career: Five-essential-phone-screen-questions - steveyegge2

five-essential-phone-screen-questions - steveyegge2: "You have to probe all five areas; you can't skip any of them. Each area is a proxy for a huge body of knowledge, and failing it very likely means failing the interviews, even though the candidate did fine in the other areas.

Without further ado, here they are: The Five Essential Questions for the first phone-screen with an SDE candidate:



 1) Coding. The candidate has to write some simple code, with correct syntax, in C, C++, or Java.

 2) OO design. The candidate has to define basic OO concepts, and come up with classes to model a simple problem.

3) Scripting and regexes. The candidate has to describe how to find the phone numbers in 50,000 HTML pages.

 4) Data structures. The candidate has to demonstrate basic knowledge of the most common data structures.

5) Bits and bytes. The candidate has to answer simple questions about bits, bytes, and binary numbers. 




Please understand:   what I'm looking for here is a total vacuum in one of these areas. It's OK if they struggle a little and then figure it out. It's OK if they need some minor hints or prompting. I don't mind if they're rusty or slow. What you're looking for is candidates who are utterly clueless, or horribly confused, about the area in question.



 For example, you may find a candidate who decides that a Vehicle class should be a subclass of ParkingGarage, since garages contain cars. This is just busted, and it's un-fixable in any reasonable amount of training time.

Or a candidate might decide, when asked to search for phone numbers in a bunch of text files, to write a 2000-line C++ program, at which point you discover they've never heard of "grep", or at least never used it.



 When a candidate is totally incompetent in one of these Big Five areas, the chances are very high that they'll bomb horribly when presented with our typical interview questions. Last week I interviewed an SDE-2 candidate who made both of the mistakes above (a vehicle inheriting from garage, and the 2000-line C++ grep implementation.) He was by no means unusual, even for the past month. We've been bringing in many totally unqualified candidates.

The rest of this document describes each area in more detail, and gives example questions"



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