How to pass an interview without time
Having an interview might be a source of stress for a lot of people. Actually, you don’t always know what is the company hiring process. Is it only a face-to-face meeting ? With a technical test behind ? Some offers posted are very clear about it, but not every time.
The offer
In my case, I was looking for frontend opportunities as a freelancer aside my job at Unflux. I was used to word of mouth to find missions, or Malt more rarely. This time I was hanging out on Twitter and a guy posted about his seek of Three.js related jobs. I checked the answer as I was interested in it too and saw someone telling him his agency was looking for junior developers. When looking at the agency website, I saw it was a really good one, with cool projects. I texted him to have more informations.
Quickly, I have been invited to call with someone of the agency who was very interested in my profile. We talked about a lot of things and I was really excited by the job, the interviewer seemed too. At the end, he asked me to realize a technical test.
The test
Their technical stack was really cool : last technologies, good and consistent choices… I told them I had a lack of experience with some of what they used and it seemed to not be an issue. The agency sent me the test, a simple Figma file with a Notion including all the necessary informations.
It was a huge one : a quite large landing page with half complex layout. It was using some advanced CSS property but not something I was not used too. The stack was imposed : Next, Tailwind and deployed on Vercel. We had to imagine and code animations & responsive. Also, all Lighthouse scores had to be at least 95.
A good challenge in sum. But there was one issue : I was on vacation two days later and had to work for my agency the remaining days.
Here is how I managed to handle this.
What I delivered
I was not used to Tailwind (like, at all) and I wasn’t going to have time to create awesome animations. Then I created a Next project, installed (and configured like a noob) Tailwind but most of all I made a Notion document dedicated to this : I was going to write a lot.
I rushed the integration part to have in few hours a V1 completely functional. I made a minimal responsive and it was set. Then I started fixing some issues especially due to the usage of backdrop-filter & made it as close to 100% as possible for each Lighthouse score.
Now, the idea was to do exactly as I do for my personal or entreprise-grade projects : write all I wanted to do, all what needed to be fix & with some leads on the origins of the problems. As well, I wrote some of my questionings for exemple about the Tailwind usage.
Here are some examples of what I wrote in this document :
Okay. But didn’t that take as much or more time than correcting/developing it all ? Actually not, by far.
I wrote them quickly during the process, not at the end. I didn’t pay that much attention to my way of writing or anything else. It was really the way I was seeing the project, It’s the most important.
What’s the point ?
By delivering your unfinished code & detailled document of your thoughts. You give an overview of your coding skills, and of the way you imagine or understand a project. You don’t just deliver something not completed. It tells a lot about your soft-skills.
