Preparing the code interview... on the other side of the table (Part I)

#career #leadership #beginners #javascript

Sooner or later, your manager (or HR) will require you to take part in a selection process.
"Could you prepare the coding exercise for this position?"

If you ask me, the code interview is a necessary evil; while it is arguably broken / unfair / subjective ...it's the best we have 🤷‍♂️

My 2 cents to the tech-world:

folks, do the code interview you'd like to solve

Idea is quite simple; There is going to be a code interview during the selection process. At least, prepare the one you'd like to solve if you were applying.

Front-end Challenge

I exposed this to my managers. Asked them to have carte blanche to design my very own front-end code challenge.

5 months later I can say everything is going well; so I'm sharing with the community.

What do I avoid? ❌

Generic js interview questions - don't ask what is a closure
Already solved algorithms - don't ask how to binary-search a balanced whatever.
Edgy-Wiki questions - don't ask what is the initial value of the @@iterator property for whatever.

Why? because those things doesn't matter in the daily work.

You don't need to define a closure, you need to use them.
You don't need to code a binary search from scratch, you need to use it.
You don't need to memorize the ECMAScript standard, you need to use it.

Instead,

What do I focus? ✅

How do you read code ?
How do you understand the problem we want to solve ?
How do you adapt to an already existing code-base ?
How do you review ?

Result 🐈

With all of this in mind. I created a simple - plain - React app at codepen. I'm planning to analyze the interview exhaustively in this series. But, in a nutshell it's just another:

List of products (cards) in JSON format;
each card has a title, image and price;
clicking on a card, the shopping-cart on top is updated.

Thing is...

There is a reported bug from QA team;
a visual change requested from Design team;
a new feature prioritized from Product team;
and an empty test file with just a TODO in it.