{"id":2494,"date":"2016-07-29T11:58:42","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T11:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/?p=2494"},"modified":"2016-07-29T03:28:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T03:28:08","slug":"interview-questions-technical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/2016\/07\/29\/interview-questions-technical\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview Questions: Technical"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing about interview questions recently<\/a>, most recently about ‘behavioural’ and ‘Situational’ questions. If you recall:<\/p>\n

\u2018Behavioural\u2019 questions ask \u2018Describe a time when you encountered a problem like this\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018Situational\u2019 questions ask \u2018Given this situation, how would you solve it?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Technical\u2019 questions ask \u2018Solve this defined problem for me.\u2019<\/p>\n

Today, I want to talk about ‘Technical’ questions. This includes two types:<\/p>\n

‘Problem Solving’ questions, where the interviewer asks a technical question, and expects you to go through some process to solve it, similar in some way to what one would do in a job in the field.<\/p>\n

‘Knowledge’ questions, where the interviewer asks specific questions about your field of study or work. For a programming job, they might be about memory management or data structures, for HR, they might be about what is legal or accepted practice in the jurisdiction in question, etc…<\/p>\n

(Note that these generally don’t include questions about a resume, which I would group under the ‘Behavioural’ umbrella, as the interviewee is expected to tell a story about them.)<\/p>\n

So what is an interviewer looking for in these questions?<\/p>\n

For both of these questions, the interviewer is looking for command of the subject matter and problem solving ability. There’s a whole smear of possible questions between these two extremes. (‘What is an array’ to ‘Design LinkedIn’.)<\/p>\n

For basic knowledge questions, it would probably suffice to re-read a textbook, or read (and understand!) a glossary of the topics one would be interviewed in.<\/p>\n

For ‘Problem Solving’ questions, answers are generally more involved.<\/p>\n

Generally, the interviewee is given a problem statement:<\/p>\n

“Write a program which counts from 1 to 100, and outputs ‘Fizz’ when the number is a multiple of 3 and ‘Buzz’ when the number is a multiple of 5.”<\/p>\n

This problem statement may or may not be well defined, so it falls on the interviewee to ask questions until it is adequately defined:<\/p>\n

“Does it also print the number when it is a multiple of 3 or 5?” “Is proper syntax required?” “What language?”<\/p>\n

(This also makes sure that the interviewer and the interviewee are on the same page.)<\/p>\n

I like to draw a large diagram, and\/or write down my assumptions in the upper-left corner when doing problems like this. Makes things explicit, people can see what you’re thinking.<\/p>\n

One of my best bosses described his best programmer as ‘having a reason for every single line of code’. Talking through one’s code as it’s being written can help with this.<\/p>\n

So:<\/p>\n

Write down assumptions
\nDraw a big diagram
\nState the overall algorithm
\nWrite down the solution, while talking about it
\nThink about corner cases, run an example through in your head.<\/p>\n

Next time, we’ll talk some other types of questions, the kinds that are known to be not as predictive, but that interviewers still ask anyways, for various reasons. Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing about interview questions recently, most recently about ‘behavioural’ and ‘Situational’ questions. If you recall: \u2018Behavioural\u2019 questions ask \u2018Describe a time when you encountered a problem like this\u2019. \u2018Situational\u2019 questions ask \u2018Given this situation, how would you solve it?\u2019 \u2018Technical\u2019 questions ask \u2018Solve this defined problem for me.\u2019 Today, I want to talk … Continue reading Interview Questions: Technical<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37,30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2494"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2508,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2494\/revisions\/2508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nayrb.org\/~blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}