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Comment by ccollins | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist.

Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.

Incidentally, we're doing that at Airbnb right now. http://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/8

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Absolutely. Frontend is far more about design and usability than it is about whether or not you can remember vendor-specific hacks for CSS columns.

I figure if I ever need to hire a "frontend hero" my checklist will be very short. Do you have a sizable portfolio, and does your stuff look like the stuff I want? If so, you're in the running.

Please notice a frontend coder is not a user experience designer. So having good design skills is not necessary to work as a frontend coder.

Being a front-ender myself (don't think I'm at 'hero' status yet though ;)), these questions look the same to me as a job listing requiring I have 'expert level' experience with a kitchen sink list of front & back end web acronyms.

You should be able to get a pretty good idea on my capabilities by looking at my code/projects and how I handled the challenges of building them, not how well I can answer whether to use CSS hacks or conditional stylesheets (because there's not one correct answer anyways).

I get your point. The people I work with who know about "obscure techniques" are sometimes better UX designers than the people who don't know. That is because they actually know the barriers of what's doable in the browser. Living on this edge is not easy as all techniques evolve all the time.

When I talk with people I don't want them to recite these solutions. I want to see if they know their ressources.

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