Challenges Interviewing for Front-End Engineering

[00:00:00]
>> So why is interviewing for front end specifically so difficult? There are many answers to this, but give me some. Give me your best.
>> The tech changes quite fast.
>> [LAUGH] It does. If you were to hit your head go into a coma wake up, you would have no idea what's going on in front end anymore.

[00:00:18]
Browsers work completely differently, technology's completely different. You're like, what's an angular? What's a view? Is that like part of MVC? They're like, [LAUGH] MVC? How old is this person? What else? Why is interviewing for Frontend so difficult? I've got a few. One, what is the Frontend? It could be so many things.

[00:00:43]
If you're programming for, I don't know, a Tesla, is that not a front-end, something you interact with? You're programming, I don't know, a refrigerator, a tablet for your refrigerator, that's the frontend. Browsers, desktops, mobile devices. Frontend is such a broad category that it's really hard to say this is one thing for frontend and it's only this.

[00:01:06]
No, no, it's so many broad things. And of all the parts of engineering, UI is probably one of the newest. Yeah, it's 20, 30 years old, around there, maybe a little bit older. But in terms of other parts of computer science, the frontend is still very new and it's evolving quickly.

[00:01:26]
Also what makes front end interviewing, it's crazy broad. It's so huge. The topics we can cover. If I said HTTP headers, that's front end. That's definitely something you deal with. Actually anything with HTTP I would expect you might have to know as a front end engineer depending on your job.

[00:01:44]
Accessibility, workers, any sort, browser compatibilities, CSS, I can keep going of the things like you might have to cover in Frontend engineering. And you can say, yeah, these are valid Frontend engineering questions. Yes.
>> The online they're saying that it's a ton of different things that are lumped together as quote unquote one skill set.

[00:02:09]
>> Yes, and we don't know what those those are because again, we don't understand what frontend engineering is half the time that's a lot of the problem. So collectively we agree there's a problem. And another problem, I think this is hilarious. I'm not laughing, I'm laughing inside. Another one problem is we all have a different idea about what the core concepts are.

[00:02:36]
Something as foundational as scope in JavaScript I tweeted this out the other day, I got so many responses from people, much more response than my dog pictures, I'm very disappointed with the Internet. Then I got response from engineers weighing in, in much, much smarter engineers than me. And they all had a slightly different definition about what scope is in JavaScript.

[00:03:01]
That's part of the problem is, we don't share this collective language about what front end engineering is. Heck, we don't even understand the core concepts of JavaScript and just saying that in a universal way. And that's a lot of the problem too. My idea of how to build a website is probably different from your idea of how to build a website.

[00:03:20]
So how do we get past that? How do we establish this kind of level field where we understand what we're talking about. We can communicate effectively.