10 Interview Questions Every Programmer Should Know

10 Interview Questions Every Programmer Should Know

Conducting Interview is not cheap and costs both time and money to a company. It take a lot of time to find the right candidate for a job from 100s resume you receive from consultants and agents. They will always tell you that this guy is a Java Guru, this one is SQL Expert and next one is the full stack developer you are looking for. If you have trust them blindly and invite all of them for face-to-face interview, you are going to be disappointed. One of the first thing you should do is to filter candidates who claims to have certain skills e.g. SQL but doesn't have them, the faster you can weed out those candidates the cheaper will be the hiring process. A phone screening interview is just for that purpose, it doesn't cost you much and also suitable for candidate, as they don't have to take off and come down to your office. It's flexible for both the parties. When I phone interview someone, I spent fist few minutes to listen them and then I go for my list of weed out programming question to see if candidate is good enough to spend another 30 to 40 minutes. They have saved a lot of time, where I found out that candidate having words like "Strong knowledge of Java", "Exceptional in SQL" and "Programming gurus" fail to answer these simple questions. If you are a candidate and gone through couple of interviews, you might have noticed that almost all interviewers make up their minds in the first 10 minutes. The rest of the interview gives them reasons supporting said decision, but not all is lost. If you ever feel that you have messed up with your chance, try coming of some really good answers on rest of questions, if you can impress interviewer to an extent that encourage you to go deep, you may be able to change his initial decision. To get some feedback and improve upon my method, I have decided to share my list of weed out programming questions (don't bother about sharing questions, I have many similar questions on my secret question bank and you can create them easily as well). I have chosen one or two question from common programming skill set e.g. Java, SQL, XML, Programming, Coding, OOPS, Multi-threading and UNIX. I am looking forward to know what you guys do, what do you ask to check same skill set before calling candidates for face to face interviews. Comment if you agree or disagree.