10 ms·

A list of lists of interview questions

284 points by melenaos 8y ago

halfastack 8y ago
I looked over the Linux questions, and they were pretty bad: Q.1: What is the core of Linux Operating System? Shell Kernel Command Script Terminal I mean... If they asked me about that at an interview, that'd be a huge red flag. I wouldn't consider this list when studying for interviews... It is sad for me how many stars and forks this list has. Hopefully, it's much better for other languages/topics.
- kraftman 8y ago
  Is it supposed to be a list of good questions you should ask, or crap questions you should prepare to get asked?
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    The repository name is "awesome-interview-questions". So far, of the 3 lists I've looked at, [1] was a page where someone apparently deleted random swathes of text in the middle of the content and utterly unusable as a result, and [2] and [3] were both full of grammatically poor questions that ask about minutiae of C++, get it wrong, and don't realize that C++11 exists. I think it's supposed to be a list of good questions to ask, but it's actually a compilation of lists that people sent the author with very little to no curation actually done. [1] http://placement.freshersworld.com/power-preparation/technical-interview-questions/C-programming-answers-21419 http://placement.freshersworld.com/power-preparation/technic... [2] https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions [3] http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/419-cpp-interview-questions-answers http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/41... Edit: Just opened up a Java list for #4... and it said that LinkedList was usually better performance over ArrayList. That is not correct; ArrayList is usually better (because of cache locality). So I'm now 4 for 4 on bad lists out of this site.
    - technion 8y ago
      This really seems to be the trend with "Awesome" lists. It's not often they appear to have much curation at all, it's frustrating to see them end up with thousands of stars. Often an order of magnitude more than many open source projects. I quite enjoyed the Erlang questions. Apparently "what is Erlang" is a common Erlang interview question.
      - rwnspace 8y ago
        Generally speaking, I consider them a noobtrap for two reasons. First off, many of the resources are written and submitted by people who have no place teaching others - and are writing almost purely to self-promote and have something to show to employers. Second, even if some of the resources in there are of decently high quality, the probable best schema for how to use and integrate that resource is going to be bound up in a textbook written by Someone Very Important. Along with all the stuff you really need to know anyway. Scrap that, three reasons. Finding and aggregating these kind of links for your personal use is of value: it develops your taste and sense of what resources to veto, and what to collect, and is a meta-skill applicable everywhere you have a search engine and some curiosity. In '17 and early '18 I wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours collecting "the perfect" set of bookmarks for various things I want to learn, and my collection method has basically been to scrape these kinds of lists and apply a surface-level "ooh sounds cool" filter to what I pick up. Obviously, I learned very little doing this, and almost never open such links except as part of a half-hour flight of fancy. Perhaps if you're of intermediate/expert-level, these factors aren't that important to you - if a couple of links are handy they've served their purpose. But you're probably not going to star the repo. It's mostly thousands of perma-beginners who should be opening textbooks and playing with fundamentals in a REPL who are starring this stuff.
- bardan 8y ago
  I'm furrowing my brow at this one: "A file is unable to be restored from tape due to several device and media errors. What is most likely the cause? Media errors usually indicate that the tape media is damaged, or that the tape drive heads need cleaning." I've read a few of the questions from other categories and I really can't say any of them have been "awesome".
- orev 8y ago
  You’d be amazed at how many people apply for jobs and lie on their resumes. Sometimes you need some canary questions to weed those people out. They only seem stupid to you because you know the answers.
ubersoldat2k7 8y ago
Jeez... Why don't we cut the crap and convert this to every single CS school curricula.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  As many comments here have mentioned, they're not very good questions.
BuildTheRobots 8y ago
Impossible to mention a list of interview questions without acknowledging David Thorne's 10 interview questions on 27bslash6. They're almost entirely ridiculous though I've used a couple when interviewing people. "How is this an issue?" and "Are you pro-active or reactive" can both lead to exceptionally telling answers. Or just confusion, despair and upset... but certainly have the possibility to almost.... http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html
