4 Beneficial JavaScript Interview Tips

In this post I will share 4 valuable JavaScript Interview Tips that JavaScript developers should keep in mind in their interview process. Some of these tips were actually from personal experience myself where I was applying for positions, and some were taken from times where I was the one interviewing candidates.

Having been in both sides of the spectrum, the most valuable thing attained from my experiences as an interviewer is being able to understand how I looked like when I went to interviews as a candidate.

With that said, I found it to be a good idea to list some interview tips that impact us the most based on real life experiences.

1. Know your JavaScript

This might be a little obvious but I think its useful to understand what happens if you blow it on even one question.

If you are applying for a JavaScript developer position you should answer everything correctly obviously. If you answer many questions correctly but totally mess up on a question about symbols for example they might wonder if you are just another casual JavaScript developer who only made simple todo list applications.

Also, if all of your knowledge aligned well with 9 JavaScript questions but you had no clue about the 10th JavaScript question, you better hope that question doesn't make them wonder "How did he answer the other ones correctly but not get the last one? They are used together in code like everywhere". Those impressions can get dangerous for you and might even provoke them to further test your knowledge with harder questions that might not work in your favor.

2. Don't stutter

This is one of the most important things to not do in an interview. No matter how smart you are, the more you stutter the more you are taken less seriously. If you are a person that hardly stutters, consider yourself lucky. Those that have even some problem stuttering might impose this notion that they are either bulls**tting their answers or give the impression that they don't care about this job enough. This is the sad reality.

So what should you do if you have a tendency to stutter often even when all of the things you are telling the interviewer are the truth? You can try to practice speaking slower.

3. Don't over-explain your answers

This is one of those mistakes that people probably have to experience themselves to be able to understand how this can easily backfire with negative impacts to the hiring decision if you were to slip. Logically it makes a lot of sense to overly provide the information asked for to show how intellectual you are. In some cases it holds true. But it can also backfire if overdoing it.

Have a look at this link and read the list of things on what is extracted from over explaining. You will find that they aren't exactly positive.

If an interviewer asks to explain what closures are in JavaScript are and you answer "Closures are when functions 'remember' their lexical scope even when they are executed outside of that lexical scope" (which is correct) the interviewer will accept this and move on to the next question. There is no need to go on to explain that "We can also use closures to hide data. There is also a term called lexical scoping that relates to closures. They define the scope of variables by where they are declared in the code and we can create modules by utilizing this". That's great and all, but if you still stutter often (see #1) then all of this will not have that much of a a great impact any further than if you just stuck with the first sentence. And you don't want to risk saying a false statement or they will catch and remember that for the rest of the interview.

4. Practice the most common data structures and algorithms

When there is a test in the interview it will most likely be about an algorithm that are commonly taught in every article you see.

I'm referring specifically to these:

• Bubble sort
• Merge sort
• Insertion sort
• Binary trees
• Trie trees
• Binary search tree
• Depth-first traversal
• Queue
• Stack
• Min/Max heap

In most interviews, the interviewer(s) just want to see how the candidate thinks and how they solve problems as well as evaluate their code writing style. They want you to succeed the interview. They are the people who gave the green light to bring you on to the next stage in the interview process so they're already in good terms with you as a candidate so they're not out to harm you or humiliate you. This is why most of them are sticking with common algorithms that every developer should already know.

Rest assured you don't have to worry about them asking you to implement the Jarnik-prim algorithm, the Kruscal's algorithm, prove how Dijkstra's algorithm performs Ω(2V) in worst case scenarios, etc. Remember, they want you to succeed but they still have to make sure you are at least capable working with common data structures.

Conclusion

I hope this helped shed some light on the Proxy pattern and how to take advantage of this concept using the now built-in Proxy class in JavaScript.

That concludes the end of this post :) I hope you found this article helpful to you, and make sure to follow me on medium for future posts!