Hello folks,
I recently had the opportunity to interview at H&M. for the Frontend Engineer position having experience of 4.5+ years in Industry. I will share my Interview Experience in this post.
Although I had applied for the Senior Frontend Engineer role, they asked that they give me a Software Engineer - Frontend title because senior roles require 5-8 years of experience.
How did I get to know about this opportunity?
The recruiter had called me directly after seeing my profile on Naukari.com It was more like a phone screen round. The recruiter was checking whether I was a good fit for the role they were hiring for. So She asked a few questions related to the Performance of applications like Lighthouse Report, First Contentful Paint (FCP), whether have I used TypeScript or not, etc.
Interview Rounds
JavaScript & DSA Round
Managerial Round
JavaScript & DSA Round
Duration: 60 minutes
There are two interviewers in this round and it started with a short introduction from each one of us. Then One of the folks start asking basic DSA questions to reverse a string without using any built-in methods. He continued with binary search and their time and space complexity. I quickly solved the problems and also answered their questions related to algorithms.
Then, The other folks asked questions related to Core JavaScript concepts like Closures, Promises, Event-loop etc. They have given me output-based questions related to these topics and I explained them clearly and gave the correct answers to given problems.
The discussion further continued with the component design section. One of them shared a sample Product Detail Page from the H&M website. They asked about my approach to design this component which is a pretty standard product detail page consisting of a title, description, price, CTA button, and multiple images.
I explained my approach and they continued with follow-up questions especially related to image optimization techniques. I have told them that we can use lazy load or will use CDN ( Content Delivery Networks ) which serves images across multiple servers worldwide, reducing latency and improving loading speeds for users from different regions. We can also use certain libraries for image components like react-lazy-load-image-component, react-responsive-image, etc.
The next set of questions involved CSS. I was asked how to set the image in a card of the same size on a product page where multiple images will be rendered of different sizes.
The interviewer then moved on to React questions, including different hooks like useEffect, useState, useCallback, and useRef and their relationship with the life-cycle of class-based react components. I explained them with examples and they are satisfied with my explanation.
After this, we had little time because I had taken a little extra time to explain my approach to component design so they quickly asked questions related to testing.
I told them that I am using React Testing Library (RTL) and Jest for Unit Testing and Cypress for Integration Testing.
They are also asking about CI/CD deployments and I have told them that I have not worked much on CI/CD because different teams take care of deployment but I had explained a little about git-yaml files.
Managerial Round
This round also started with a brief introduction from both ends and I explained about various projects which I have worked on in the past. He also started with the same questions about image optimization techniques and further performance optimization in React. This round was more in-depth technical and had discussions around accessibility, performance, and security-related questions on web applications. He asked me questions related to state management, Context API, and cookies. I was able to answer most of them but I was not confident enough on the performance part.
Then He shared a problem statement in React to implement an input search box and use debouncing. I got stuck in implementing debouncing so I was not able to gave proper expected results but he was kind enough to give some hints and I finally solved it.
After this, we had a small discussion about the roles and responsibilities of the developer, work culture, and expectations from the required roles that I am hiring for.
I was more interested in Senior Engineer roles but he explained to me that they have more responsibility and they act as Independent and team contributors to the overall project.
Conclusion
After a few days, I got confirmation from my recruiter that I had cleared the final round and they were interested in making an offer to me. I have accepted the Offer letter and hope to join my first Retail-based company.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. You can connect with me on X, LinkedIn and GitHub.
Have a great day and happy coding! :)