- soij09 8y ago
  Surprised to have never heard of him. That was really funny!
  - mercer 8y ago
    If you're new to him, you're in for some fun. The spider article is great: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
- skilled 8y ago
  Man, that is funny as hell! Thanks for sharing.
johnnylambada 8y ago
I looked at the first few Android question lists and the questions were terrible. "What are the four API classes used for sensors?" Are you kidding me?!? I have over 10 years of experience building Android apps and I have no idea of the answer -- and I've probably used them! Along with the thousand other apps and classes in the framework. If someone asked me that question I'd kindly explain that I'm no trivia master, that's what documentation is for and walk away.
- edoceo 8y ago
  If you answered like that, I'd ask if you can start tomorrow.
  - reificator 8y ago
    Yeah, I don't remember is a perfectly valid answer to a question like that IMO. Especially in any language where you have suggestions in your IDE, just remembering where it is would be fine. "Oh yeah that's in the IO.Sensors namespace" or wherever it is. If there are some incredibly common pitfalls or footguns, those are a better test, especially if you can ask something like what the difference between two methods is. But even that is pushing it. Operators, on the other hand, I think are fair game. If you're doing Javascript you'd better be able to tell the difference between `==` and `===`, even if the answer is "== does magic things that surprise people and I don't remember what they are, so I stick to ===".
  - PenguinCoder 8y ago
    You are in the minority. I said something like this, more tactful, in a very recent interview. The question was related to troubleshooting a performance issue on Linux. I answered, with the process and tool I would use and how I thought it would help, what I was looking for etc, high level The interviewer response was along the lines of 'anyone can spout off command names, but what's the flags and parameters, and what do they mean'. I answered I don't know the exact syntax, I'd have to read the man pages or my notes. The interview was cut short and I was removed from consideration. Note, this was not a FANG, was not for SRE or Systems admin type role either. But this was my experience. The majority of interviews want you to repeat trivia bullshit because it makes their job 'easier'.
williesleg 8y ago
I can't imagine any H1B's doing the needful passing any of this.
daniel_iversen 8y ago
More is not better - definitely not in interviews. I only skimmed a couple of bits but there ought always to be more “thinking” questions rather than “remembering/knowledge” questions. And of course if you wanted to use some sort of list of interview questions the cultural non technical questions (which isn’t the scope of that curation I think) are the most important questions of all I believe.
jccalhoun 8y ago
So do job interviews for computing-related jobs only ask about your skills and not your personality, goals, or motivation? Or is this list of "interview questions" just focusing on the computing?
- sgerenser 8y ago
  In my experience with technical interviews, the majority of time is spent on algorithm questions. This was especially bad at a recent interview I had at Google... all 5 interview rounds were almost entirely focused on one or two algorithm questions without any regard to any of the usual open-ended questions about past challenges, motivation, etc. I even had one interviewer start out asking about an interesting technical challenge I had, and basically cut me off after a minute or two with kind of a "ok thats great lets get on with the whiteboard now."
  - throw0u1t 8y ago
    What algorithm questions did they ask?
    - sgerenser 8y ago
      Technically I'm not supposed to reveal the exact questions they ask because they have candidates sign an NDA that covers the questions they ask during an interview. But it really shouldn't be too surprising the type of questions they ask, basically similar to stuff you see on sites like Leetcode or books like Cracking the Coding interview. Although very heavy on trees and graphs as opposed to the easier linked list/string/array type problems. Since it was an embedded position, there was on interview round where they asked some stuff about device drivers and Linux Kernel internals. Overall I thought it was a pretty bad interview for how "smart" Google is supposed to be. I thought Amazon actually did a much better job with interview questions, although they were still very algorithm-heavy.
FabHK 8y ago
From looking over some examples, there doesn't seem to be much curation: many linked articles are pretty bad (typos, and questions that ask for regurgitation, not understanding).
mdeeks 8y ago
