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 que

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.