The 3 Types of Interviews You Will Encounter as a Front End Developer
Brian Jenney
Software Engineer - I work with career changers who want to switch into tech
Interviews are weird. You likely do them in spurts every few years and if you’re not practicing in between these high stakes periods, you don’t really know what to expect. They can be stressful, completely unrelated to the type of work you do on a daily basis and leave you doubting yourself. Many people would rather stay in a less than desirable company for lower pay than subject themselves to the interview circuit.
More often than not, the fear of interviewing stems from a lack of knowledge and preparedness. If you know what to study and what to expect, it can make the interview feel a lot less like a terrible game of Jeopardy. After going through too many interviews to count, here are the 3 most common formats I’ve encountered:
The Game of Trivia
Who:?Non-tech companies, large companies, older companies
What:?The interviewer will go through a list of questions related to the primary programming language they use at work. The more obscure the questions, the more you should question whether you want to work here or not. For front-end focused roles, you should expect to answer questions about the event-loop, closure, ES6 and?this?.
How to Study:?Read MDN docs around Javascript and be prepared to answer the most common JS questions like the difference between?let?and?const?or?bind, call, apply?. Refresh yourself on browser APIs and scope and don’t forget?closure?!
The LeetCode-Style Interview
Who:?Tech companies, FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies, startups who think they WILL be FAANG adjacent ??
What:?This is by far the interview that most developers will prepare for, although I’d argue the majority of companies will not ask you these types of questions ?? ♀. Do I even really need to explain what happens here? A question ripped directly from LeetCode or a very similar one is given to you with a time limit. You ask the interviewer/s some questions and dive into writing code.
How to Study:?These questions typically center around data structures and common algorithms. Study graph/tree traversal, string manipulation, sorting/searching algorithms, and recursion. You’re less likely to see questions that involve linked-lists in my experience.
Build a UI Component/Extend Functionality
Who:?FAANG, startups, and non-tech companies
What:?This is the interview you are most likely to encounter and there seems to be an industry trend towards these interviews as of late (likely because companies are starting to see diminishing returns on the LeetCode style interview). I’ve done this interview about a dozen times: build a?React component that fetches some data asynchronously and displays it in a visually pleasing way.
A variation of this interview is to give a candidate a component that has some bugs that need fixing. More often, I’m seeing unit testing as part of these interviews.
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How to Study: I’ve had the best luck on these interviews by doing side projects using ReactJS. If you work as a front-end developer, you hopefully get enough practice in your day to day work but I would suggest familiarizing yourself with CSS animations, event listeners and?window.fetch?since an interviewer may not allow you to use a 3rd party library for HTTP requests ??.
Not so Honorable Mentions
These interviews are common enough but just don’t appear with the same frequency as the ones I’ve mentioned above.
The Take Home Project
Who:?Small companies, startups, junior positions
What:?Build us something for free! The company gives you a prompt to build a small app. You waste your weekend for free and then go onsite to do 1 of the 3 aforementioned interviews.
How to Study:?Don’t. Just don’t. But if you must... write some unit tests to stand out.
System-ish Design
Who:?Small companies, startups, FAANG
What:?System design for front-end developers can often involve state management tactics for composing large applications or can be a more traditional system design exercise like building a rate-limiter. I’ve been asked to solve an actual issue the team has faced in the past as well (my personal fave).
How To Study:?Honestly, as a front-end developer, you will have a bit more room for error here in my opinion(excluding FAANG companies who will have a higher bar and less tolerance for shallow answers). To be safe, study the most common system design questions like designing a rate limiter, building Uber, building a tiny-URL shortener, and be ready to talk about the tradeoffs with state management tools (ex: Redux vs React’s Context API).
A couple ways I can help you:
Associate Software Developer | Masters of Computer Science
8 个月Helpful post thank you! But I am surprised system design and behavioral questions are not in the list specially for FAANG interviews.
Software Engineer | Ruby on Rails & PERN Stack
2 年That's encouraging. I had a 20 question assessment over PHP for a React Developer interview. PHP wasn't even a requirement for the role. I was worried they would all be that way. ??
Developer Support Engineer @ Salesforce | Inclusion Advocate | A11y | Space Weather Nerd
2 年Thanks for this article. Those trivia questions are kind of fun to research answers for during prep but WAY less fun to actually have to answer in an interview setting.
IT Professional- HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, React, Nodejs, Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Express, git, github
2 年Thanks for sharing.