How To Prepare For Front-End Interview In 5 Steps — 2021

Steven(Liang) Chen

5 min readOct 8, 2021

Hope my personal experience will help you save some time and prepare for your ideal Front-end position

Understand The Front-end Interview:

It is helpful to be familiar with different kinds of front-end interviews so that we can prepare beforehand.

Here are the types of interviews I have experienced in my previous job hunting journey.

Algorithm
System Design
Take-home assignment + Follow up Pair Programming
Pair Programing(bug fixing or new business logic or algorithm)

Algorithm and System Design have become a common practice across all engineer roles regardless of front-end or not.

For me, I would make use of the following platform to prepare for these accordingly:

LeetCode or Hackerrank + Pramp -> Algorithm Interview

Educative -> System Design

For pair programming and Take-home assignment, I haven’t found any suitable platform to prepare for these interviews. It is better to ask a senior developer to do a mock interview with you.

Step 1: Write Down Your Dream Company:

Write down your dream company should be your first step. Also, this is definitely not the more the better. Prepare for too many companies will exhaust you.

I would like to suggest that only prepare for less than 5 companies at the same time if you have less than one month.

Giant companies are not always the best choice. You need to investigate by yourself. For example, if you are in Australia you can look at the following ranking list:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-startups-2021-25-australian-companies-/

Above is an example of the list that you need to keep updating while you looking for new opportunities.

It is important to know how long does it take to receive the result. There shouldn’t be any big gap between interviews otherwise you lose the opportunity to make the offer compete with each other.

Try to make the result date as close as you can.

Step 2: Practice Algorithm and Data Structure Questions

Algorithm questions have become a common practice during the interview process. You can choose your favorite platform to practice it. LeetCode and hackerrank are my favorite platforms to prepare for interviews.

This type of interview not only test your problem-solving skill but also your communication skill.

If you can finish the question there will always be some follow-up questions. For these algorithm questions, you don’t have to resolve all of them or pass all the test cases but show that you have good communication skills and are easy to work with.

There is a good strategy to resolve interview questions which is REACTO.

Repeat the question
Examples
Approach
Code
Test your code.
Optimize your code.

Before wrapping up this section, I would like to mention not only prepare algorithm questions but also implement some popular data structures by JavaScript or TypeScript I used to fail at implementing a data structure and write test cases.

For data structure you can use this repo as a reference:

javascript-algorithms/src/data-structures at master · trekhleb/javascript-algorithms

📝 Algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript with explanations and links to further readings …

github.com

Step 3: Mock Interview

This is very important. If you can find yourself a friend who will do a mock interview with you that would be fantastic. The plan b is to use a mock interview platform like Pramp.

The mock interview will make you answer questions and write code under pressure, which is similar to a real interview.

I highly recommend you find someone to do a mock interview together or make use of the Pramp website.

Step 4: Front-End Foundation:

Here is the roadmap of front-end development. It is necessary to go through the roadmap. This roadmap enables you to understand the scope of front-end development.

Learn to become a modern frontend developer

We now have a YouTube Channel. Subscribe for the video content. Step by step guide to becoming a modern frontend…

roadmap.sh

Normally the Q&A interview includes JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Modern Framework(React, Vue, Angular), Design Pattern/Principles, Cloud…

For more example questions you can check this repo below.

GitHub - h5bp/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questions: A list of helpful front-end related…

A list of helpful front-end related questions you can use to interview potential candidates, test yourself or…

github.com

Step 5: Find Yourself A Referral:

The referral will help you at least secure the first round of the interview or the opportunity to talk to HR. It may not change the result of the interview but at least make your cv visible to HR.

Referral can also introduce the company culture to you or walk you around the working environment if you want. It will help you to make the decision to some extent.

If you cannot find a referral you can also contact a recruiter on LinkedIn to get updated information about the position you would like to apply for.

Conclusion

Given front-end developer is still a software engineer, which makes the interview has a big overlap with the software engineer interview. Hope my article can help you secure your dream position in the near future. Happy coding Front-ender!!

Resources: