilled full stack developers, and they're not the most common beasts around. Everyone wants them, but they have their pick of jobs. It's far easier to hire for the positions separately, and if your company is in need of rapid expansion, I'd say almost necessary given the market. While I term myself as more of a frontend developer currently, I also know CSS pretty well (I sometimes fix bugs the UI team can't figure out), and I am currently transitioning to doing some backend work at my current job as well. All developers should strive to be full stack, and designers should strive to know code more, but realistically speaking, not everyone is there yet of course, so you have to focus on developing the talent or hiring it.

bjryan 13y ago

I am honestly a little shocked by this. I am a university student and this past semester I interviewed with around 10 companies in the Bay area, all of which were for Front-End engineering positions. I can only think of one company which did not give me any 'front end specific' questions. I was asked everything from hoisting and closures to explaining how Webkit works and various ways to improve page load time. Are you free to elaborate on what companies you spoke with?

philipwalton 13y ago
Maybe offline. I'm not interested in publicly calling out any companies. I mainly wanted to shed light on the process and my experience. I will say that when interviewing for previous jobs in the past (at smaller companies), I got asked a lot more front-end questions. Maybe it's just a big company problem.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  It's true on the business side as well. Small companies ask relevant questions because they have to - their survival depends on finding someone who can do the job. Big companies, even famous ones, have moved so far beyond their scrappy "gotta survive" days that they have become quite lost in their bureaucracy and arrogance.
csomar 13y ago
He interviewed at big co. and (I guess), you interviewed at startups. Maybe that's the difference?
- bjryan 13y ago
  I interviewed at both. The larger companies were more likely to give me 'programming challenges' or puzzles (usually small mockups) for me to do ahead of times while startups tended to be more conversational and, quite frankly, didn't ask as hard of questions.

ckorhonen 13y ago

This seems fairly typical, and I understand the rationale on both sides. In any kind of engineering role, not just front-end, having domain experience/expertise certainly helps you be more productive from the get go. In a previous company we hired developers with good CS chops but no iOS experience to build our iPhone app - they picked it up, but it took a couple of years and numerous rewrites to get an awesome product. Thats a huge opportunity cost. You'll end up with a better product right off the bat if you hire an expert, especially with technologies which have a ton of quirks and nuances. So why wouldn't you want to hire a front-end expert? In a lot of smaller companies flexibility can trump expertise - having an engineer who is smart and can work across the entire stack is essential in smaller teams. That doesn't mean they won't be primarily doing front-end development, but its helpful if they know their way around the back-end to some extent without hand-holding from other engineers. A good candidate needs to be smart enough to quickly pickup new tools and techniques, and it is important to determine this in the interview process.

mackey 13y ago
I was just thinking about the similarities in iOS development. I have worked on a project where the original authors weren't iOS developers but were very competent front end developers, and it wasn't pretty. It doesn't just affect the code, but also things like the build environment and documenation.

codingdave 13y ago

It could have been a sign that they trusted your front-end skill. If I know someone has a skill, I don't waste my time interviewing them to prove it. I try to figure out what else they can do, where they can grow, and how well they would fit in with the team. So I'd pose the question back to you -- did you provide them a portfolio or any code samples that would have made the front-end questions redundant?

danhoc01 13y ago
I was thinking along the same lines. I would be curious to see his resume, as the content could potentially influence the interviewer to ask certain types of questions.
philipwalton 13y ago
Yes, I provided a detailed resume as well as my Github account for all of these. The problem is it didn't seem like the individual interviewers had taken much time to actually look at what I'd done. If they had, then maybe I'd agree with you, but it seemed like many of them were just going through the motions. It seemed like they interview people all the time.
- majormajor 13y ago
  "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.

mgkimsal 13y ago

"I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning." False dichotomy. How about a smart person who knows a lot about X and is creative and logical? They do exist. I feel like many interviewers want to categorize someone in to one of those two categories from the outset - "this person already knows a lot about XYZ, therefore, I'd rather look for a smart person who doesn't know XYZ and teach them". Sounds crazy writing it out, but it's the impression I got years ago interviewing. It's also the impression I get from friends of mine who have interviewed in the more recent few months.

