Of interviews, and interviewers Part 3: Meltdown for an intervieweeNow let's look at the problems of interviewees. If like me you rely heavily on your tools you are going to have problems at a technical interview. Ditto if you are used to methodically thinking through and planning what you are going to write. Most interviews are like quiz shows, there is no time for thought. I'm a sloppy coder, and my IDE settings reflect that, with maximum compiler warnings, using structures that will show up errors rapidly, non-linear writing (I think faster than I type, so I stack missing bits up and go back and put them in when I finish the current block - try doing that on a white board...), and unit tests. Come to think of it, I've never been to an interview where the question allowed time for a test and debugging, before the result was evaluated. The myth of the possibility of writing bug free software without debugging clearly lives on in the hearts of interviewers! All interviewees should learn, off by heart, how to write recursive and iterative functions to generate the Fibonacci series. This is a must. It's probable you will have never used recursion, let alone written a program to generate the series since reading an example in the first chapter of the first programming book you ever read. It's also the case that you will never use it in the job you are being interviewed for. However, interviewers consider it a clever question on their part and will fail anyone who can't answer it. You should also make sure you have a strategy for handling problems caused by interviewers who have wrong answers to their own questions. This is a difficult issue. You don't want to look like a smart-ass, but on the other hand you also don't want to fail because you were considered to have got something 'wrong'. I once had an interviewer who insisted that I should have used alloca() in a C++ problem he had set, because it was part of the standard C++ library. It's not part of either the C or C++ the library, and for very good reasons (search Google using the keyword alloca for more details). I explained that it wasn't standard, that it was highly non-portable, that the function was frequently badly implemented, and that there were issues with its use that could bite the unwary. No joy. He was adamant, so I had to just let it go. On the basis of this experience I would have probably turned the job down if it had been offered to me. Oh, and incidentally, take some printed copies of your CV with you. Unless you are very lucky, you will encounter interviewers who don't have your CV with them at the interview. |
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