09 3 / 2011
Lessons from Front-end Dev Interviews
I recently got an email asking for a post on the lessons learned from my recent interviews. You ask and you shall receive…
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A few weeks back I was in the hunt from a Front-end Developer job at Zappos. There were three rounds that I went through before being sent the dreaded rejection email.
First Round was a phone screen with the recruiter. Basically answer questions about my personality, and a few simple “What is HTML” & “What is CSS” questions.
Second Round was with 4 or 5 engineers and, as I’ve only been seriously coding a for a little over 7 or 8 months, I had no clue what to expect. It turned out not to be that bad- just a ton of more specific questions. “What is a float?” “What is the difference between a span and a DIV?”
Third Round was a coding challenge. I had 2.5-3 hrs to build a site they emailed me. The JS was implied by the design. All in all, this too wasn’t hard. I got 90% through after 3 hrs, and could have definitely completed it with 30 more minutes.
A few days after I submitted my code, there was another phone interview to review my work & the decisions I had made. It was after this round I was rejected.
Overall thoughts
I think if you read New Rider books (Designing with Web Standards, Developing with Web Standards, Handcrafted CSS, etc..) you will come away with a great understanding of front-end development (at least HTML & CSS).
The reason I think I was rejected was my lack of JS experience. I know how to mess with jQuery and thats really it. I’m guessing this is one simple giveaway on how experienced a front-end dev is. Just throw a JS problem at them, and see how they solve it.
To strengthen my JS skills, a few friends recommended 2 books I should check out:
All in all the experience wasn’t that bad. With a little more experience and JS knowledge, I think I would have done much better. In terms of a career, if Housefed doesn’t pan out, I’ll definitely look for front-end jobs as I think that is more my cup of tea than the backend.
