Does anyone know of some good resources for practice coding questions typically asked in interviews. I know of topcoder.com which is kind of fun to use to exercise your algorithms. And I have seen the occasional test set on company websites. Any others?
Edit: Also found in my bookmarks ...
TopCoder is quite hardcore actually, possibly a little OTT for most interviews! However the quality of the algo questions is phenominal.
I find Michael Pryor's (co-founder of Fog Creek, Joel Spolsky's company) Tech Interview site very good.
Steve Yegge's Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions article has some great questions and interview advice there as does his Get that Job at Google article.
Wu::Riddles also has a lot of good riddle-type questions you might be asked on it too.
Scott Hanselman has a couple of good posts about ASP.NET interview question and general .NET questions:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ASPNETInterviewQuestions.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhatGreatNETDevelopersOughtToKnowMoreNETInterviewQuestions.aspx
This is a classic site with a whole bunch of riddles, algorithms, etc. used in Microsoft interviews:
http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm
I've been working through Project Euler in my spare time for fun and it's a good brain trainer if nothing else.
If you can, it might be a good idea to talk with other folks who've interviewed at this place and see how they ask programming questions. Some places will have you write code on the computer while others expect you to do it on a whiteboard or a piece of paper. Writing code by hand isn't something most of us practice, and it can be difficult, especially if you're used to relying intellisense or other features of your editor or IDE. It might be worth doing some longhand coding as practice.
One of my favourites is to ask
What happens when you enter the following command at a Unix prompt:
cp *
and hit return.
I'm not saying that programming questions aren't important, but I'd spend more time worrying about the business side of the job you're hiring for.
Do you know what the company does? Do you know what they want you to do? Can you do it? Can you do it in a way that makes the company money? Are you going to get along with other people on the team, so that the hiring manager doesn't have to waste his time dealing with personnel problems?
Technical competence is important in an interview, sure, but what's going to put you ahead of everyone else is making the interviewer (who I hope is the hiring manager) know that you're going to play ball and be part of the team.
Another way to show that you are a competent programmer, which is most of why there are programming questions, is to bring in a portfolio of your work. Bring in source code that you've worked on in the past. Ultimately, programming interview questions are auditions where you perform stunts, but showing a portfolio of code you've worked on in the past will show that you can actually do the work that needs to be done.
This is a big hot-button topic of mine, since I'm writing a book about job hunting for techies. See my website at theworkinggeek.com.
Careercup.com has a ton of interview questions posted by people who had interviews at places like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. Good resource if you want to prepare for a programming interview.
It's obviously a good idea to cover your basics - sql, data structs, os concepts, and whatever languages you'd be expected to code in...it's amazing how many 'programmers' out there don't know the simple basics.
Here's a good site to help you cover some basics, w/ a few advanced questions:
http://www.programmerinterview.com is a great resource - clear explanations, real questions from actual programmer interviews
http://www.programminginterview.com contains a compilation of various programming interview questions and answers at that should prove helpful.
CareerCup is definitely the best resource. Thousands of interview questions from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. And the CareerCup book is great too.
http://www.projecteureka.org/ is a compendium of problems (not only computer problems).
The book Programming Interviews Exposed very effectively covers some of the most common programming interview questions.
"Programing Pearls" by Jon Bentley is one of the greatest books I have ever read for programming interview preparation. Other than interview prep, it's a great programming book in itself.
Best technical interview question collection I have come across...
http://www.thecareerplus.com/index.php?page=resources&cat=10
Some very good technical interview questions and quiz are available at Skill-guru
It has conceptual questions as well as coding questions as well. You can compare your results with others who have taken the test