I recently had the pleasure of using Skilled for a mock technical interview in Javascript!
Skilled is an interesting concept, especially for aspiring developers. They facilitate mock technical interviews between job seekers and coaches. Coaches are professionals in the tech industry, usually with years of development experience. They have experience hiring candidates and managing teams so you know you have a credible coach. The interviews are 1 hour long and conducted remotely, so there are tons of time slots to choose from.
The Interview
During the interview you are on the Skilled platform which has a window to code in and a video window so you can interact with the coach. You then code in their custom built environment that is interactive so the coach can also test/edit your code.
My interview was slightly different than some of the people I spoke with. Typically in a Skilled interview the coach jumps into an algorithm problem with the job seeker. If you get to the answer quickly, the coach will ask you to refactor to decrease time/space. However, in my experience we did it a bit differently. Since my coach (who has over 10 years of dev experience) did not like to interview strictly on algorithms, she conducted it in two parts.
- Testing my Javascript knowledge by asking questions:
- What is the difference between apply and call in JavaScript?
- What is the difference between an object and an array?
- What type of data structure is a stack? (LIFO)
- What type of data structure is a queue? (FIFO)
- What is event delegation in JavaScript?
- Explain how event propagation works in JavaScript. Give an example.
- What is hoisting?
- How would you emulate a stack in JavaScript?
- How would you emulate a queue in JavaScript?
- If the DOM has n nodes, and is a balanced binary tree, how long does it take to traverse the DOM?
These were some of the questions I could remember from the first part. After discussing these we moved on to the coding challenge.
2. For the coding challenge, instead of an algorithm, I was supposed to build a webpage in react that had two buttons and the component switches when the buttons are clicked.
Here is how I tackled it:
Since she asked for buttons I first thought about creating a Navbar component to house the buttons.
Then I wanted to Movies component to display the movie name, running time and genres. Since the data that was provided was an array with objects, I knew I had to map through the array to get to what I wanted (title, time, genres). And after looking at the data more closely, genres was a nested array inside the object. An example of the data looked like this:
This is how I created the Movies component:
Then I had to create the Directors component using the same logic:
My App container used Router from react-router-dom to create the different routes.
After I put it together I was able to create this simple site, with buttons that routed to the Movies component and Directors component.
Overall my experience with Skilled was great! My coach had tons of experience and was able to ask me JS questions that I thought were difficult to answer on the fly. She also shared her experiences when hiring developers and what managers look out for. At the end of the interview you are provided with feedback and can also leave feedback for the coach.
I would definitely recommend developers prepping for interviews to check out Skilled!
