It was interesting handling frontend interviews recently.
We do a 30-min tops exercise where you create a React project to show how to use useState and useEffect, etc. I help with whatever command they want to use and allow Google/ChatGPT.
More than half of the candidates had no idea how to use React without Next.js, and some argued it was impossible, even after I told them the opposite.
This surprises me a lot. I spin up new react apps with vite often to replicate issues with 3rd party libs we use. Like how do they not know you can just spin something up over on CodePen or CodeSandbox and there's not a hint of a server side paradigm required? (sure, vite has a little server but you don't really need to know anything about it)
Some devs have worked exclusively in feature mills where expectations are rock bottom and some senior setups the project for them. When recruiters don't filter them, a basic React test has to.
What are you really testing for? That sounds like a bad interview.
Basic react experience presumably. As a first approximation, it seems like every possible interview sounds like a bad interview to someone. What has worked well for you?
Seems more like a test on random React minutiae. Like, let's take some framework, take away some random piece. How well do you know the area around that random piece we just removed? Frameworks are large and gnarly (or there isn't enough to them). Expecting a candidate to be lucky and know random implementation details in the area that happened to be picked doesn't seem like you'd select for anything other than luck.
For me, lately, the interview question is "here's code that ChatGPT generated for (previous interview question as related to the role we're hiring for that we could do)", what's wrong with it? What do now? (ChatGPT may or may not have actually generated the code in question.)
It's not React "minutiae". It's incredibly basic concepts, that if you don't know, you cannot in good faith say you know react.
It's like not knowing how to write a for loop or how to access an object's property in JavaScript.
I remember one of the first technical interviews I conducted about 15 years ago, I asked the candidate the difference between == and ===. She had the same answer as gp, claiming the doesn't "memorize minutiae like that."
> Seems more like a test on random React minutiae.
It is more like test on whether or not you can figure out random React minutiae (with Google/ChatGPT, if needed) when presented with a need. Which isn't a bad approximation for how well you will do at finding any random minutiae as needs present themselves. React-based development doesn't require much original thought — the vast majority of the job really is just figuring out the minutiae of your dependencies to fit your circumstantial need.
For fun, I asked ChatGPT for an answer and it gave a perfectly good one back without hesitation. Even if you had no idea what React was beyond knowing it is a library for developing web components, you should still be able to answer that particular question with ease.
I was assuming that particular interview was not open ChatGPT. If all you want to test for is can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth, type that into ChatGPT, and then read it to me, yeah, it seems fine.
Why would one random part of the interview disallow ChatGPT when it is otherwise accepted for answering other random React minutiae?
Because humans have to interact with other humans in conversations, and if you can't read social cues as to when something is and isn't acceptable, you're boned. I have trouble with that, so it's not surprising to me when others do as well.
When you're in a work meeting, do you just put ChatGPT up on one laptop and Claude on another and just sit back for 30 minutes to an hour?
It was deemed acceptable to use ChatGPT to discover the minutiae of useState and useEffect. What is special about createRoot that makes it off limits?
The most basic React functionality isn't "React minutiae".