Sr Front-End Engineer interview
Recently interviewed at Google for a Sr Front-End Engineer position in Seattle. I had 4 technical, and 1 system design question. I was astonished that there was not a single coding question that was within my domain, or even relevant to front end development. I was asked: 2 tree questions (BST&BT) 1 trie question 1 graph question The system design question was absolutely relevant to front end, so hats off to that guy. I was contacted a week or so later saying I didn't get the job and was given no reason (which is fine). I'm mainly disappointed that it feels like someone asked a Baker to make chicken parmesan instead of a croissants. I'm surprised that Google doesn't ask more relevant questions, is this typical? I understand that basic knowledge of CS is important but there are ways to test this with out asking graph questions, just like I wouldn't ask an SDE to write CSS or explain the JS event loop. I've worked in industry for 13 years, at Amazon for~6 years and conducted several hundred interviews. TC ~ 245k (although less now because of stock :( ) Follow up question, what company do you think does the best job conducting front end engineering interviews.
Yeah I’m in the same boat. I’m taking a month to study for algos before interviewing. It’s the industry standard process now so I don’t question why they still follow this practice. I’ve never taken a single algo class in my whole life. I’m watching videos now and it’s actually not that hard. I imagine that doing this can only help me in future interviews that’s why I quit my last job cold turkey to do this.
That's the thing though, I know enough to know to look something up should I need it (such as a trie for a look up), but I use it so rarely it's not a good use of my time to study that. It's like regex, why would I invest a lot of time to learn regex when I used it (seriously use it) once every 3-6 months
Yeah definitely. I would recommend to just learn bc it helps you career wise even if you don’t really use this stupid algo stuff. I stayed away from these a long time and I realize I’m disadvantage wrt career opportunities not knowing algorithms. Backend people don’t use algorithms in their everyday job either. However, they’re better at solving algorithms problems in interviews than us so they are at an advantage. Time for FEs to upsell our worth. 😁
Consider yourself lucky. Front-end at Google is a myth. You're expected to be full stack, while back-end engineers are not expected to write FE code. So unless that something you'd like to do, look at other companies that value FE engineers.
Most fe people are now full stack, not just at google. It’s the industry norm now. FE people can write backend code but I cringe when I see frontend code written by backend people.
Do you mind sharing the questions? DM is fine too.
Sharing questions would be cool
Google doesn’t hire front end people. They hire strictly for computer science fundamentals. I’m not saying you don’t have those, but I am saying they have a weak correlation to actual, hands on skill in front end engineering. Might was well have tarot card readers perform hiring.