rhc2104 13y ago
It's more like, "we want smart people, so let's optimize our interview process to find smart people, and give everyone the same interview questions." The problem here is that firms tend to prefer giving "engineering interview problems" to everyone, and do not want to segment interview questions by position.
- kyrra 13y ago
  Because that takes a lot more time for the interviewers. For a growing tech company, they could have as many open reqs as they have engineers. Crafting questions for all of those positions takes a lot of time that most companies don't have time to do.
  - Bahamut 13y ago
    Ideally they should be having people in that area of expertise doing the interviewing of the candidate, since they have ready access to the domain specific information to ask relevant questions.
  - justinsteele 13y ago
    Hiring is pretty much the most important thing you do as a company.. if you can't spend an hour per position developing applicable questions for each position, you are setting yourself up for failure.

potench 13y ago

A coworker and I wrote a script that's been through a few iterations based on feedback and tailored to whatever company I'm hiring for. Based on the participants self-rating (1-10) you can ask increasingly more nuanced questions in each area of CSS, HTML, and JS. Here's the front-end interview script I use: https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119 https://gist.github.com/potench/e71e09c882628054c119 So far it seems to do a good job at promoting conversation and identifying thoughtful and talented FE developers.

nairteashop 13y ago
This is a good list. Can I ask you something though? I've always been curious about the value of questions like these (just to take a sample): > On a scale of 1-10, what is your comfort level developing with HTML, CSS & JavaScript? > How well do you think you work with other fellow developers? > Given a choice, would you rather work alone or in tandem with someone? What are the "correct" answers to these? Or more specifically, in your opinion what are the "wrong" answers? On the first, the problem I see is one of self-reporting. We have seen developers self-report a 9 on something, only for us to determine later based on the interview that they were more like a 5. We didn't put value on either of these numbers, because both were relative - the "9" was presumably relative to his previous job environment, and the "5" was relative to ours. (At another company the person could've been a "2", for example.) Fact is, it doesn't really matter - we were just looking to see if the person can add value, regardless of whether they were a 5 or a 10. On the latter two: we have had "loners" crank out incredible bits of code on their own, and "team people" do the same as part of a larger group. We have also seen people switch between the two "personality types" based on context - the specific project, their team mates for the project, and so on. So we prefer not to ask these types of questions as we don't seem to get any relevant information out of them, but perhaps we're missing something, and so I'm curious as to what your motivations are.

ktavera 13y ago

I've had similar experiences in the last month of interviews i've been through. I was asked how i'd design a secure backend API in asp.net, various algorithm questions, some basic javascript questions ("what is a closure?", "what does the var keyword do?", etc") and other very non-specific things. At the end of most of my interviews when they ask if I have any questions about the positions I tend to have to ask "Is this a Front end Developer position you just interviewed me for?" Not once have any of the interviewers been front-end devs, only SVP of Development or Director of Design or some other inflated title. I want to talk about problems i've had building Angular or Knockout apps or or cross-browser JS/CSS issues.

walshemj 13y ago
Interesting so I hope you said get ready to spend a fuckload of cash on state of the art secure key stores as this is the only way to properly build a secure back end.

cleverbaker 13y ago

Those are excellent suggestions in the "My Suggestions" section. Thanks for the article.

usingpond 13y ago

Similar in NYC. I remember an interview where I was asked to bit-shift in Javascript, for the sake of itself. I've also had good experiences though--I liked one where I had to build certain UI components and get my code evaluated in real-time.

lgieron 13y ago
Since it's just *2 (right shift) or /2 (left shift), I'm pretty sure they wanted to quickly test how are you with general programming knowledge.
- nanidin 13y ago
  In javascript, the number type is just number. To truly bit shift with this method, you'd need to convert the bitwise representation into a number, perform the given operation, handle the corner case of odd numbers when dividing, and the convert it back into some representation of bits. Trying to judge people with questions like this seems like a misguided endeavor. Yes, it's probably valuable to know that bitshifting is roughly equivalent to *2 and /2. But that's more like trivia - the chances you'll actually use that in real life is really low. I've had to work with people that think bitshifting is an appropriate optimization for division/multiplication by even numbers. I then have to explain overflows, underflows, and the fact that the compiler will compile it to shifts if appropriate anyway, so don't sacrifice readability in the name of micro-optimization.

mikeya 13y ago

You'd hope that before they bring you in they know that you know basic front end stuff. To be honest most front end tech is simply memorization of standards and idiosyncrasies between browsers. Anyone can go through and figure this stuff out via a simple google search. On the other hand taking say data from a Ajax call and sorting it or filtering it with custom logic takes some creative problem solving to do it gracefully. Interviewees always forget to figure out why they interviewer and company is asking these questions or requiring particular knowledge. Next time just ask them!

