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Developer Interview Questions

Three months ago, I started mentoring another developer. It went great, but I was always wondering how to quantify, or at least evaluate how good (/bad) this mentoring effort was. I am now mentoring multiple people and I want to see how their performance evolves over time, how their knowledge expands.

I stumbled upon a great collection of Front-end Job Interview Questions put together by many contributors on GitHub. For now, this post is just a subset of those questions that I like best, with answer suggestions where it feels appropriate, plus some of my own questions.

General (Web) questions

  • What did you learn lately? (framework, stack, trick, methodology, etc.)
  • Talk about your preferred development environment. (OS, Editor, Browsers, Tools etc.)
  • Can you describe the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation?
    • Bonus points for describing feature detection
  • If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?
  • Do your best to describe the process from the time you type in a website’s URL to it finishing loading on your screen.
  • Who is Tim Berners Lee?

HTML Questions

  • What is HTML5 for you? (APIs, elements, hype, etc.)
  • Can you explain the difference between GET and POST?

CSS Questions

  • Have you used or implemented media queries or mobile specific layouts/CSS?
  • Explain your understanding of the box model and how you would tell the browser in CSS to render your layout in different box models. (box-sizing?)

JS Questions

  • How do you go about testing your JavaScript? (console.log, alert, Unit testing)
  • What’s the difference between feature detection and using the UA string
  • What is the difference between == and ===?
  • What is "use strict";? what are the advantages and disadvantages to using it?

Cool questions

  • What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever coded, what are you most proud of? (class project, personal project, beautiful website, art)
  • Do you have any pet projects? What kind?

The repository contains the bulk of those questions, plus links to other related resources and translations in many languages.