A lot of the Python ones seem like fairly poor phone screen questions to me. I like to ask my candidates to solve a realistic problem just like they would if they were working at a desk with me. Q&A where they either know the answer or do not are awful. "Me: Do you know this random fact about python? Them: No... Crickets: <awkward cricket noises>". <-- All I've learned from this is that they don't know that fact and I have zero idea of their coding and problem solving ability. Instead we ask them to pair program on a live IDE and tell them that using Google is okay (copy/pasting code is not). I don't care if you have the standard library memorized, I care if you can solve problems and have the experience to understand how your code can fail and how to make it robust. I care if you can write clean code and then later easily refactor it when I add some complications to the problem. I care if you know how to make it perform well, etc. Testing for Linux skills? Give them a broken VM/Vagrant image and ask them to troubleshoot it, fix it, and install and configure some things. Testing for Ansible/Puppet/Chef knowledge? Ask them to do all of the above and send you the playbook to recreate the fixed image from your broken image. Interviewing is hard and if you haven't spent many hours thinking on it, setting it up, testing it against your current employees, and figuring out some kind of score sheet so it isn't 100% subjective, then everyone is going to have a bad time.
magicalhippo 8y ago
https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions/issues/126 https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questio... Suitable question given the apparent level of the list... As for my current job, I think I only got one directly programming related question. They asked if I had done any work with public key crypto, ie generating and verifying signatures etc. I hadn't, though I knew about the theory and math involved. Maybe they checked out some of the OSS contributions I referenced though... I'll have to ask now.
PJDK 8y ago
In the last set of interviews I've conducted (for junior/midlevel C#/vue.js devs - still hiring if anyone wants to experience this for themselves and is in London - link at the bottom) I've settled on a list that more or less all start with "can you tell me about a time when...", or some other variation on asking about experience. One's I've had a some success with... - A bug that was particularly difficult to track down? (What did you learn? What would you do differently?) - A time you disagreed with your manager/lead? (And a time when in retrospect you think you were right/wrong/got your way/didn't get your way?) - a piece of work took much longer than you anticipated? (what did you/would you do to prevent it happening again?) - you had to quickly learn a new thing? For more specific technical stuff I like to try and find questions that allows someone to show off, rather than tests if they know just one thing. We're using Typescript, C# and TDD... - what new or upcoming features in C# do you most like using/would like to get the chance to use/really wish were out already? - what parts of Typescript do you find most useful vs Javascript? - what makes a good test? - what makes a bad test? I don't see why anyone wants to ask anything of the what does using `ref int foo` mean, especially when there's lots of competition in the job market at the moment! https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs-typescript-2-years-experience-at-appraisd-965026309/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs-typ...
- Dudemann 8y ago
  Those are junior level? How much experience must someone have to be a junior developer in your opinion?
  - PJDK 8y ago
    The people I've been interviewing have had between 1-4 years experience. For people with effectively zero experience these questions have limited value, and I try to tailor the questions to the level of person I'm interviewing.
- inertiatic 8y ago
  That style of question is perhaps the most horrible one to subject someone to. Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc. The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
Anyone have good resources for the whiteboard side of things? Preferably example questions I can go out an practice? I passed a couple of screens with flying colors with the company I'm interviewing at, but now I'm about to go onsite again and do the final whiteboard+general interview. I tend to blank on basic concepts in front of an audience on a whiteboard and then suddenly I'll figure out the answer in seconds after walking out of the interview.
- technion 8y ago
  The resource I'm surprised never gets recommended is buy a whiteboard. I found it incredible how much code you can write and feel competent in before finding out crunch time you literally can't write legibly on a board.
clircle 8y ago
I would like to see something like this for statisticians and data scientists.
jcranmer 8y ago
