How To Answer A Programming Interview Question And Look Good Doing It | Skorks

How To Answer A Programming Interview Question And Look Good Doing It

Rather than continuing to talk about how hardcore developers should have hardcore math fu, I'd like to shift the focus a little to softer skills (although, as I said, I will come back to math stuff often). I believe that technical people should place even more of an emphasis on soft/people skills than non-techies (I mentioned this in one of the comments to my last post). I will expand on my reasons for this in a later post. In the meantime let's just take it as a given and look at the value of these skills in a technical interview situation.

The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions | steveyegge2

The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions - steveyegge2

I've been on a lot of SDE interview loops lately where the candidate failed miserably: not-inclined votes all around, even from the phone screeners who brought the person in initially.
It's usually pretty obvious when the candidate should have been eliminated during the phone screens. Well, it's obvious in retrospect, anyway: during the interviews, we find some horrible flaw in the candidate which, had anyone thought to ask about it during the phone screen, would surely have disqualified the person.
But we didn't ask. So the candidate came in for interviews and wound up wasting everyone's time.

Crossbrowser » Things you should know when interviewing for a programming job

Crossbrowser » Things you should know when interviewing for a programming job

I was browsing through the Programmers stack exchange Q&A website yesterday and I stumbled upon a question about the fairness or unfairness of some interview questions that the candidate was asked to answer. Basically, the candidate was asked to answer questions out of his field of competence and felt cheated by the interview. In all fairness, he was a recent graduate and probably didn’t have that much experience interviewing.

In his question, he mentioned that he wanted to write the company to tell them about the unfairness of the questions. Fortunately, the Programmers community responded well and told him that this was not the right thing to do, however a few people did agree with him. Since he might not be the only one feeling that way, I decided to write a few (non-technical) things that every programmer should know when applying for a programming job.