[wanderr]

Note: I work for Grooveshark, which is in Gainesville, FL, about as far away from San Francisco as you can be in the continental US...so what I'm about to talk about might not be like what is going on over there at all.

When we bring someone in for an interview, we generally already have a pretty good idea of their technical skill level. Part of the filtering process is asking to see their work, either code samples or a portfolio. For frontend engineers it is especially easy to see their work since you can load it up in the browser, inspect, interact with the console, etc.

If we are impressed by their work, the interview is 90% making sure they are a good personality fit, 10% making sure the work we looked at was actually theirs. We probably end up asking slightly more frontend-specific questions than the author experienced, but probably not much.

We find that this process generally works quite well, but a few people that we gave offers to did tell us they were surprised because they felt they had bombed the interview, assuming that since we didn't get into a lot of nitty gritty technical stuff or ask them to write code on a whiteboard, that we had already decided we weren't going to hire them.