Ask HN: What questions you ask interviewing mid-senior front-end devs?

1 point·jakub_g··4 comments

Do you expect your people to know all/most of the hot recent frameworks & tools or you prefer them to have the deeper knowledge of the underlying principles? How do you distinguish good and experienced developers from the mediocre ones?

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I usually start with asking them to describe the technologies in their ideal stack. That gives a good platform to talk about frameworks, technologies, and challenge them with the bits and bogs.

I'm looking for:

* Technical skills (on a rather broad level): how much experience do they seem to have? Are they interested in their field beyond work?

* How clear is their communication? Can they argue well?

* How well their preferences align with ours in terms of technology.

What is the value in their technological preferences aligning with yours? I ask because that simply encourages me to tell you what you want to hear in the interview.

It helps to determine how future-proof your hire might be. If a candidate wants to learn, say, Android development, they will be very unhappy writing PHP tests in a year's time.

(But then, it’s nothing new. Rule of the thumb is always, hire for attitude and train for skills - and not the other way around.)

Oh, and lying happens all the time. The only way around it is getting better with inter-personal skills.

Depends on the company.

Wherever I've worked, they all expected deeper knowledge. How else would you distinguish good vs mediocre ones? It takes time to get good at anything and getting good means deep knowledge of at least one thing, plus the requisite breadth. Mediocrity misses the first part.

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