"Curated" seems rather strong. One of the C++ lists has some let's-trip-you-up-on-trivia questions, with bad answers to boot: > 1. Explain mutable and volatile keywords. > Volatile keywords are designed to prevent the writer from applying optimisations on objects over which he or she has no control. Any objects that are declared as volatile are just omitted from optimisation to prevent values being changed by coding outside the scope of the original code. Volatile is a keyword which tells the compiler to not optimize away loads or stores to the relevant memory location (note that volatile is actually a property of memory accesses, not variables, so there's lots of fun corner cases such as volatile bitfields). Actually, strictly speaking, it was originally meant to tell the compiler that the variable was being used to access memory-mapped I/O registers, but it has been shoe-horned to serve other deoptimization uses as well. > 5. When would you use virtual inheritance? When you want to find bugs in your compiler. :-) Well, the "correct" answer given in the guide is to not use it, but let's explain what it does anyways. The question really should have been to explain the difference between virtual and regular inheritance, although this does venture into obscure trivia territory because I'm not sure I've ever seen someone use it or want to use it in over a decade of C++ programming... > 9. What does the acronym OOPS stand for? This is a worse-than-useless interview question. For starters, I've only heard it as OOP (object-oriented programming), so I have to guess at the S. It has nothing really to do with C++ in particular, especially as C++ has been growing in non-OOP ways in the past decade. Finally, the question doesn't ask to explain or contrast OOP with other paradigms, it just asks you to say that you know its abbreviation. You can know an abbreviation without understanding anything else--I know that SU(3) means Special Unity group of degree 3 but I literally know nothing else about it. > 13. Define an inline function. > This is when a function is prefixed and the keyword ‘inline’ is placed before the function definition. They often work faster than normal functions as the compiler replaces the definition of inline functions at compile-time instead of the referring function definition at run-time. ... That's not correct. In C and C++, a function can only have one definition in general. An inline function--which can be specified either by adding the inline keyword or by giving the function body within the class definition--circumvents this rule, instead supplanting it with a rule that the linker must discard all but one copy of the function. Note that compilers do not generally treat inline as a hint as to whether or not to inline a function, they use their own heuristics instead (incidentally, the register keyword falls in the same boat). Obviously, the function cannot be inlined if its body is not present, but equivalently replacing inline with static would generally have the same impact on inlining.
usaphp 8y ago
> 15. What is the best multilingual plugin for WordPress? What???
sotojuan 8y ago
Rule of thumb - outside the original lists by Sindre Sorhus, most "awesome" GitHub lists are of very poor quality and curation. They're made with good intentions but rarely checked or updated.
Waterluvian 8y ago
Awesome lists shouldn't just be "huge lists". The first item for Python is pretty awful. Spelling and grammar aside, there's no code formatting so some of the examples don't even make sense.
meggar 8y ago
The very first Swift question has a partially incorrect answer. It says that "var array2 = array1" creates a copy of array1. But it's incorrect because a copy isn't actually created until one of them is mutated.
dorianm 8y ago
Looking at Rails, first list, first question: "What does ruby name refer to?" I interpreted the question as: "What does ruby's name refer to?" so I guess the precious stone... but no https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439 https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439 Anyway, this seems exactly what a typical clueless recruiter would ask and try to pattern match the answers to
myegorov 8y ago
Also from the authors: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
n4r9 8y ago
I haven't yet reached the stage of giving interviews but I've given some thought to it. Based on the experiences I've read, it seems that technical proficiency should be addressed in a basic way prior to any in-person interview; the latter can then be devoted to gauging fit and personality. My idea for the technical side is this: procure a fairly subtle, simple, real-life bug that you yourself have had to fix. Ideally it should involve a single class or function and require about an hour for a competent person to fix. Email the code to the candidates along with the parameters that fail, and ask them to resolve the bug and return the code. This tests a lot of skills that should immediately filter out unsuitable candidates - such as code comprehension, bug-finding, and problem-solving - all in a real-world scenario. You can also change up the scenario every couple of months, and very quickly test whether a candidates' code passes. Has anyone come across something similar to this?

