The job interview process can be a tough road that can catch job seekers off-guard and cause great opportunities to fall to the wayside. One often over-looked part of the process is the technical interview. Technical Interviews are, for many companies, used for only the top candidates. This is a time-consuming and expensive task for employers and a stressful addition to the interview process for the candidates. “If we have three finalists for a role, this is where we do a technical interview to see who is the most proficient,” says John Reed, Senior Executive Director at Robert Half Technology. Below are a few practice questions from Rich Hein, Senior Managing Editor at CIO. Read the full article here.
Prepare Yourself With These Sample Technical Questions
Tracy Cashman, a technology search consultant with WinterWyman, offers some actual questions and problems that employers use to qualify candidates. Each set of questions will be unique to the position and they will range from the core fundamentals to the higher principles, depending on the role at hand. However, these will give you some insight into what to expect. You can also look online to find some more of the common technical questions associated with your particular arena of knowledge.
Linux Engineer Questions
- If a system fails and has to be rebooted what tool can we use to look at monitoring and CPU usage for the past week?
- If I need to set a U limit parameter higher than what the user is allowed, how do I do it?
- If I want to make sure Init service does not come up at reboot, what do I do?
- I’m adding disk space to a virtual system: How do I make it show up?
- How do you extend a file system in LVM?
.NET Questions
- What are the general page life-cycle stages for an ASP.NET page?
- What is Polymorphism?
- What are some of the advantages of Generics?
- Design a many-To-many relationship between two tables
- Design patterns: What are they, why are they used? Ttalk about a few of them and describe how you have used them in the past?
- What are some of the available .NET collection types? Give a quick comparison of their differences and explain why you would want to use one versus the other?
OOP Design Type Questions
- How would you design a file system using class diagrams? What datastructures would you use and why?
- How would you design an account management system where each account could be an index or a client account? Each account has holdings, each holding has related security information and holdings can consist of multiple lots for pricing purposes. How would you model this?
- How would you design a class structure for animals in a zoo?
Coding Challenge Sample
We are looking for a solution that is compact and runs quickly. What quickly means to us depends on the language you use, but it should take no longer than 500 milliseconds to run. Please use what language you are most comfortable with. However, please know that we do not have Visual Studio so C++ solutions should have the ability to compile with the standard G++.
Problem:
Consider a word as any sequence of capital letters A-Z, not limited to just dictionary words. For any word with at least two different letters there are other words composed of the same letters but in a different order. For instance, stationarily and antiroyalist, which happen to both be dictionary words. For our purpose alianrostily is also a word composed of the same letters as these two. We can then assign a number to every word based on where it falls within an alphabetically sorted list of all words made up of the same set of letters.
One way to do this would be to generate the entire list of words and then find the desired ones, but this would be slow if the word is long. Write a program that takes a word as a command line argument and prints to standard output its number. Do not use the method above of generating the entire list. Your program should be able to accept any word 25 letters or less in length possibly with some letters repeated. It should use no more than 1 gig of memory and take no more than 500 milliseconds to run.
Some companies will have traditional processes and some will give you creative problems to solve. Some have gaming situations or puzzles and many times says Reed, “It’s not about having the right answer, it’s about gaining insight into how you understand a problem and how you approach solving that problem. There’s as much insight there as there is in the question [and] answer?”