Pre-interview Questions
1. What relationship does inheritance model?
2. Explain multiple inheritance.
3. What is the singleton pattern? What is the abstract factory pattern? What is the iterator pattern?
4. What is an abstract base class?
Common Knowledge Questions
General Questions
1. What is your philospohy of programming?
2. How do you know where to put code for a particular feature or piece of functionality?
3. How do you try to make your programs easier to debug, maintain, and modify?
4. How do you decide upon and describe the architecture for a large program?
5. Describe what coupling and cohesion mean and how you use them?
6. What is the difference between little and big endian? Why do you care??
7. What is a shadow register??
8. What is a spinlock? How is it implemented??
9. What does the keyword "volatile" mean??
10. How do you handle inter-task synchronization? What is a semaphore? What are the different types of semaphores?
11. Explain priority inversion.
12. What is network-byte order?
13. What should you be aware of in an ISR?
14. When do you use Task Locks, Mutex, Interrupt Locks?
15. What is big O notation? How do you use it?
16. Which do you prefer: manifest or latent types? Why?
17. What commenting style do you think is appropriate? Why?
18. What sort of documentation artifacts do you like to produce? Why?
19. Do you think exceptions are good, or bad? Why?
20. Explain transactions.
21. What is a left outer join?
22. Create Simple Text Calculator that takes 1+2*3 and prints 7
Professionalism Questions
1. What publications do you read?
2. What news groups do you read?
3. How do maintain and improve your skill level?
Process Questions
1. What is your ideal programming process? Don't give me what you have done before. What is your ideal?
2. Describe an Agile style process.
Programming Questions
1. Reverse a string in place
2. Reverse a linked list
3. Count all the bits that are on in a byte more info
4. Binary search
5. Find the longest run in a string
6. atoi
7. itoa
8. How do you evalute the solutions to your solution? How do you know if they are good or bad?
Character Questions
1. Do you often make mistakes? If so, tell me one you particularly remember. If somone says they don't make mistakes then they should not be hired.
Comprehension Questions
1. Get a piece of code with a bug in it and have them find the bug and describe how they would find it. (for example )
2. Have them explain a piece of code.
3. Pair program with candidate on a simple problem.
Project Questions
1. What are the keys to project success?
Weird Questions
1. Explain a database to a young child.
2. Explain the Internet to your grandparents
3. What is your favorite web site? Why? Now improve it.
4. Steve Jobs calls and asks you to improve the iPod. Go.
5. Youre in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake.
6. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake goes up, goes down, stays the same?
7. How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
8. Why are manhole covers round?
Advanced Questions
1. Who is Brad Cox?
2. Who is Grady Booch?
3. Who is Donald Knuth?
4. Who is Larry Constatine?
5. Who is Parnas?
6. Who is Turing?