from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to interview a senior front end engineer?

by m3h on 1/29/23, 12:50 PM with 5 comments

What are the right questions to ask in an interview for a senior frontend engineer from an employer perspective?

Given that we are trying to raise to average experience level of our own team, how do we interview a person who is more senior than the senior-most frontend engineer we have at the moment?

For context, our engg. team is quite small, and we have 4 frontend engineers, all of whom are junior/associate software engineers. We are hoping to add someone to the team that can improve the quality of the work we do (unit tests, architecture, reviews, scoping projects, scaling the codebase up, etc.). Our tech stack is React/TS and ASP.NET Core.

In general, I am also interested in learning about how to hire for roles where our company does not already have experience in? It seems to me that to hire a senior frontend engineer, you would need another senior frontend engineer sitting on the interviewing side. How do we break that circular dependency?

  • by wspeirs on 1/29/23, 1:00 PM

    >We are hoping to add someone to the team that can improve the quality of the work we do

    I think that's your answer... Show them your existing front-end code, and ask them how they'd make it better. If they're experienced, then they should have some very concrete ideas. Then ask them "why" for their ideas. If they can't fully explain the "why" behind the "what" they're probably just regurgitating things they've read, but don't actually understand the tech.

  • by jbergens on 1/29/23, 2:19 PM

    Ask them what they have done before. First of all, years of experience is good to have so you may want to strive for 5-10 years instead of someone with 2 years. You can then ask if they have mentored others before and how they think about best doing that. Also hear if they have been the lead developer in projects before.

    Just some ideas.