This has been around for a few years and it's due for some major updates. The CSS questions are becoming very, very dated.
> Have you played around with the new CSS Flexbox or Grid specs?
Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old versions of IE?", well there's another interview question for you.
Only one question about preprocessors—and a vague one at that? Not even a mention of things like Grunt and Gulp, pattern libraries, style guides, or even the terminal?
This stuff is integral, not optional, these days.
I interviewed a lot of people last year for a senior front-end position that we never ended up hiring for. We made a few offers that fell through but for the rest, I would have ended up teaching them how to do the bulk of the job had we hired them.
> I would have ended up teaching them how to do the bulk of the job had we hired them.
Is that really a bad of thing? If they're good programers and quick to pickup new technologies wouldn't you be better off getting them, training them, and when they succeed making sure you're compensating them enough to keep them onboard?
If what you wanted was someone completely versed in all your technologies and systems to just pickup and do the task, I'd say get a contractor who has the skills you need.
>It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old versions of IE?", well there's another interview question for you.
So what is the other interview question?
I really haven't dove into flex box because I am stuck supporting IE 9 on both of my projects. If I were to try and implement it on one of these projects it would be a wasted effort when 90% of my users are still using IE 9 on their corporate Dells.
How do you learn and develop new skills if your stuck supporting older browsers?
The question would be "how do you handle browsers that don't support flexbox?"
My answer would be to use Modernizr to detect lack of flexbox support and write some fallback styles.
If you're supporting an extremely higher than average percentage of users on IE 9, then it's worth basing decisions on this fact. Globally IE 9 accounts for 2.13% of usage and that number isn't going up.
There's no way to really learn this stuff other than to just start doing it. Just write fallback styles to support crappier browsers and remember that pixel-perfect designs across browsers was never a realistic goal.
But to be more precise, graceful degradation is the answer. I'm building an interface that needs to last for several years, and IE9 is circling the drain. I can't justify making too many decisions around browsers that will be gone soon at the expense of the experience in all the browsers that fully support modern properties now.
IE 8 and 9 will get a degraded experience, but the content will all still be there, and it will look pretty good. But it won't look exactly the same.
That's correct. The plan for IE 8 and 9 when I'm building heavily with flexbox will be for them to resemble the mobile breakpoints of the site. Since we build mobile-first, they'll pick most of this up without any extra work.
>> This stuff is integral, not optional, these days.
While I agree with your point, most companies I've worked for in the last few years or so are light years from using build systems and preprocessors. Case in point is my current employer. I've struggled for the last year to convince them to use SASS and Gulp to speed stuff up. At every turn, I've been discouraged to implement them.
> Have you played around with the new CSS Flexbox or Grid specs?
Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. It's ready. And if that leads you to the question of "well what about crappy old versions of IE?", well there's another interview question for you.
Only one question about preprocessors—and a vague one at that? Not even a mention of things like Grunt and Gulp, pattern libraries, style guides, or even the terminal?
This stuff is integral, not optional, these days.
I interviewed a lot of people last year for a senior front-end position that we never ended up hiring for. We made a few offers that fell through but for the rest, I would have ended up teaching them how to do the bulk of the job had we hired them.