Hiring Questions

Phone Screener

Get an idea at their technical level, but this is more about the person. Are they a culture fit?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?