284 points by melenaos 8y ago

I looked over the Linux questions, and they were pretty bad: Q.1: What is the core of Linux Operating System? Shell Kernel Command Script Terminal I mean... If they asked me about that at an interview, that'd be a huge red flag. I wouldn't consider this list when studying for interviews... It is sad for me how many stars and forks this list has. Hopefully, it's much better for other languages/topics.

kraftman 8y ago
Is it supposed to be a list of good questions you should ask, or crap questions you should prepare to get asked?
- jcranmer 8y ago
  The repository name is "awesome-interview-questions". So far, of the 3 lists I've looked at, [1] was a page where someone apparently deleted random swathes of text in the middle of the content and utterly unusable as a result, and [2] and [3] were both full of grammatically poor questions that ask about minutiae of C++, get it wrong, and don't realize that C++11 exists. I think it's supposed to be a list of good questions to ask, but it's actually a compilation of lists that people sent the author with very little to no curation actually done. [1] http://placement.freshersworld.com/power-preparation/technical-interview-questions/C-programming-answers-21419 http://placement.freshersworld.com/power-preparation/technic... [2] https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions [3] http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/419-cpp-interview-questions-answers http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/41... Edit: Just opened up a Java list for #4... and it said that LinkedList was usually better performance over ArrayList. That is not correct; ArrayList is usually better (because of cache locality). So I'm now 4 for 4 on bad lists out of this site.
  - technion 8y ago
    This really seems to be the trend with "Awesome" lists. It's not often they appear to have much curation at all, it's frustrating to see them end up with thousands of stars. Often an order of magnitude more than many open source projects. I quite enjoyed the Erlang questions. Apparently "what is Erlang" is a common Erlang interview question.
    - rwnspace 8y ago
      Generally speaking, I consider them a noobtrap for two reasons. First off, many of the resources are written and submitted by people who have no place teaching others - and are writing almost purely to self-promote and have something to show to employers. Second, even if some of the resources in there are of decently high quality, the probable best schema for how to use and integrate that resource is going to be bound up in a textbook written by Someone Very Important. Along with all the stuff you really need to know anyway. Scrap that, three reasons. Finding and aggregating these kind of links for your personal use is of value: it develops your taste and sense of what resources to veto, and what to collect, and is a meta-skill applicable everywhere you have a search engine and some curiosity. In '17 and early '18 I wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours collecting "the perfect" set of bookmarks for various things I want to learn, and my collection method has basically been to scrape these kinds of lists and apply a surface-level "ooh sounds cool" filter to what I pick up. Obviously, I learned very little doing this, and almost never open such links except as part of a half-hour flight of fancy. Perhaps if you're of intermediate/expert-level, these factors aren't that important to you - if a couple of links are handy they've served their purpose. But you're probably not going to star the repo. It's mostly thousands of perma-beginners who should be opening textbooks and playing with fundamentals in a REPL who are starring this stuff.
bardan 8y ago
I'm furrowing my brow at this one: "A file is unable to be restored from tape due to several device and media errors. What is most likely the cause? Media errors usually indicate that the tape media is damaged, or that the tape drive heads need cleaning." I've read a few of the questions from other categories and I really can't say any of them have been "awesome".
orev 8y ago
You’d be amazed at how many people apply for jobs and lie on their resumes. Sometimes you need some canary questions to weed those people out. They only seem stupid to you because you know the answers.

ubersoldat2k7 8y ago

Jeez... Why don't we cut the crap and convert this to every single CS school curricula.

saagarjha 8y ago
As many comments here have mentioned, they're not very good questions.

BuildTheRobots 8y ago

Impossible to mention a list of interview questions without acknowledging David Thorne's 10 interview questions on 27bslash6. They're almost entirely ridiculous though I've used a couple when interviewing people. "How is this an issue?" and "Are you pro-active or reactive" can both lead to exceptionally telling answers. Or just confusion, despair and upset... but certainly have the possibility to almost.... http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html http://www.27bslash6.com/interviews.html

soij09 8y ago
Surprised to have never heard of him. That was really funny!
- mercer 8y ago
  If you're new to him, you're in for some fun. The spider article is great: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html
skilled 8y ago
Man, that is funny as hell! Thanks for sharing.

