[davedx]

I interviewed for a long-term "Frontend engineer" role in June for a large cable company here in the Netherlands. I've been a full-stack developer for the past 3 years or so, and before that I was in game development, and before that still, I wrote enterprise middleware.

My frontend experience going into this interview was almost entirely jQuery, with the exception of one 2 month freelance project where I had a crash course in AngularJS.

I was asked a ton of technical frontend questions, and I was able to answer them at a conceptual level but not from experience. I got the job, and I think what was important was my broader experience as a programmer, not the answers to specific frontend questions.

The thing is, real frontend programming of large JavaScript applications is a brand new field. There are lots of people with lots of jQuery experience (it's telling that this article deals with jQuery as an example of frontend development), but not so many with serious JavaScript programming experience outside of a library or framework.

I think because of this, companies are just being realistic when they interview for frontend positions based on general programming knowledge and experience. Maybe in 5 years they will drill down more, as the pool of expert frontenders expands.