
Front End Interview Handbook - yangshun
https://yangshun.github.io/front-end-interview-handbook/
======
grapheq
This looks like a great checklist when you're implementing a multi-lingual
site for example. But for a developer interview, this is just terrible.

This is not the way to find out if someone can and has experience to build
complex shit that is easy to manage(also by others). This whole assessment
model is totally deprecated (if it ever worked at all).

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_the_inflator
One thing I really miss out here: questions around behavior, especially
motivation.

I conducted more than 200+ interviews as a department lead and for me the
single most important skill in an ever changing frontend landscape is
enthusiasm and motivation.

How do you keep up with the current trends? Name some? Ain't it tough to learn
new stuff all the time? How do you deal with fatigue in this regard?

What blogs/authoers do you follow? Do you work on Open Source or private
projects in your spare time? What is the current version of ECMA, Framework
etc. and when does the next come out? Name 3 of the last things you learned
this year as a developer.

These questions really make enthusiasts shine. If I had to choose motivation
over knowledge, I would always opt for highly enthusiastic people over
knowledge people. Former will easily surpass the later.

Besides that I like this idea. Very good!

~~~
scarface74
No I’m not going to eat sleep and breathe development. It’s a job to me. I’m
not going to work 40 hours a week in front of a screen and then come home and
“contribute to open source.”

I will read blogs and listen to podcasts for whatever area that I choose to
specialize, but I’m not going to spend time actually investigating it outside
of work.

If you as an employer deem it important for your employees to keep up with the
latest trends and contribute to open source, allocate some time during the
day.

But, I guess this is also the reason I abandoned the clusterf%%% of modern
front end development almost 10 years ago and just try to stay somewhat
current with JS.

~~~
varrock
I definitely agree with this sentiment. However, if there is any development
job where enthusiasm would be of a benefit, I would think the front end is a
good candidate. I imagine it also depends on the culture of the workplace,
too. Some may favor the "trends" that are associated with the web, while
others may just want somebody as you describe.

I do not hire developers, but I can imagine that with the lower barrier to
entry for front end jobs in 2020, companies have a difficult time
differentiating all the new grads/bootcampers/self taught developers. It's
almost teetering towards the same conversation as the leetcode problem --
merely finding a way to cut the pool of candidates given the vast amount to
begin with.

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29athrowaway
Perhaps you can add something about ARIA tags (accessibility).

Much of the web could improve in terms of accessibility.

~~~
blitmap
A subject not covered nearly enough!

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

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

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

~~~
makapuf
Can you write a quick list of missing concepts ?

~~~
wildrhythms
I interview for front-end at a big company (actually a different title, but
effectively front-end engineers) and we explicitly do not ask trivia
questions, which is what this guide focuses on. I might ask warm-up questions
like "a customer says they click a button on the page and nothing happens, how
do you investigate?" and that's it. The entire rest of the interview (1hr) is
spent on a coding problem where we both walk through and discuss solutions,
and I let them code and we talk about their code.

I truly believe that experienced engineers can learn 1000x more about
someone's skillset in the first 5 minutes of them coding than any amount of
trivia questions.

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

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

~~~
lhnz
Are you talking about building a 90s-style website or something like Figma?

~~~
readme
I wish people would _only_ build 90's style sites.

The way things are going is bad, here are some example sites that I find
particularly difficult to use:

    
    
        - new reddit (old reddit is much, much better)
        - parley (yes, the "free speech" twitter) has a terrible UI. it takes like a year to post a tweet and you wait like 30 seconds for some dynamic spinning progress dialog to go away
    

The web was not invented as an application development platform. I think we
have gone too far with web applications. Good web apps are simple and have low
complexity. Once you start trying to make it really "modern" and fancy you're
shooting yourself in the foot because of all the browser quirks. The more you
use heavyweight frameworks, the more complex and crufty your work becomes.

With that said I do see the appeal because there aren't many good desktop UI
frameworks either. I've worked with Qt enough to know it's plenty frustrating.
On the other hand, if it's so easy to make a portable web app, why do we have
things like Electron that ship a _browser_ with your web-app, aside from
native experience? Wait, did I dare say: native experience, is valuable?

We are well past peak web app, we are even past peak mobile app. What even
makes an app, an app? Is it that it's tailored to a smaller purpose than more
general applications? Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably
not. Is it good software, yes. Is Vim an app? I don't think I'd call it that.
How about 'cat'? Nah... Apps are tailored to a specific business purpose
rather than a more general use case.

Apps are a fad, but good software tools are not a fad. Build good tools, don't
build apps (unless you're paying the bills)

~~~
lhnz

      > Would you call Microsoft Visual Studio an app? Probably not.
    

Yes. Visual Studio Code is a good example of a high-quality web app built by
front-end developers.

'App' is a shortening of 'Application' popularised by iOS.

The state of the art in UI Engineering, is everything that used to be done in
C++, but on the web/cross-platform using a mixture of JavaScript and
WebAssembly.

Anyway, my point is that you are shitting on front-end development, yet there
are front-end engineers out there developing high-quality software, and it is
difficult: it requires a lot more ability than just copy-pasting from W3
Schools.