johnnylambada 8y ago

I looked at the first few Android question lists and the questions were terrible. "What are the four API classes used for sensors?" Are you kidding me?!? I have over 10 years of experience building Android apps and I have no idea of the answer -- and I've probably used them! Along with the thousand other apps and classes in the framework. If someone asked me that question I'd kindly explain that I'm no trivia master, that's what documentation is for and walk away.

edoceo 8y ago
If you answered like that, I'd ask if you can start tomorrow.
- reificator 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't remember is a perfectly valid answer to a question like that IMO. Especially in any language where you have suggestions in your IDE, just remembering where it is would be fine. "Oh yeah that's in the IO.Sensors namespace" or wherever it is. If there are some incredibly common pitfalls or footguns, those are a better test, especially if you can ask something like what the difference between two methods is. But even that is pushing it. Operators, on the other hand, I think are fair game. If you're doing Javascript you'd better be able to tell the difference between `==` and `===`, even if the answer is "== does magic things that surprise people and I don't remember what they are, so I stick to ===".
- PenguinCoder 8y ago
  You are in the minority. I said something like this, more tactful, in a very recent interview. The question was related to troubleshooting a performance issue on Linux. I answered, with the process and tool I would use and how I thought it would help, what I was looking for etc, high level The interviewer response was along the lines of 'anyone can spout off command names, but what's the flags and parameters, and what do they mean'. I answered I don't know the exact syntax, I'd have to read the man pages or my notes. The interview was cut short and I was removed from consideration. Note, this was not a FANG, was not for SRE or Systems admin type role either. But this was my experience. The majority of interviews want you to repeat trivia bullshit because it makes their job 'easier'.

williesleg 8y ago

I can't imagine any H1B's doing the needful passing any of this.

daniel_iversen 8y ago

More is not better - definitely not in interviews. I only skimmed a couple of bits but there ought always to be more “thinking” questions rather than “remembering/knowledge” questions. And of course if you wanted to use some sort of list of interview questions the cultural non technical questions (which isn’t the scope of that curation I think) are the most important questions of all I believe.

jccalhoun 8y ago

So do job interviews for computing-related jobs only ask about your skills and not your personality, goals, or motivation? Or is this list of "interview questions" just focusing on the computing?

sgerenser 8y ago
In my experience with technical interviews, the majority of time is spent on algorithm questions. This was especially bad at a recent interview I had at Google... all 5 interview rounds were almost entirely focused on one or two algorithm questions without any regard to any of the usual open-ended questions about past challenges, motivation, etc. I even had one interviewer start out asking about an interesting technical challenge I had, and basically cut me off after a minute or two with kind of a "ok thats great lets get on with the whiteboard now."
- throw0u1t 8y ago
  What algorithm questions did they ask?
  - sgerenser 8y ago
    Technically I'm not supposed to reveal the exact questions they ask because they have candidates sign an NDA that covers the questions they ask during an interview. But it really shouldn't be too surprising the type of questions they ask, basically similar to stuff you see on sites like Leetcode or books like Cracking the Coding interview. Although very heavy on trees and graphs as opposed to the easier linked list/string/array type problems. Since it was an embedded position, there was on interview round where they asked some stuff about device drivers and Linux Kernel internals. Overall I thought it was a pretty bad interview for how "smart" Google is supposed to be. I thought Amazon actually did a much better job with interview questions, although they were still very algorithm-heavy.

