These questions remind me of the time when I took AP Computer Science AB, many years ago (10 years ago to be exact Freshman year). To be honest, many of these

These questions remind me of the time when I took AP Computer Science AB, many years ago (10 years ago to be exact Freshman year). To be honest, many of these concepts are good to know, but I find a much more useful test is to test them on something that they probably haven't used before, especially a technology that you use in your project. For instance, our project uses a good deal of Jabber, so we test our applicants if they can write a program to act as a bot responding to the Jabber message "ping" with "pong." It tests their ability to develop rapidly and to justify their choice of a library and how fast they can pickup our technology. It's been a great filter as well as a useful test to see if they can assemble a solution on their own. Even non-working solutions work well for us because we can examine their thought process. Asking them to develop a sort solution isn't useful for us as much as seeing if they can develop code relevant to the components we use--because, let's face it; you aren't going to be writing your own string class from scratch, but it is good to know how one works. And in our case, they'll learn about XMPP/Jabber if successful--and it will test to see if they are willing to learn. Seeing which library they use is also interesting, because it tests their system design skills, and in some cases, will indicate if they can make good design decisions. But if we do have doubts about them being able to assemble a program, we will test them computer science questions, but in the meantime, we want to see if they can engineer a solution. But if you are looking for a low-level programmer to develop you a compiler from scratch, maybe these are the right questions to ask. But we don't expect our applicants to build a hammer; we want them to know how it works, but we don't expect them to build us one. I guess if we need a hammer maker, we will find one, but if we need an applications programmer, we will have them use the hammer. Just like your engineer knows how a spectrum analyzer works, but won't be expected to build one. Unless you are hiring them to do that.