&gt; All this has nothing to do with said algos. I really think that people who don&#x27;t understand this should not be interviewing frontend engineers.<p>React, Angular, Ember, etc, are all basically just giant tree diffing algorithms. The DOM is a tree. Understanding how to manipulate trees is important. Memorizing algorithms, less so, but it&#x27;s absurd to suggest that front-end developers should get a pass on being able to code generalized solutions to problems.<p>More and more, &quot;front end&quot; is coming to mean &quot;the whole application,&quot; and the difficulty is moving away from the gritty individual DOM manipulations and into writing structured algorithms to process large sets of application data and wrangle state, which you then throw into your deterministic renderer of choice.<p>It sounds like when you say &quot;front end developer,&quot; you might really mean, &quot;person who is comfortable with HTML and CSS.&quot; In that case, sure, that has nothing to do with algorithms, but that person is also not a software developer.