FabHK 8y ago

From looking over some examples, there doesn't seem to be much curation: many linked articles are pretty bad (typos, and questions that ask for regurgitation, not understanding).

mdeeks 8y ago

A lot of the Python ones seem like fairly poor phone screen questions to me. I like to ask my candidates to solve a realistic problem just like they would if they were working at a desk with me. Q&A where they either know the answer or do not are awful. "Me: Do you know this random fact about python? Them: No... Crickets: <awkward cricket noises>". <-- All I've learned from this is that they don't know that fact and I have zero idea of their coding and problem solving ability. Instead we ask them to pair program on a live IDE and tell them that using Google is okay (copy/pasting code is not). I don't care if you have the standard library memorized, I care if you can solve problems and have the experience to understand how your code can fail and how to make it robust. I care if you can write clean code and then later easily refactor it when I add some complications to the problem. I care if you know how to make it perform well, etc. Testing for Linux skills? Give them a broken VM/Vagrant image and ask them to troubleshoot it, fix it, and install and configure some things. Testing for Ansible/Puppet/Chef knowledge? Ask them to do all of the above and send you the playbook to recreate the fixed image from your broken image. Interviewing is hard and if you haven't spent many hours thinking on it, setting it up, testing it against your current employees, and figuring out some kind of score sheet so it isn't 100% subjective, then everyone is going to have a bad time.

magicalhippo 8y ago

https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questions/issues/126 https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interview-questio... Suitable question given the apparent level of the list... As for my current job, I think I only got one directly programming related question. They asked if I had done any work with public key crypto, ie generating and verifying signatures etc. I hadn't, though I knew about the theory and math involved. Maybe they checked out some of the OSS contributions I referenced though... I'll have to ask now.

PJDK 8y ago

In the last set of interviews I've conducted (for junior/midlevel C#/vue.js devs - still hiring if anyone wants to experience this for themselves and is in London - link at the bottom) I've settled on a list that more or less all start with "can you tell me about a time when...", or some other variation on asking about experience. One's I've had a some success with... - A bug that was particularly difficult to track down? (What did you learn? What would you do differently?) - A time you disagreed with your manager/lead? (And a time when in retrospect you think you were right/wrong/got your way/didn't get your way?) - a piece of work took much longer than you anticipated? (what did you/would you do to prevent it happening again?) - you had to quickly learn a new thing? For more specific technical stuff I like to try and find questions that allows someone to show off, rather than tests if they know just one thing. We're using Typescript, C# and TDD... - what new or upcoming features in C# do you most like using/would like to get the chance to use/really wish were out already? - what parts of Typescript do you find most useful vs Javascript? - what makes a good test? - what makes a bad test? I don't see why anyone wants to ask anything of the what does using `ref int foo` mean, especially when there's lots of competition in the job market at the moment! https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs-typescript-2-years-experience-at-appraisd-965026309/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/full-stack-c%23-vuejs-typ...

Dudemann 8y ago
Those are junior level? How much experience must someone have to be a junior developer in your opinion?
- PJDK 8y ago
  The people I've been interviewing have had between 1-4 years experience. For people with effectively zero experience these questions have limited value, and I try to tailor the questions to the level of person I'm interviewing.
inertiatic 8y ago
That style of question is perhaps the most horrible one to subject someone to. Instead of focusing on the task of talking to someone, you end up trying to recollect instances of each kind of event, evaluate them on whether you can talk about them openly, whether they can sound impressive even if they actually are, whether they will sound plausible, whether you can recall enough details to avoid being called out as a bullshitter etc. The people who can appear to answer these questions best are either a) prepared for them specifically or b) psychopaths who can comfortably lie and twist stories with a smile on their face on the spot.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

Anyone have good resources for the whiteboard side of things? Preferably example questions I can go out an practice? I passed a couple of screens with flying colors with the company I'm interviewing at, but now I'm about to go onsite again and do the final whiteboard+general interview. I tend to blank on basic concepts in front of an audience on a whiteboard and then suddenly I'll figure out the answer in seconds after walking out of the interview.

technion 8y ago
The resource I'm surprised never gets recommended is buy a whiteboard. I found it incredible how much code you can write and feel competent in before finding out crunch time you literally can't write legibly on a board.

clircle 8y ago

I would like to see something like this for statisticians and data scientists.