meritt 13y ago

You were interviewed by back-end engineers. That's what they knew. My question is why didn't you leave the interview upon seeing it was a waste of time?

philipwalton 13y ago
To be honest, I was actually having a good time. I'm one of the crazy people who likes interviewing. I think it's kind of thrilling. Also, they flew me up there, so what was I gonna do?
dylandrop 13y ago
Because he needs a job?
rhizome 13y ago
My experience is that interviews only appear to be wastes of time in hindsight. They are not zero-sum, and due to the nature of the beast there is no way to figure out that you're scoring an "F" rather than a "B+".

camus2 13y ago

A bit off topic,but is there a website that gather common computer science interview questions with solutions ? thanks.

millerm 13y ago
I saw this on Reddit yesterday. http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/ http://www.grokit.ca/spc/computer_science_review/ So, perhaps this can get you started. I plan on getting a copy of: http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/098478280X http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-... too.
9999 13y ago
http://codingforinterviews.com http://codingforinterviews.com http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.html http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.htm...

vikas5678 13y ago

I have friends who have politely refused to answer or indulge the interviewer in the algorithm questions labyrinth. As someone being interviewed, you should atleast try to divert the interview toward your strengths. On the flip-side, if a company is interviewing you for a front-end position and not asking enough DOM, CSS questions, they're doing it wrong.

philipwalton 13y ago

Related, I just found out that Darcy Clarke put this list together of good front-end interview questions. I would have included it in the article if I'd known about it ahead of time. https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questions https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview...

krsunny 13y ago
"Whats your favorite feature of internet explorer" I think I see what she did there..
- rimantas 13y ago
  Well, you can play around and talk about good things which wer e born in IE first: XMLHTTPRequest, .innerHTML, etc.
- whileonebegin 13y ago
  The ability to emulate different versions of IE. Of course, the only reason this is necessary is because of the many breaking changes that the different versions created.
- davedx 13y ago
  "I can book my holidays and put my hours in on the company's intranet"? :D
jianshen 13y ago
Great list! I remember coming across this other "Learn Front-end" list: https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks on HN a little while ago and thought it was a great example of just how scattered Web-FE education still is. Everyone has their own favorite "book" and there's no K&R that you just pick up and read.

sergiotapia 13y ago

Concerning that they ask you computer science questions when you will be working on the front end. What if you were to ask CSS and Javascript questions to a DBA? Do you see how absolutely ridiculous that sounds?

Jgrubb 13y ago
More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficiently solve problems I wouldn't have been able to solve a year ago. I have had the exact same experience with the author of the article regarding a total absence of actual front-end related questions, though. Not sure how to feel about not getting those gigs.
- krsunny 13y ago
  Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?
  - sergiotapia 13y ago
    His silence is highly amusing to me. :)
    - Jgrubb 13y ago
      Your condescension is highly distasteful to me.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - krsunny 13y ago
        Who was he talking about? Me? If so, I upvoted the reply, what more do I need to do?

hawkharris 13y ago

One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the author, I'm much more drawn toward the CS-related tasks of the job such as writing JavaScript. To be clear, I have an enormous amount of respect for people who enjoy the design aspects. Writing CSS, using Photoshop, etc., requires a lot of skill. My point is simply that there is a divide among those front-end developers who are drawn toward programming and those who are drawn toward layout and design. 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. This might make the expectations of a front-end development position much clearer, allowing for a simpler interview process.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> 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?
- _random_ 13y ago
  > What more do you think is needed? Hiring managers knowing the difference...
- eliah-lakhin 13y ago

steven777400 13y ago

We were hiring a non-senior full-stack developer recently and I noticed there were no "frontend" questions on the list, so I added what I thought would be a question that any developer with frontend experience could answer, and would also pave the way for some more interested discussions for an advanced candidate. The question was something to the effect of "In JavaScript, what is the value of 'this' in a method?" I would have accepted an answer as simple as "The value of 'this' depends on how the method is called" or even "The value of 'this' confuses me because it's often not what I expect." It was a disaster. We may as well not have asked the question at all. Nobody seemed to even be aware of anything about it.

