The short answer is- I don’t pay all that much attention to the sites listed on a candidate’s resume.
Don’t get me wrong, I look at sites and I prefer to see at least three or four examples when doing an evaluation. It’s just that I’m looking at sites mostly to exclude people. We see a lot of unqualified candidates at the resume level, so most of what we need to do at this point is to get rid of all the people who have no chance. Because of that, I’m visiting listed sites just to make sure the work looks professional and is done in a reasonably modern style. Basically I don’t want to see any tables, inline event handlers, or generated code and looking just a little deeper I want to make sure the JavaScript doesn’t look obviously insane. If they pass that test, then the real work of the hiring process begins. We’ll start the rest of the interview process in order to dig deeper into their front end knowledge and personality.
Why I Don’t Look at Source Code
I could view source and maybe learn a thing or two, but I’ve done this long enough to know how unreliable that can be for judging a candidate’s technical ability.
The problem with looking at sites to gauge talent is actually pretty straightforward:
Continue reading “Hiring Front End Engineers: How I Look at a Candidate’s Past Work”