There’s plenty of opinions about the efficacy of technical interviews and an equally large amount written on the topic. Personally, I don’t think there’s much value in putting someone in front of a whiteboard and seeing if they can regurgitate how merge sort works (I couldn’t) and there’s plenty of blog posts arguing that point. Something that I do think is valuable is trying to gauge how well someone really knows a language that they’ve listed on their resume or used in a project. And recently, with the surging popularity of Node.js and “coding boot camps” it seems like every resume we’ve seen mentions a proficiency in Javascript.
So how could you suss out someone’s knowledge of Javascript? I poked around on Quora a bit and ran across few top voted related questions: What are some good JavaScript interview questions? and What are the most important JavaScript concepts to know for a job interview?. Skimming through them know, the questions are mostly focussed on “tricks” which isn’t very useful and the list of skill is a bit underwhelming as well. Ok, so what questions can we ask?
Prototypical Inheritance
Prototype based inheritance is woven into the fabric of Javascript so I think chatting about it will reveal a lot about a candidate. You’ll get a sense if they generally “get” how object oriented programming works and then more specifically how Prototype inheritance in Javascript works.
Looking at code, a good starting point would be talking through the difference between “Duck” in the following sample:
From there, there’s the natural philosophical discussion about how Javascript doesn’t have classes but instead objects are copied from existing ones down the prototype chain. That seems to naturally lead to a discussion of how you’d accomplish something like (don’t in production):
First Class Functions and this/bind
First class functions are heavily used Javascript in idiomatic Javascript so they certainly deserve some discussion. At a high level, describing first class functions is fairly simple. Functions are treated like any other object so that they can be passed as arguments, inserted into arrays, and all the other things you’d normally be able to do with objects.
Jumping back into code. An interesting first discussion would be “How could you implement a switch statement without using ‘if’ statements or a ‘switch’ block?”
Getting a bit fancier, another task would be to implement a “filter” method similar to the one found in lodash/underscore. “filter” accepts an array of elements and a callback and returns the elements which return “true” when passed to the callback. So as an example:
The big change is in our “filter” we’re changing the semantics so that “this” is the value from the list being filtered. Watching how someone approaches and implements this will reveal how deeply they understand Javascript’s function semantics.
Async and Promises
Last up would be touching on Javascript’s model of asynchronous programming followed by a Promise implementation (q, jQuery, etc.). The difference between asynchronous code and synchronous code is large enough that it probably could fuel an interesting discussion. A couple of interesting points to touch on:
- At a high level, what is the difference between asynchronous and synchronous code?
- In a single threaded environment like a Javascript engine, why would an asynchronous model be beneficial?
- Typically, why would an implementation using Promises be more flexible than just a callback?
Jumping back into some code. A good first task would be to execute a set of asynchronous operations in series – Another interesting task would be to implement a tiny API using regular callbacks and then using a Promises library.
Anyway, just a couple of quick ideas. I’m still new to the recruiting and interviewing game so I’d love any feedback or comments!