matwood 13y ago
I don't even write JS much and I know 'this' is a trap question.
- byroot 13y ago
  It's not a trap. It's just required knowledge. Saying you're a Javascript developer without understanding the behaviour of `this`, is like saying you're a C developer without understanding what a pointer is.
byroot 13y ago
I always include something around `this` behaviour in my interviews if the position is Javascript related. You cannot possibly have a decent experience in JS without have been bit by this. And I'm always amazed by the amount of developers that just do not understand how it works, and bind every possible methods.
- ac2u 13y ago
  Likewise, I ask it also. When someone has spent the last 3 years as a "JavaScript developer" and doesn't have a basic grasp of context in JS, them it's a red flag.
- badman_ting 13y ago

michaelochurch 13y ago

I'm almost entirely backend, but I can relate to the travails of interviewing in the Bay Area and dealing with unprepared interviewers. The engineers were like anywhere else-- and a fair proportion of them were very good-- but there are just a lot of arrogant people in the managerial ranks of the Valley. After you get an offer and you get to the negotiation phase, most Bay Area firms try to lowball you because-- even if you're from an objectively better place like NYC or Austin-- obviously everyone wants the privilege of working in California. (Expensive housing even in the suburbs, nightmarish traffic, and the most aggressive homeless population in the U.S. Where do I sign up?) Then there was one silly game company (which, presumably unrelatedly, is now being sued) that wanted me to sign a full NDA just to do a coding test. Not an NDA over the material of the test (which I would have signed) but one that included a one-year non-solicit covering all employees of that firm. I could be generalizing negative experiences, but it seems to be like they didn't prepare for your interview (recognizing that you were a front-end engineer) because of that obnoxious (and completely false) assumption that, if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area. Obviously they had enough interest to take time out of their day, but not enough to prepare. In New York, there are a lot of startups that are of low quality; but the arrogance of Silicon Valley is unparalleled. Wall Street's reputation would have you expecting it to be worse but, by and large, it's not.

thecage411 13y ago
I haven't really seen the assumption that "if you were any good, you'd already be in the Bay Area." I have seen sort of the opposite, though -- if you are experienced, you likely have a family and there is no way in hell you are moving to the Bay Area.

badman_ting 13y ago

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.

_random_ 13y ago
Times when Rails development was considered an out-of-box thinking have clearly passed...
- badman_ting 13y ago
  Yep, just another orthodoxy now, for some.

ritchiea 13y ago

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.

ktavera 13y ago

As a follow-up to my earlier comment, i'm doing a phone interview right now and the first interviewer started off with questions about how IIS internals worked and some obscure C# questions. I immediately asked him "Is this a front-end position or not? I know C# and .net MVC but i'm focusing my career on Angular" his reply "I honestly don't know, they just told me to call you and ask you a series of questions on advanced C# development" Job posting title "Senior Frontend Developer with AngularJS"

_random_ 13y ago
It seems that JS MVC frameworks change every year, maybe they decided that asking questions on the flavour-of-the-month is not an indicator? Would expect some JS questions though.
- ktavera 13y ago
  As a bonus, finally got to talk to the hiring manager a second ago and he informed me that there would be NO javascript or front end development in this role, just converting Crystal Reports into some other obscure reporting system. So I ended the call promptly with a "Thank you for your time and good bye"

Osiris 13y ago

Are algorithm questions really that useful when looking for a candidate? I find myself being really nervous about applying to other jobs because I'm not formally trained in CS. My job and side projects are mostly web sites that require knowledge about how to architecture software but I very rarely write complex algorithms. If something comes up where I need to optimize something I can usually spend some time Googling for some insights on how to improve it, but it's been 15+ years since I've written a sort algo. The idea of being forced to come up to a solution to an unknown problem on the spot makes me feel inadequate.

