wow hiring/interviewing an offshore developer is surprisingly tough. 0/3 so far. Like not even close on the most basic javascript and css questions. Not sure what to do here.

I do have a new favorite JS interview question though: "How would you find out if a variable is an array?" and yeah 3 answers of "typeof variable === 'array'" cool beans...

I always have to google that ****.

finding good offshore people is hard, but honestly that is just an awful interview question. it's trivially googled in 10 seconds, and is the kind of thing that many good js devs, myself included, would have to google, because it's so rarely used, and indeed switching on types is usually a code smell anyway.

it's would be like interviewing for journalists by asking them to enumerate the situations in which an em-dash is appropriate.

hmm ok. Seemed pretty simple to me and there's multiple good answers i.e. both jquery and underscore have methods for it, you can use instanceof but its not legacy browser, etc. Its also one of the most common JS gotchas in that it typeof array is 'object'.

And of course, because we're using this giant homemade framework that has a million abstracted methods that return mystery types we often need to do this exact thing anyways..

i mean, i've been doing js on and off for years and don't recall ever being bit by that.

but my point is that you don't want to test information that is a 10s google away. you want to test the stuff that requires real experience and understanding. you need to have them writing nontrivial code to solve some kind of problem. ofc, what you really want to test -- is the person reliable, are they productive over long periods, can they solve problems with minimal management on their own -- even that won't help with. contract to hire is the only solution for that i've seen. but yeah, hiring is really hard.

A good warning flag for a bad question is when people you know you'd hire can't answer it.

+1 on never actually checking types in js

lol

me_irl

This seems like overkill though. I don't really need to dig in that deep in a situation where they're way out of their comfort zone and may blow it. I just need to know if they have the minimal competence to do something that would help us. I asked each of them (variations) on:

var foo = [10, 20, 30, 40]

tell me how you would write a function that returns a new array that every element doubles in value.

I never once heard the word "map", and the closest I got was literally:

no defining b, overloads the length of foo.

m8 are you just making things up because you don't want to hire foreigners?

I think he means overruns the length of foo.

Took me a minute too.

By the way - I generally don't care about things like initializing variables or even off by one errors (Unless its relevant to the question in some way).

My general statement to people before coding is that I know an interview isn't a really coding environment and that while I want as close to real syntax as possible I don't care about minor details. If someone uses 'length' instead of 'size', I don't care.

Guess I'm going about this all wrong then.

Better than the architect who keeps insisting on asking front end candidates "what is polymorphism" and "what is dependency injection" though.

Have them make a basic jquery slideshow or something similar in codepen/jsfiddle and walk you through what they're doing.

have basically one or two days to finish up an 8-week online class. This thing has been nothing short of a custerfluck.

While we technically have several more weeks, the class ends in a few days, and I'm 100% sure we will lose access to the online portion, meaning we'd be going in blind on any assignments we needed to do, and wouldn't have access to tests we just got assigned.

To cap it all off, the server we use for uploading and running our work just caked its pants.

What's a resourceful student to do?

Why, figure out how the hell to login to his mysql db on his trusty raspberry pi, set that the **** up, manually reconfigure some php5 files, get port forwarding sorted, sftp the files and run the **** out of them!

Oh, all while it's running a java chat server i built yesterday.

Boom.

I think your array doubling question is fine for a coding screen. I'm just saying you have to be careful how you evaluate it - taking into account the differences between an interview situation and an actual real life coding situation.

been 7 months since i touched js, and all i had to look up was using [ ] instead of { } when declaring and populating the array

i think that's reasonable as a screening question.

just make sure you haughtily say, "thank very much, we'll be in touch" if they use a for loop instead of map.

"for loop instead of ES6 for-of? next"

Sounds like my last job. One person, who was pretty expert at Excel put it like this: "There is no place on earth that would give you the Excel knowledge and experience you need for this job."

Our interview process was basically give a test and see how they approached solving the problem. No one ever "passed" if you meant "they could solve the problem."

Was it the case of using excel as some sort of database or not in a way it was meant to be used or just some interesting niche work that required maxing out the capabilities of excel?

Probably just your keyboard. Get a wireless keyboard, USB dongle and continue on.

We've completed the transition from 100% offshore to 100% on-shore, Director of Engineering, a Senior Engineer, and an Engineer are all in house and on-site, the rest are on-shore remote around the US.

IT FEELS SOOOO GOOOOOOD

I've used h2 as an in-memory db for unit tests in the past. Not sure if it would work for what you want to do.

thanks, that looks like it might. sadly i already spent a few hours getting a test database up and working on azure, using ruby's tiny_tds to connect to it. but i may look into h2 anyway.

I'd be interested to hear about value added by US remote vs offshore if you want to share your perspective.