[jonahx]

> Where's the disconnect here - are we talking about different kinds of front-end work?

Yeah I would assume so. Of course if know the job requires such knowledge, you should interview for it. But I'm thinking of more average front-end work, where you'd be building forms or dashboards or ordinary websites.

It sounds like you're building a complex application that just happens to be hosted in a browser. Although even then, I'd argue that while your knowledge of when to apply those algorithms is important, you still shouldn't be writing them yourself. You should be finding a well-vetted library and taking the function from there.

[eschutte2]

We may be on the same page here. I don't like the way dev interviews are run and I think the focus on textbook algorithms is misplaced. I would say if your interview process can be aced by somebody hitting the books for a month, you're not testing for hard enough things.

I was just a little surprised about those particular items because I feel like they're such an essential background for all software development. But I don't think they should be quizzed for in an interview.

[jrumbut]

So, so many people do things the hard and reliable way, or don't do them at all and sacrifice some desired feature, because they don't recognize a well understood computer science problem lurking underneath a business problem or a UI implementation.

I'm not saying that's what anyone in this discussion is doing, just that I see it everywhere (and have done it myself). 1000s of lines of incomprehensible code because no one realized that this drag and drop flow chart creation interface can be understood as a graph.

[jon-wood]

> I would say if your interview process can be aced by somebody hitting the books for a month, you're not testing for hard enough things.

I'd say if someone can independently learn the things you think are important enough to interview around in a month then they're the sort of person you should be hiring, unless you don't expect new problems to ever emerge you'll need people who can develop their knowledge anyway.

[maccard]

Who vets those libraries? And who writes them in the first place?

[jonahx]

Not sure I understand the question... are you suggesting the concept of using vetted libraries is somehow faulty? Anyway, the answer is generally "a large community" or "some big company like google or facebook."

[Drdrdrq]

I think GP was referring to a situation where no such library exists or the needed modification would be prohibitive. Not that uncommon scenario once you are inventing new kinds of visualizations. Libs like d3js help, but they are pretty low level.

[maccard]

Those "large communities" and big companies are made up of people, who are front end developers are they not?

[andrew3726]

People knowing about algorithm+implementation details? Definitely not front-end developers. (Not trying to implicate that front-end devs can't do it... you get the point)

[maccard]

I don't really get the point. If you're writing an app to do X, and you require functionality Y for your interface, if a library doesn't exist, or is just some random persons GitHub dump minidress and no other committees, what do you do?