millerm 13y ago
I'm a full stack developer. Currently focusing on iOS. Interview questions should really depend on the expectations of the type of software being developed. I've been to a couple interviews lately and this has been the first time (in my career) that I have been tested (with time constraints too, mind you). I was either pointed to a whiteboard, or sat in a room with nothing but a couple sheets of blank (unruled) paper, a non-erasable pen, and a list of ~10 algorithms questions with a few to be implemented and their running time, and memory footprint to be explained. I was not prepared, at all. I have been developing software for about 17 years. Do you have any idea how many times in my career I have been asked to write a heap sort, a trie, or create a power set? Never. So, I had forgotten some of the specifics of how to implement them. Let alone on paper. A quick note... My handwriting is atrocious. I'm 41 and I am extremely embarrassed as to how bad it is. I can play classical guitar, but I screw up everything I write or attempt to draw. I thought it was a dyslexia thing or something, but I don't seem to have enough of the symptoms for that. That's pretty much why I liked using a computer when I was younger; I could fix my mistakes. So, needless to say, when I am asked to write stuff down I kind of freak out. Anyway, there is a reason I have reference materials and the Internet. If I don't remember the specifics of something, I go look it up. I know what a lot of data structures and algorithms are, but I just don't bother memorizing all their specifics. I know what to look for. I read the description and can decide what the best thing to do is. Sure, I remember the basics of the major algorithms and data structures, and some of their their Big O characteristics. Implementing these isn't really what I do on just about any given day. So, what have I been doing about it? I've been spending the last couple weeks going back over the "Algorithms" book (http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/) and grabbed all the videos from the Coursera courses on the same book/topic. I admit it's all my fault. I have written a lot of very successful applications over my career. These have fulfilled requirements for power generation, real estate, healthcare, search engine, and marketing companies. Using higher level abstractions (like using an OO language) with industry tested APIs for sorting, lists, trees etc.. kind of makes you push that stuff to the side because for 95% of the development, that kind of low level detail is just not necessary. Now, of course, this really depends also on what type of development you do. Sure, if you are writing a lot of C code, you may need to manually write these structures. Or, if you are writing low level code (game event loops, collision detection, file system stuff, you know) that needs to run as optimally as possible, sure. A lot of us write applications that take in data, and spew it back out. Heck, a lot of developers are forced to write just a hell of a lot of SQL queries and they'll never see a data structure beyond a class file, an array list, and a result set. Again, I am attempting to better myself now. I don't know how long it will be before I can answer some of the more crazy questions I have been asked though. TL;DR I was not prepared, at all.

joeblau 13y ago

Great writeup. This is pretty much the same experience that I had when I moved to San Francisco. I got a lot of "college memorization" questions. Basically, you could read a book, memorize the answer and come up with it. I was also interviewed by some young guys out of Stanford who asked me a question that they probably spent a few weeks in class working on that I had 45 minutes to figure out. When I look at the interview process, it seems more like a battle than an actual interview, but it is engineers we are dealing with. When I do interviews, I want to know that you can program, but I care more about whether or not I can work with you.

fistofjohnwayne 13y ago

I think these problems stem from the job posting. Like the author, I've come to love interviewing and I've conducted a good deal of interviews myself. I've noticed that a job titled "front-end developer" with a poor description casts too wide a net and wastes everyone's time. If I see that you mentioned design experience and Backbone in your job posting and then you quiz me on Rails and database queries I'm going to feel like I'm attending amateur hour. However, if you state that data structures, algorithms and all that other great CS stuff is fair game in the job posting or the follow-up emails – then go ahead. Don't envy the front-end developer. At this point we have to be prepared for anything.

NDizzle 13y ago

SF Tech Interviews. By recent college grads FOR recent college grads.

ra3 13y ago

>"A correct answer to this will demonstrate both an understanding of basic computer science principles as well as a deeper knowledge of what jQuery is doing behind the scenes." How does the referenced jquery statement represent basic CS principles? OOP? Definitely not that.

whatevsmate 13y ago
The referenced jQuery statement gives the candidate a chance to speak on: selector complexity (id look ups vs traversing to find descendant elements), first-class functions (passing a function reference to the .on() method), regular expressions (to add class names to an existing class attribute in older browsers that don't have .classList property on elements). There are probably other things but those are just a few off the top of my head.

proksoup 13y ago

The two CSS questions I ask (but skip depending portfolio quality): 1) Make these two discs sit next to eCh other. What other ways you could do that? Why each way bad/good for what? 2) center this. Other ways? Bad/good about each?

edw519 13y ago

I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning. This! That one sentence pretty much addressed all of your questions and concerns. So instead on hacking the apparent process, read that sentence again and get it. This is pretty much an absolute truth in almost any industry for almost any skill. It's especially true in tech because: - "X" will be different in 2 years anyway. - "X" will be VERY different in 4 years. - Well funded companies want long-term talent. - Start-ups seeking their place want long-term talent. - Companies with long-term vision want long-term talent. - A jack of all trades is usually better than a master of one. - If it's so complicated to learn, it's too complicated to use.

