Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview?

Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by andrewstuart on Sunday August 14, 2016 @06:06PM (#12287566)

Most modern production quality software systems there days are implementing fibonacci algorithms as part of their core business rules, controlled via a red/black tree. Usually it's held together by a fizzbuzz architecture so as a minimum you should be able to whiteboard fizzbuzz. You should understand all these things well, and really if you are doing modern software development these things hould be day to day tasks anyway so they should be top of mind.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by Rapzid on Monday August 15, 2016 @12:31AM (#12288644)

Ah interviews; when you realize all your programs have been opening all the files they need to for months and you can't remember the exact syntax for opening files in any of the half-dozen+ languages you've written production code in.. :D

Fizz/buzz, graph traversal, and etc actually come much more easily for me haha.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by isuckatcoding on Sunday August 14, 2016 @10:27PM (#12288295)

I know you've written it as satire but this is so real for me. The struggle is real.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by cmenge on Monday August 15, 2016 @07:12AM (#12289648)

I agree that it's far from what is needed in everyday tasks, but in defense of that process: if you are unable to implement fizzbuzz, Fibonacci numbers, etc., I am almost sure you can't understand react sagas or dependency injection properly. Mixed with more open-ended questions (why was React built? how does it compare to Angular? What's a generator function?), I believe this isn't the worst type of interview.

See the other side: a significant number of applicants can't implement fizzbuzz, Fibonacci sequences or anything, but ask for ridiculous salaries and their portfolios appear to be mostly borrowed plumes. We need a process that isn't too time-consuming to id the chaff, allowing for false negatives (people who are good at Fibonacci numbers and interview questions, but not much else), but keeping the false positives low (I explain the Fibonacci sequence first so it doesn't become a math riddle rather than a programming task).

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by hifumi on Monday August 15, 2016 @10:29AM (#12290637)

> their portfolios appear to be mostly borrowed plumes.

I don't understand this phrase. What do you mean by borrowed plumes?

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by jimcsharp on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @07:03AM (#12296615)

When you aren't being forthright with the position you held on a development team. If you were a late onboard to a project and spent your time firefighting bug reports, you could perhaps lend cachet to your resume by omitting the relatively minor role you had in the project. Then you'd be borrowing the "plume in your cap" from your team, who deserves more of the credit.

edit: this is my best-fit guess. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by masharp on Sunday August 14, 2016 @07:55PM (#12287876)

You had me there for a split second.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by majewsky on Monday August 15, 2016 @04:18AM (#12289264)

Honest question: People always joke about this, but is it really so widespread? I only had one job interview in my life until now, and that did not have any tech questions because my CV and open-source portfolio made it reasonably clear that I can, in fact, write working programs.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by pjmlp on Monday August 15, 2016 @04:43AM (#12289324)

In Europe, it is mostly the cool startups that think they are in Silicon Valley that ask for fizzbuzz, tree balancing algorithms, optimization algorithms for HD access and such.

Most business do ask for technical questions, but more like how do the UML diagram of some architecture, how to write SQL queries, implement some code to make their unit tests green, describe what is virtual method dispatch and so on.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by stevenwiles on Monday August 15, 2016 @03:14PM (#12292699)

All of this advice is especially relevant to a Front End Developer role. You'll want to go into this thing having a solid grasp of Big-O notation runtime efficiency of your favorite UI algorithms.

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Re:Ask HN: How to prepare for a Front-end Developer interview? by Aqueous on Sunday August 14, 2016 @08:41PM (#12287978)

best answer ever.

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