[codingdave]

It could have been a sign that they trusted your front-end skill. If I know someone has a skill, I don't waste my time interviewing them to prove it. I try to figure out what else they can do, where they can grow, and how well they would fit in with the team.

So I'd pose the question back to you -- did you provide them a portfolio or any code samples that would have made the front-end questions redundant?

[danhoc01]

I was thinking along the same lines. I would be curious to see his resume, as the content could potentially influence the interviewer to ask certain types of questions.

[philipwalton]

Yes, I provided a detailed resume as well as my Github account for all of these. The problem is it didn't seem like the individual interviewers had taken much time to actually look at what I'd done.

If they had, then maybe I'd agree with you, but it seemed like many of them were just going through the motions. It seemed like they interview people all the time.

[majormajor]

"It seemed like they interview people all the time."

I bet you hit the nail on the head.

At my current job, I've had weeks where I've been on an interview loop every day. At that point, I'm not going to spend much time looking at your github code in depth beforehand each day. Especially when it's a candidate whose area of expertise isn't the same as mine, so I wouldn't know what to look for. Ideally we'd be better able to match interviewers with interviewees, but if we had enough people to be doing that, we wouldn't be in the mad hiring rush that ends up with a developer doing five interviews in a single week around career-fair season. ;)

(My last job was a much smaller company where each hire was weighed a lot more, and we absolutely would've looked at all that stuff there.)

However, I always start off asking about a specific project from the candidate's resume, usually the one that I think sounds most interesting to me. Depending on how long they take to explain it, or how interested they seem to be in explaining it, I'll follow up with a more open-ended question of what their most interesting or challenging project was -- if you can sell me on that project, it's just as big an influence on me me as the coding or design question that I'd also ask.

But I have coworkers who don't ask about other projects like that, which I think kinda sucks.