An insightful post from Chris Zacharias, who, in his time at Youtube, interviewed hundreds of potential candidates for the position of front end engineer. Thus, he's in a good position to offer some advice on how to recruit them.
The key points are:
- Don't look for a Computer Science degree.
- It's very hard to turn a backend engineer into a front-end engineer.
- Look for generic javascript skills, not just jQuery.
- Good front-end engineers tend to do art too (writing, music, painting...).
- Many good front-end engineers emerge out of the newspaper and print industry.
