preface
If the business is doing well, the average company’s front-end technology team will gradually become bigger and bigger, with more and more people, and the team will face more and more challenges. As the front-end team TL, it may be time for you to consider 🤔 and train a front-end architect within the team. Or hire an experienced front-end architect to solve technical problems that may arise now or in the future to maintain a stable development and balance of the team’s technical architecture
So how do you interview candidates to see if they have architectural skills or experience?
Front-end architect capability Model
Basic ability
- The ability to determine architectural boundaries
- The ability to balance architectural boundaries and reach consensus with multiple parties
Front-end architect is, of course, a subclass of the architect, in the absence of architecture foundation ability so it is difficult to complete the daily work as an architect, on both counts, actual working experience in architecture from the candidate is three stages to ask questions, answer from the candidate to see whether candidates have the basic ability of working in the field of architecture
Architecture Birth Stage
- Did you participate in the design and implementation of the architecture?
- Describe how the overall architectural design is done, and how many stages are expected? How did it land?
- How to solve the problems encountered during landing?
In general, small and medium-sized business iterations of enterprises do not necessarily exist in this stage. Usually, when enterprises start medium and large projects, there will be architectural design and implementation, such as a business platform, operation platform, intelligent development, cloud IDE, or a certain type of business cloud, or a front-end engineering project, etc. Questions at this stage are asked, You can test whether the candidate has a real lead or worked on a core project as a front-end architect
Framework Development Stage
If the candidate was not involved in the inception phase of the architecture, for example some candidates were involved in a refactoring, or came in during the 2.0 phase of the architecture, then the architecture development phase can ask questions about specific architectural evolution, As I mentioned in my last article, the constant leakage of architectural boundaries is a major cause of architecture’s eventual demise, so we need to examine the candidate’s ability to deal with the leakage of architectural boundaries.
- How did the architecture work at that time? Were there any scenarios that the architecture could not support effectively
- If so, what are the reasons for the reconstruction? What are the problems encountered in the reconstruction? How to solve the problems
- Can you talk about the evolution goals for the next phase of the project architecture and why this is the goal
Such scenarios are common. For example, when a candidate takes over a project similar to the operation center and needs to support intelligent operation, the original architecture may have seeped out at the boundary. For example, there is no separation between the components used to build the operation page and the construction system itself. Or build after the resources and the project itself in together, and no good isolation on the directory, both in logic and physical didn’t do any isolation, means that the whole project internal lack some boundaries, this situation is out of the speed is very fast, with a large number of page is constructed, for example, piling up in project on the server, Some coupling logic lead to performance and problems occur frequently, or because for building components and coupling builder itself, more and more operation accumulation there cannot solve the demand for personalized, similar this kind of circumstance is relying on the project itself the internal architecture of the balance has been unable to continue to maintain, If the candidate is aware of this and does effective refactoring, it can help to understand the process of refactoring, how the candidate thinks about refactoring, how the architecture is patched and improved, and whether there are reinforcement measures, such as logical separation of the project from the product in the original project. And then gradually evolve towards physical isolation.
Architecture death phase
It’s hard to ask valuable questions about this part, but if the candidate has experienced the end of an architecture, ask questions about it
- If you had the opportunity to refactor the architecture, what would you have done and made it usable again?
- If the architecture can no longer be maintained, but the business must continue to support, how to balance?
Through these questions, if the candidate can clearly answer how he demarcates the boundaries of the architecture, for what reasons, the role and value of these boundaries in the actual operation of the architecture, and how to solve the boundary balance and keep the architecture stable and evolvable, I believe that to answer these questions, Candidates must have real experience working with architecture, as these questions cannot be answered by theory alone.
Architectural capabilities in the front-end domain
Through the examination of the candidate’s general competence, it is certain to touch on the specific architectural details of the project that the candidate is actually responsible for. This part is the front-end domain and the deep water area of the front-end architect competency, if the front-end architect competency model is a T word, so it is
General Skills - Boundary thinking - Communication skills - Global Perspective - Adjacent technical fields - Negotiation skills - Project Management - Leadership - Sharing speech writing - Industry knowledge... ---------Front end ability | front-end engineering (front-end project life cycle related technologies)| front-end development framework| front-end programming language| intelligent front-end| front-end standardization|... | Copy the code“
If the front-end architecture as a profession in the game, your energy is your skill points, as you grow older you can order the skill points will be less and less, but you have to believe in some skills will only more and more, so I don’t believe a front-end architect is omnipotent, and always will be the front end of the longitudinal vertical capacity is full, But like I mentioned above, the front-end architect is an architect, so we should consider about the domain of the front of their actual energy and learning ability limited point full one, of course, you also can try all the points, but believe I later you must pk but specialization for one person, but I suggest that all points for general ability, You’ll see why when you’re over 35, and if you have limited energy, it’s a priority to have universal capabilities, at least one in the front end
So candidate if through the general ability of investigation, then enter into the field of the front, can be seen in resumes and candidates describe him go what is the specialization, and then the specialization in-depth digging, but I’m sure the interviewer may not be able to have, so this part of the interview, the general ability to use cross the interview, Don’t hire a front-end engineering architect who specializes in smart projects such as UI customization, operating platforms, etc. That won’t get you anywhere, and it won’t tell you the true depth of the candidate’s front-end expertise.
The details of the front end will be left out, as long as the interviewer knows.
The latter
I know that most of the students in nuggets are actually young, and most of them are still engaged in front-line development work. There are not many older code farmers like me, who are nearly 35 years old. The reality is that generally, those who have worked in architecture or TL, especially those who have a wife and two children, do not have much energy to write articles. In fact, there are many unemployed people like me who are suddenly idle. I hope that if you have many years of working experience and can’t find a job soon, you might as well calm down and write some articles and make some summaries to add some diversified contents to the Nuggets
Maybe you’re more interested in how to grow from a front-line developer to an architect than in this one, and we’ll talk about that in another one, right
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