rondon 13y ago
I've done very little HTML,CSS but I feel confident that I could become proficient as a front-end dev. But it is going to take months. I assume you are saying that these companies are hiring based on expected performance at 1+ years. They don't expect the person who gets the job to be making major front end code changes the first month?
pmiller2 13y ago
How does one go about identifying these companies that are willing to invest in smart people who might not have experience in LibraryVersion 2.1.9 or something?

sbilstein 13y ago

I was full stack at my old job, so I do phone screens for front end engineers now. It's incredible how many people claim "front end" and fail at basic JS, HTML api, or page optimization questions yet do well at algo questions. I am far from an CSS expert but if we didn't ask questions like "how would you optimize the static content of the page?" I'm sure we would end up hiring OK general devs who actually don't know anything about front end.

mcintyre1994 13y ago

I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'm a student so anything about interviews interests me a lot. For the Bacon Number question, I'm struggling a bit to get my head around a good way to do it. My immediate idea is to derive a graph where nodes are actors and an edge between 2 actors means they've been in 1 or more films together. I believe the shortest path between them and Bacon could then be found by breadth-first search. It looks like that graph would be quite slow to derive though - my naive pseudocode being something like: for bucket in hashtable: for actor in bucket: if actor not in graph, add a node for actor for other_actor in bucket (up to actor): add an edge between other_actor and actor That looks pretty slow without deriving a running time, so I'm guessing there's some optimisation that can be made from the current structure of the hashtable. Could anybody give me a pointer in the right direction please?

llimllib 13y ago
A simple upgrade to your algorithm would be bidirectional search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_search This image from Norvig's AI may help explain it better than the wiki page: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~a159302/lesson3/fig03_17.gif http://www.massey.ac.nz/~a159302/lesson3/fig03_17.gif
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  That seems like an interesting alternative to BFS, thanks.
lostdog 13y ago
There's no need to construct the graph. The dictionary already is a graph.
- mcintyre1994 13y ago
  I appreciate that, but I don't see a way to efficiently do a breadth first search or some similar search routine that will find the Bacon number on it. I mean, surely you need at some point to be able to follow edges from an actor - and that's really inefficient in this format?

necolas 13y ago

Hey. I work at Twitter. I think that at certain companies the "front-end" role is not as specialized as assumed, and you tend to interview for a specific team that has an opening, rather than for a generic position among a hoard of similar developers. Having said that, I'm surprised there was only one CSS question, and the suggestion to combine questions with front-end specific knowledge might be a good way to ease into the interview.

bredren 13y ago

My understanding is that this is type of 'shallow' technical interview in SF with notable companies is not limited to front-end. A good friend recently interviewed at multiple well known and respected internet companies for an Android position. This guy is perhaps a global authority on Android. Technical questions were of the computer science type, and did little to illustrate the substance of value the companies were actually trying to hire for. Rather than take the time to understand whether he really, really knew Android, they wanted to see if he could traverse nodes in a tree. Two companies even asked the exact same non-Android specific question.

davedx 13y ago

I interviewed for a long-term "Frontend engineer" role in June for a large cable company here in the Netherlands. I've been a full-stack developer for the past 3 years or so, and before that I was in game development, and before that still, I wrote enterprise middleware. My frontend experience going into this interview was almost entirely jQuery, with the exception of one 2 month freelance project where I had a crash course in AngularJS. I was asked a ton of technical frontend questions, and I was able to answer them at a conceptual level but not from experience. I got the job, and I think what was important was my broader experience as a programmer, not the answers to specific frontend questions. The thing is, real frontend programming of large JavaScript applications is a brand new field. There are lots of people with lots of jQuery experience (it's telling that this article deals with jQuery as an example of frontend development), but not so many with serious JavaScript programming experience outside of a library or framework. I think because of this, companies are just being realistic when they interview for frontend positions based on general programming knowledge and experience. Maybe in 5 years they will drill down more, as the pool of expert frontenders expands.

char 13y ago

Just wanted to share that I had a very similar experience interviewing as a front-end engineer last year, and had made many of the same assessments about the process as you have. It is interesting that the company I ended up at-- while they did ask some standard algorithm and 'how do you think' type questions-- there were also many questions probing my front-end skills, including some quick JS coding problems. The interview just felt SO different than anything else. Thanks for posting this!

