Cracking the Frontend Developer interview

Are you someone who is working towards getting his/her first developer role? Then this article is for you. In this blog post, I will walk you through the strategies and preparation ideas to crack the Frontend Developer interview in 2022.

As per my experience and recent trends of interviews, there can be 3-4 or sometimes 5 rounds of interviews for a developer position.

Early-age startups generally go for fewer rounds. On the other hand unicorn startups or big companies like FAANGM (you must be knowing this term else google it) have 4-5 rounds.

Let us talk in detail about what they ask you in each round and how should you prepare yourself.

1. Online Assessment Round

In almost all cases the first round of interviews starts with an Online Assessment. These assessments are conducted on online coding platforms like Hackerrank, HackerEarth, CoderByte, CodeSignal, Codility, etc.

In this round, you can expect 2-3 medium-level DSA (Data Structures and algorithms) problems and some MCQ questions too.

Preparing for round-1

To crack this round you should focus on solving easy & medium-level problems on leetcode.com platform. You should solve problems related to the following topics –

• Arrays
• Strings
• Linked Lists
• Trees
• Hashmap

This is for DSA. For DSA problems you can pick any programming language of your choice to solve them but I suggest you to be comfortable with solving problems in JavaScript. Knowledge of JavaScript will help you in every round of the interview.

For MCQs, you should focus on-

• JavaScript Language Fundamentals
• HTML & CSS
• Frontend framework-related questions like anyone of React/Vue/Svelte (Only If it is mentioned in the job role requirements).

Most of the questions asked will be from JavaScript itself. So prepare that pretty well. You can use platforms like JavaScript.info and bigfrontend.dev/quiz to practice MCQs.

2. Problem Solving Round

In the 2nd round, half of the companies go with a complete DSA round and the other half go for a platform coding round in which they ask coding problems related to core JavaScript fundamentals.

The sole purpose of this round is to check your problems-solving skills. The interviewer closely looks at your approach to solving a particular question.

Your preparation strategy

You already know how to prepare for DSA as discussed above in the first round preparation section.

Coding problems related to core JavaScript are mainly asked from the following topics–

• Nested Objects (like traversing, flattening, or filtering nested objects)
• Timers ( setInterval and setTimeout)
• Currying + Closures
• Promise
• this keyword
• Implementing Polyfills for map, filter, forEach, and other methods.
• Object-oriented JavaScript

For the preparation of these topics, I recommend you 3 resources.

1. My articles
2. Akshay Saini YouTube Channel.
3. Learners Bucket Website (Learn and Practice on this platform).

Pro Tip – Solving more and more questions multiple times will make you confident enough to ace the interview.

3. Machine Coding Round

In the 3rd round of interviews, companies generally ask you to develop a small project with some listed features. For eg. code a Todo List app with the following features-

• Display 2 lists of tasks, one list contains completed tasks and the other list contains non-completed tasks.
• Implement drag and drop functionality so that a task can be dragged from one list and put in the other list.
• Store all the items on the list in the Local Storage.

This is just an example to give you an idea.

Preparation tips

You should try creating small projects on a regular basis. Some of the projects you can try are-

1. Todo List.
2. Notification Toast (google it if you don’t know).
3. Reply Widget. As you see on social media platform, every comment has a reply option and that reply also has a reply option too, and so on. This can be infinitely nested.
4. Develop a list of food items. Each item will have a price, category, and other attributes. Implement searching based on name, filtering based on category, and sorting based on price.

For more practice, you can look at the How To section of w3 Schools.

4. The cultural fit or HR round

The 4th round of the interview is most likely the final round, in which they ask questions to test whether you are a good fit for company culture. They also check if you are a team player.

IMO, this round is the easiest among all the rounds. Just be honest and answer politely. If you have reached this round ,that means you’re quite strong in technical skills.

Preparation tips

1. Be ready to talk about challenges you faced in your career so far and how you tackled those challenges.
2. Explore the company, its products and its competitors, especially when you’re interviewing for a startup.
3. Show confidence and communicate well.
4. Ask questions when the interviewer gives you a chance.

This is all about what your interview will look like and how you should prepare for it.

Some important points to keep in mind.

1. Before diving in for preparation, you should first search about the companies you’re targeting. Get an idea of what they ask.
2. Prepare to talk about the projects and skills you have mentioned in your resume.
3. Sometimes you can face system design interview questions. This is asked when you apply for an experienced position.
4. Some of the companies give a take-home assignment in which they ask you to develop a product and talk about it in the interview. Preparation of 3rd round will help you here.
5. Very few times it happens that the interviewer is not sure about you, so they ask you for another round. That round of interviews will be mostly like what we have discussed in round-2.

This is all for this article. You made it to the end. Congratulations!

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