jcranmer 8y ago

"Curated" seems rather strong. One of the C++ lists has some let's-trip-you-up-on-trivia questions, with bad answers to boot: > 1. Explain mutable and volatile keywords. > Volatile keywords are designed to prevent the writer from applying optimisations on objects over which he or she has no control. Any objects that are declared as volatile are just omitted from optimisation to prevent values being changed by coding outside the scope of the original code. Volatile is a keyword which tells the compiler to not optimize away loads or stores to the relevant memory location (note that volatile is actually a property of memory accesses, not variables, so there's lots of fun corner cases such as volatile bitfields). Actually, strictly speaking, it was originally meant to tell the compiler that the variable was being used to access memory-mapped I/O registers, but it has been shoe-horned to serve other deoptimization uses as well. > 5. When would you use virtual inheritance? When you want to find bugs in your compiler. :-) Well, the "correct" answer given in the guide is to not use it, but let's explain what it does anyways. The question really should have been to explain the difference between virtual and regular inheritance, although this does venture into obscure trivia territory because I'm not sure I've ever seen someone use it or want to use it in over a decade of C++ programming... > 9. What does the acronym OOPS stand for? This is a worse-than-useless interview question. For starters, I've only heard it as OOP (object-oriented programming), so I have to guess at the S. It has nothing really to do with C++ in particular, especially as C++ has been growing in non-OOP ways in the past decade. Finally, the question doesn't ask to explain or contrast OOP with other paradigms, it just asks you to say that you know its abbreviation. You can know an abbreviation without understanding anything else--I know that SU(3) means Special Unity group of degree 3 but I literally know nothing else about it. > 13. Define an inline function. > This is when a function is prefixed and the keyword ‘inline’ is placed before the function definition. They often work faster than normal functions as the compiler replaces the definition of inline functions at compile-time instead of the referring function definition at run-time. ... That's not correct. In C and C++, a function can only have one definition in general. An inline function--which can be specified either by adding the inline keyword or by giving the function body within the class definition--circumvents this rule, instead supplanting it with a rule that the linker must discard all but one copy of the function. Note that compilers do not generally treat inline as a hint as to whether or not to inline a function, they use their own heuristics instead (incidentally, the register keyword falls in the same boat). Obviously, the function cannot be inlined if its body is not present, but equivalently replacing inline with static would generally have the same impact on inlining.

usaphp 8y ago

> 15. What is the best multilingual plugin for WordPress? What???

sotojuan 8y ago

Rule of thumb - outside the original lists by Sindre Sorhus, most "awesome" GitHub lists are of very poor quality and curation. They're made with good intentions but rarely checked or updated.

Waterluvian 8y ago

Awesome lists shouldn't just be "huge lists". The first item for Python is pretty awful. Spelling and grammar aside, there's no code formatting so some of the examples don't even make sense.

meggar 8y ago

The very first Swift question has a partially incorrect answer. It says that "var array2 = array1" creates a copy of array1. But it's incorrect because a copy isn't actually created until one of them is mutated.

dorianm 8y ago

Looking at Rails, first list, first question: "What does ruby name refer to?" I interpreted the question as: "What does ruby's name refer to?" so I guess the precious stone... but no https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439 https://www.careerride.com/view.aspx?id=2439 Anyway, this seems exactly what a typical clueless recruiter would ask and try to pattern match the answers to

myegorov 8y ago

Also from the authors: Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

n4r9 8y ago

I haven't yet reached the stage of giving interviews but I've given some thought to it. Based on the experiences I've read, it seems that technical proficiency should be addressed in a basic way prior to any in-person interview; the latter can then be devoted to gauging fit and personality. My idea for the technical side is this: procure a fairly subtle, simple, real-life bug that you yourself have had to fix. Ideally it should involve a single class or function and require about an hour for a competent person to fix. Email the code to the candidates along with the parameters that fail, and ask them to resolve the bug and return the code. This tests a lot of skills that should immediately filter out unsuitable candidates - such as code comprehension, bug-finding, and problem-solving - all in a real-world scenario. You can also change up the scenario every couple of months, and very quickly test whether a candidates' code passes. Has anyone come across something similar to this?