_greim_ 13y ago

I believe the mindset behind this behavior is A) they take it for granted that you're proficient in your stated area of expertise, B) they're not necessarily proficient in your area of expertise, so wouldn't be able to assess your skills anyway, C) algorithm knowledge is hard to fake, so your false positive rate for hardcore engineers will be low, even if your false negative rate will be ridiculously high. Google's publicly available prep material reinforces this third point, even if they don't say it explicitly. They recommend books, point you toward places where you can learn the concepts, and tell you if you fail once, try again in a few months.

drhayes9 13y ago

I do lots of front-end work and have tended to do front-end phonescreens for the past few years. I'm a huge fan of Steve Yegge's five essential phone screen questions: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-pho... Good breadth, no one gets bounced for not knowing a couple of the answers, great way to get a larger picture of what the candidate knows (or doesn't!). Designers-turned-JSers tend not to do so well on data structures and bits and bytes. After the five questions, I move to HTML/CSS questions: inline vs. block, what does float really do, the display property, valid values for display besides "none", visibility: hidden vs display: none, position, absolute vs. relative (with relative offset parent questions thrown in). For the JS portion, I ask scoping, closures, global object, the values of "this" based on calling context. I like front-end engineers who are also, y'know, engineers. I like working with people who I can say "that distributed system has performance characteristics akin to a hashtable" and they know what I mean.

mikeleeorg 13y ago

As a former front-end engineering manager that has screened, interviewed, and hired tons of developers for large corps and small startups, I hear this guy's frustration and have felt it myself. I've often stepped into interviews for other departments and teams that had no FE developers to give them a hand. At the same time, I've come across far too many developers who assume "front-end" only meant HTML, CSS, and jQuery. NOTE: Not JavaScript, but jQuery, which are very, VERY different things. The author does himself a disservice by citing a jQuery example instead of a general JavaScript one. I get how prevalent jQuery is, but if you can't describe some of the inner workings of JS to me, then I may weed you out. That's just my preference though; other hiring managers differ. In my particular cases, we needed FEs that knew JavaScript and server-side scripting languages - to the extent of being able to write some presentation-layer logic if necessary. So whenever I've coached technical hiring managers who have no experience with front-end development, I'd tell them to go right ahead and ask questions on general programming logic. Even if the candidate's verbal answer is incorrect, the thought process behind trying to answer it can be helpful. FYI, the type of phone screen questions I would ask are: + Why is a doctype significant? (HTML) + What is the box model? (CSS) + Describe the event model. (JavaScript) (You'd be surprised at how many purported front-end engineers get these wrong.) These were accompanied by general programming logic questions. They all designed to assess the developer's ability to communicate and explain, and not the developer's technical skill. For that, I looked at code samples and the results of a take-home code exercise. And the specificity and difficulty of the questions would depend on the stage of the interview and level of candidate's experience. The "What is the value of 'this' in a method?" question is a great one too.

thekingshorses 13y ago
This guy hired me based on my FE skills even though I didn't had any development experience. It was my first job as a FE engineer. I won't be able to get a job based on algorithm/standard CS interview questions.

mVChr 13y ago

I have been a front-end engineer for over a decade, and if I were hiring for a position a decade ago I would understand and agree with your points. However, with the breadth and depth of skills required for great front-end engineering today, I would feel very uncomfortable hiring someone who only had the arcane skills required to "get the job done" on the front-end. If hiring for a smaller company, I would be concerned about this person's ability to contribute to more than just the tasks in their silo. If hiring for a larger company, I would be concerned about this person's potential for future growth. Also, it's usually apparent from projects or employment history that someone can do what's required on the surface for front-end work, so why would I waste interview time going over details and minutiae in that area? I'd rather take the opportunity to find out if they're a solid engineer as well.

wanderr 13y ago

Note: I work for Grooveshark, which is in Gainesville, FL, about as far away from San Francisco as you can be in the continental US...so what I'm about to talk about might not be like what is going on over there at all. When we bring someone in for an interview, we generally already have a pretty good idea of their technical skill level. Part of the filtering process is asking to see their work, either code samples or a portfolio. For frontend engineers it is especially easy to see their work since you can load it up in the browser, inspect, interact with the console, etc. If we are impressed by their work, the interview is 90% making sure they are a good personality fit, 10% making sure the work we looked at was actually theirs. We probably end up asking slightly more frontend-specific questions than the author experienced, but probably not much. We find that this process generally works quite well, but a few people that we gave offers to did tell us they were surprised because they felt they had bombed the interview, assuming that since we didn't get into a lot of nitty gritty technical stuff or ask them to write code on a whiteboard, that we had already decided we weren't going to hire them.