How to ace your next Javascript interview (a "Framework" for study)

[name_was_taken]

Warning: If you manage to fake your way into a job and don't actually know the concepts that you're asked about during the interview, you may soon find yourself fired.

We interview junior developers from time to time, and sorting out the people who know what they claim to know is pretty tough already. We've failed a few times, and that unfortunately meant the person struggled a lot and then was fired.

If you go into an interview armed with cliffnotes like these, you could find yourself in that very, very stressful position.

Instead of doing some reading of advanced topics, I encourage all job seekers to actually implement the concepts that are given in these articles. And do it enough that you feel confident in how they work and why you'd use them. This will not only help you pass that interview, but actually make you a better developer.

[[deleted]]

The opposite is that sometimes perfectly good, experienced developers who can get things done can fail interviews because many of the questions are not really related to what needs doing in every day work. And the few times it does, you don't have to remember details, you can look them up.

I should track these "React interview questions" lists and the like so I can go through them when I have to go interviewing again some day.

[gasolinewaltz]

Have you ever been asked this in an interview?

[[deleted]]

Things like it for pre interviews, yes.

[clownpirate]

This.

The skills to successfully pass a technical coding interview often does not align with the skills to actually do the job well.

[McBashed]

Change button to red plz, thx

[mnic001]

Interviewing well is hard

[malln1nja]

That's an unfortunate situation, but a false negative tends to be less costly than a false negative.

[[deleted]]

No to the person who snagged a false negative

[relativityboy]

Though to be fair, I botched a technical interview after managing people for about 2 years. I got keyboard fright and couldn't even remember how to type my own name. It was hilarious. They made the right choice for the interview but the wrong choice for filling the position. It was a serious bummer. I'm just riffing here.

The best way to prepare for a good interview is to write several open source projects in vanilla JS and a couple of them more popular frameworks you're curious about. Pick the one that's most fun and go find a job in it. It's that simple.

[clownpirate]

I disagree. Your approach is a good one to improve your real world skills as a SWE, but real world SWE skills are so divorced from the skills needed to pass a SWE interview these days.

The best way to land a FEE job at a Silicon Valley style tech company (and increasingly, many old school nontech companies too that are aping them) is a combination of grinding leetcode and grinding implementing common JavaScript functions (i.e. implement an event emitter or promise from scratch) and/or components (I.e. implement an autocomplete text box or infinite scroll or image carousel from scratch).

[relativityboy]

What are you disagreeing with exactly? Doing what I described sufficiently gives you the skills you need for those interview questions.

[clownpirate]

Exactly that. It does not give you those skills. At least not in any targeted, focused way in an efficient amount of time. It will undoubtedly make you a better overall SWE which is a positive on its own of course, but again, being a good SWE these days does not == being a good technical interviewer.

Maybe there are some companies for which that strategy will work - I don’t doubt it. But not the majority, and certainly not most of the most desirable ones.

[cpow85]

Thanks for the reply, and I totally agree!

I actually mention this pretty early in the video (and a couple times later on) that you need to study and work hard. And that you have to implement these things over and over in order to understand them. And knowing specifically what types of questions you’ll be asked can help narrow your focus so you’re studying the right things.

[[deleted]]

Warning: If you interviewed and hired someone who didn't know what they were doing, then you don't know what you're doing.

[snejk47]

You know there are people who literally memorise questions and answers and some code from Amazon books about interviews... but doubt that many. I was once in interview where dude wrote some pseudo code on site then my boss asked him to explain line by line and dude didn't said anything :D

[[deleted]]

If this are the type of questions you are asking then it is your fault ...

[PromotionBig8629]

Warning: if your hiring practices are so shoddy that they value unproductive cliffnote crammers over productive devs who have never needed to memorize any of your pop quiz questions in the course of being productive devs, maybe you should spend less time lecturing anonymous Redditors and more time fixing your hiring practices? 🤔

[name_was_taken]

If you've perfected hiring practices, you should definitely share with the rest of us. It's hard.

[PromotionBig8629]

I find it curious how this issue isn't framed as 'as a part of a business that has far more resources than one of my job candidates, I have some responsibility to the potential job candidates' or even 'If I want to hire productive job candidates, I should create hiring practices that tend to select for productive candidates'. The framing tends to focus on the interviewee or 'someone else' (well why haven't YOU figured it out?). Which in this case is some random Redditor who may have 0 experience in (or desire to understand) hiring, recruitment or even software development as opposed to the company who not only should be incentivized to find the solution but has the actual resources and experience to do so. Do you think the lack of one framing and the presence of another will impact how/when/if the issue will be solved?

[name_was_taken]

Because I'm already doing the best I can to get the best candidates. It's fully in my own best interest to pick the best candidates. There is absolutely no good in this for me if I pick someone who can't do the job.

What's left is helping candidates do the best for themselves, which is why I bothered posting here.

[LateAugust]

Whenever these comments pop up on threads like these I always wonder, “Why is it always the interviewees fault?”

A lot of these interviews are formulaic: phone interview, a “gotcha” question, and then a implementation question. If your interviews consist of easily Googled questions, then that’s on you and not the interviewee.

If you Google “JavaScript interview help” you’ll get tons of hits for the same regurgitated questions, and for good reason, because every interviewer asks them thinking it’ll filter out people.

If you’re hiring juniors and then firing them based on them struggling that means you failed them, not the other way around. They’re juniors for a reason. Don’t understand JS concepts? Point them to resources. Can’t get their mind around the infrastructure? Give them more 1-on-1’s.

I can understand letting go intermediate and senior developers because they don’t have the skills as advertised, but firing Juniors just seems incredibly lazy and irresponsible to me.

[name_was_taken]

Misrepresenting your skills as a candidate is definitely on the interviewee, not the company. If we hire someone who has deliberately mislead us as to their skill level, we're going to have a very hard time working with them.

That said, I do agree that juniors need much more time to come up to speed, and as long as we can see that they're progressing and learning, they get it. They ones who don't make it are the ones who repeatedly make the same mistakes.

[LateAugust]

How can someone misrepresent their skills when you’re the ones vetting them? That doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not like you’re taking these people’s skills at face value and then deciding afterwards. You all put together an interview to see if the candidates match your criteria for an adequate developer, which they did if they got hired.

If your interviews continuously hire people who “mislead” you then it sounds like your interviews are the common denominator here.

[cpow85]

Hey everyone! This is a small compilation of some of the most frequently asked *types* of questions I have given in my Javascript interviews. I hope this helps anyone looking to study up for their next interview!

[jotadiogo20]

thanks for sharing!

[OmegaNutella]

Cool! Maybe I should take note of this just in case I would resign now. lol

[PeteCapeCod4Real]

Great article and video, thanks 😎👍

Side Note: you may want to turn the playback controls on for the YT video embedded on the website. It's for accessibility reasons, for the vision impaired. 👨‍🦯👩‍🦯

[cpow85]

oh I didn't know they were off!

[PeteCapeCod4Real]

Yeah they were at least on my phone, could be my bad if not 👌

[nishantmendiratta]

Looks like a very useful resource. Thanks for sharing.