I don't think so. First of all, a Frontend Hero needs to have design sense, ability to learn quickly, empathy with users, trustworthiness to "fill in the blanks", and the balls to say no to designs or features that are unnecessary, impractical, and time-consuming. What Sebastian Deutsch described is a CSS / Javascript quirks specialist.
Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.
Absolutely. Frontend is far more about design and usability than it is about whether or not you can remember vendor-specific hacks for CSS columns.
I figure if I ever need to hire a "frontend hero" my checklist will be very short. Do you have a sizable portfolio, and does your stuff look like the stuff I want? If so, you're in the running.
Being a front-ender myself (don't think I'm at 'hero' status yet though ;)), these questions look the same to me as a job listing requiring I have 'expert level' experience with a kitchen sink list of front & back end web acronyms.
You should be able to get a pretty good idea on my capabilities by looking at my code/projects and how I handled the challenges of building them, not how well I can answer whether to use CSS hacks or conditional stylesheets (because there's not one correct answer anyways).
I get your point. The people I work with who know about "obscure techniques" are sometimes better UX designers than the people who don't know. That is because they actually know the barriers of what's doable in the browser. Living on this edge is not easy as all techniques evolve all the time.
When I talk with people I don't want them to recite these solutions. I want to see if they know their ressources.
Q: What methods do you know to realize columns?
A: cleardiv
clearfix (better one)
WTF? I'd expect floats, faux columns, display: table-* , *-column-count being the answer but get some cleardiv/clearfix instead. I never liked those, especially cleardiv. Often you can do simply reusing next element (#footer {clear:both}), but sometimes that's not enough, alas.
In my opinion any competent frontend developer should know these, not enough for the hero. On the other hand, to be able to interview hero you should be at least on that level yourself, which is not the case there, imho.
That looks like a very poor checklist unless you're purely looking for someone that rapidly turns templates into markup.
Otherwise, a grasp of how the users will interact with your app and what constraints that imposes on the front end is far more important than their ability to regurgitate CSS clearfix syntax and knowledge of server side javascript frameworks they might not have to learn.
At least in my little corner of the front-end dev community, CSS frameworks are considered helpful in some cases, but not a good fit in most cases.
One of the situations where they can be really helpful, though, is in developing a functional prototype. The code is going to be a bit bloated, but most of it is meant to be thrown away in any case.
Actually, I would answer that question with "Compass". Blueprint, etc. are CSS templates and themes, not a "framework" as used in computer science and else where.
Bloated as because CSS frameworks are, essentially, based on CSS and works at mercy of the browser; true “frameworks” like Compass are pre-compiled and comes without presentational classes, therefore less bloat. On the other hand, front-end work is dirty by nature, and I’d argue that a beautiful page with bloated code is better than a not-working page with very clean code.
Someone who understands normal flow and positioning, how elements interact with each other, and minimizes the amount of code for each part of the design will be much more effective than someone who knows all the short cut css hacks.
Also, a bunch of these questions were far more relevant during the IE6 era which is now finally at a decline. I would care that someone knows how to code for IE6, but that requires one question since all IE6 bugs are very well documented, just make sure the person is aware.
hacks, css grids, obscure references, nonstandard way of clearing divs, instead of the much more used and standard overflow:hidden , vendor specific css declarations? printed media references?
here's a few questions that a REAL front end dev would likely answer:
do you know standards?
do you do inline css/js?
do you use hacks?
do you use grids? if yes, this guy is a neofite and needs to learn how to unbloat his css
do you reset your css?
do your sites validate?
do you like flash in your websites?
do you code by hand?
do you use autohotkey/zen coding/texter/autoit/etc for coding?
do you despise expression web/dreamweaver/kompozer?
do you use firebug?
how do you test for xbrowser testing?
do you know what "semantics" mean in a web context?
For a user experience designer I would have a different interview.
What's important for me is to see if some understand what is happening behind the scenes. There are so many people who apply a clearfix but do not understand the principles of block contexts.
I do not see how any of these questions reflect the ability to be good at the front-end. If I didn't know one of those answers in a real world scenario, I could easily just Google it. Design sense and a good concept of usability are much more important IMO.
Additionally, the article never really touched on how to recruit these people - it just lists screening questions to ask during an interview. To recruit a Frontend Hero, you need to hire great designers and create a culture that treats front end engineers as first class citizens.
Incidentally, we're doing that at Airbnb right now. http://www.airbnb.com/jobs/show/8