Hiring Questions
Phone Screener
Get an idea at their technical level, but this is more about the person. Are they a culture fit?
- How did you find out about this job?
- Tell me about your background
- What got you into design?
- How did you get to where you're at?
- What size of teams have you worked on before?
- Do you go to conferences or meetups? Which ones?
- How do you stay current?
- What type of designer do you want to be?
- What's your ideal position?
- What would you be excited to do here?
- What do you think the future of your career will be?
- What kind of salary are you looking for?
In Person Interview
Intro
- What's a day in the life of [name]?
- Talk about your preferred working environment. (OS, Editor, Browsers, Tools etc.)
- How would you optimize a websites assets/resources?
- What's your criteria for deciding if a design/UI is good or not?
- What's your favorite app?
Open-ended / Story-telling
- What’s the project you worked on that you’re most proud of?
- Tell me about the hardest problem you've had to solve in a client/work scenario.
- If we went hands off and you can work on whatever project you wanted, what would you do?
- What’s the feature you’d most like to see DreamHost offer that we do not today?
- Where do you see the hosting industry going in the future?
- How do you define done?
Design
- What's your favorite typeface? Why?
- What's your least favorite design trend in the last year or two?
- Who are your favorite designers?
- Tell me about your design process. How would you approach a project?
- How do you design an interface for a 1000 floors elevator?
- What are the problems with the UI with this online order form? How would you redesign it?
- What are affordances?
- What is Fitts' Law?
Front-end Development
- Traditionally, why has it been better to serve site assets from multiple domains?
- Javascript Code Questions
- How do you write an extension for jQuery?
- Can you describe the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation?
- What are some ways to decrease page load. (perceived or actual load time)
- How do you organize your code?
- What would you change about HTML5/CSS3 if you could?
- We're going to offer a brand new service and there's no work done yet. You're handling all the front end. Where do you start?
- Working on a team of a designer, you doing front-end development, and a back-end programmer, how do you prefer to handle that collaboration?
- You have a slow application that runs with a 5,000 line JavaScript file and you need to make it run faster. Where do you start?
- Describe the difference between
<script>
,<script async>
and<script defer>
. - Have you ever used a grid system, and if so, what do you prefer?
- What are some of your rules for writing efficient CSS?
- What are some upcoming CSS features you're looking forward too that haven't hit full browser compatibility?
- What existing CSS frameworks have you used locally, or in production? How would you change/improve them?
- Which one would you prefer among px, em, rem, %, or pt and why?
JavaScript Developement
- What can you tell me about this SQL statement?
- What are the pros and cons of functional programming vs object-oriented programming?
- What are two-way data binding and one-way data flow, and how are they different?
- What is asynchronous programming, and why is it important in JavaScript?
- Make this work
duplicate([1,2,3,4,5]); // [1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5]
- Why is it, in general, a good idea to leave the global scope of a website as-is and never touch it?
- What are some of the advantages/disadvantages of writing JavaScript code in a language that compiles to JavaScript?
- What are the pros and cons of using Promises instead of callbacks?
- What tools would you use to test your code's functionality?
Design Systems
- What does your design process look like when creating new components for a design system?
- How can you monitor your components live in production?
- How do you test functional components? Visual components?
- What does “maintainable” and “legible” CSS look like in a component library?
- How do we communicate component changes internally? Externally?
- What is the right balance between customization and control?