Ask HN: Are my technical interview questions too hard?
I don&#x27;t do frontend but they all sound fairly easy to me, although 9 is odd (I&#x27;m assuming you want people to compute timeouts? To prove they&#x27;re decent at arithmetic? In which order should the balls animate, row-first or column-first?).<p>10 is filtering out people who have anxiety about doing things in an interview that they don&#x27;t yet know how to do -- if your work environment doesn&#x27;t require learning something brand new while a manager looks over your shoulder, you may be better off having it as a homework assignment.<p>11 is fine but the people who froze on 9 and 10 because they didn&#x27;t understand 9, don&#x27;t like math, had their brain freeze up on them at the &quot;I don&#x27;t know what async.js is!!!&quot; step, or something else don&#x27;t get to it.<p>In addition, while I would be able to do this in an hour, the fact that there are 11 points may be pre-emptively stressing some people (some people get anxious at long lists of tasks, time-limited, that don&#x27;t entirely fit in their working memory), and things like reading through documentation can take a bunch more time if someone is more thorough or less efficient at searching (prefers tutorials to documentation, has trouble googling &quot;async.js&quot; because of e.g. blog posts on ajax hogging up their search results page), if someone&#x27;s eyes are tired (at this point they have been coding at least half an hour), and so on.<p>My suggestions would be, present the questions 1 by 1 not 11 at once, verbally in addition to having the current question in writing. At the looking up docs steps, have the link to the docs ready, or otherwise give a heads-up to the interviewees before the interview (&quot;you may want to read up on async.js as preparation&quot;). Otherwise, give the same exercise as homework.<p>After questions 1-8, if the candidate is satisfactory, say &quot;great job! I only have a few more questions&quot;, thank them for their patience, generally validate their good answers. Make them feel like you&#x27;re asking for their help vs. just evaluating them.