As a second interview I get people to sit down and write code...I try to make the problem really technology independent. My programming problems that I have don't really exercise peoples OO abilities. I tend to try and keep the coding problem solvable within 2 hours ish. So, I've struggled to find a problem small enough and involved e...
People in java/.net world has framework which provides methods for sorting a list. In CS, we all might have gone through Bubble/Insertion/Merge/Shell sorting algorithms. Do you write any of it these days? With frameworks in place, do you write code for sorting? Do you think it makes sense to ask people to write code to sort in an inte...
On a recent round of interviews, one interviewer at "a leading brand technology company" asked - as an ice breaker - this question. I thought it was a good question, worth asking (and warning) others. Interesting can mean a multitude of things, so there a few more suggested constraints to make this a valid question: minor cause, majo...
There's been a cluster of Perl-hate on Stack Overflow lately, so I thought I'd bring my "Five things you hate about your favorite language" question to Stack Overflow. Take your favorite language and tell me five things you hate about it. Those might be things that just annoy you, admitted design flaws, recognized performance problems, o...
Hi I had telephone interview question yesterday. The interviewer asked me if I had faced any challenging debugging issue? I told him I once faced a problem debugging someone else's code and it took me 3-4 days to solve that. I used Windbg, symbols and a crash dump to solve the problem. Now is this enough to tell? What is interviewer ex...
We're having a PHP freelancer come by next week, and are assuming he knows his way around PHP. But of course, we would like to make sure. What questions would you ask a candidate in a PHP job interview? Would you have them write some sort of bubblesort op paper, without the aid of a computer? Would you ask array-specific questions, OOP ...
I am interested in finding out what were considered important attributes of a developer in the early days of programming, i.e., 1950s, 1960s, or early 1970s. Post any examples/materials you have: interview questions, developer tests, expected experience, personality assessments, anything that was used to evaluate a programmer before Micr...
There are several topics about what questions will be raised in an interview for a programming job, but none actually talk about a small problem that some companies want: an example program. My question is based on my last job application, where I've been asked to create a simple program and send it to them. Well, this raises several ...
I am currently having a bit of an internal war with myself. I am studying for the MCAD, and for reasons which I won't go in to here, the course has been dragging on for a few years now. The course expires in March of next year (2009) and I am very close to sitting the exam for the Web Developer cert. (70-315). Now, I think I can get th...
I'm interviewing for programmers at the moment, and in one case, we've a chap who comes across extremely well but admits there are gaps in his knowledge. This isn't a problem for us, because we've allowed time for a training period, but we're curious to see how quickly he can pick up new concepts. We've agreed to conduct a sort of "home...
I will be the first to admit that it is my soft skills, and only partially my programming skills, that has got me to where I am today at the director level. I am a good "architect", problem solver, and researcher, and I am very good at designing an application's business rules. However, when it comes down to things like design patterns, ...
Yesterday I had a two-hour technical phone interview (which I passed, woohoo!), but I completely muffed up the following question regarding dynamic binding in Java. And it's doubly puzzling because I use to teach this concept to undergraduates when I was a TA a few years ago, so the prospect that I gave them misinformation is a little d...
1a)Are MS Word and MS PowerPoint different processes or threads of a single process? b)How does a spell checker routine (common to both, word and PowerPoint) used? I mean is the code copied 2 times for each of the processes in the main memory, if they are different processes if they are threads. The question is not specific to Windo...
I am seeking advice on how to ask a generic interview question that would test a candidate's programming aptitude. Is the following question on track or am I way off base? 'Using the data resulting from your completion of the Excel part of this test, write the code in the programming language of your choice, which would yield the averag...
What do you think about purely CS knowledge questions during the interview? What I mean is: Data structures (stacks, queues, lists, trees) Algorithms (sorting, search, shortest path, data compression) Recursion, etc. Unless you have some specific need (search engine implementation, low level no-framework programming), I am struggl...
Let me put it to you this way: I'm a top-notch programmer, but a notoriously bad interviewee. I've flunked 3 interviews consecutively because I get so nervous that my voice tightens at least 2 octaves higher and I start visibly shaking -- mind you, I can handle whatever technical questions the interviewer throws at me in that state, but...
Given a NxN matrix with 0s and 1s. Set every row that contains a 0 to all 0s and set every column that contains a 0 to all 0s. For example 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 results in 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 A Microsoft Engineer told me that there is a solution that involves no extra mem...
If you are taking an interview of an candidate without any prior work experience and want to find out how good he/she is in C++ what are the areas you generally look for ? ...
I was recently asked an interview question on a hypothetical web based booking system and how I would design the database schema to minimize duplication and maximize flexibility. The use case is that a admin would enter the availability of a property into the system. There could be multiple time period set. For example, 1st of April 200...
If you could only ask 1 interview question to determine whether or not to hire a programmer what would it be? Pretty similar to : what is THE best answer interview question... ...