Many of the jobs (developer, tester, manager, tech writer, support, and so on) at technical companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon require at least a basic knowledge of SQL joins. So, it’d be natural to assume that interview questions about joins are common. And they are up to a point. The trouble is that (more…)
Add comment April 24th, 2010
I heard an interesting interview question at Microsoft this week. The hiring manager asked the candidate, “What is the difference between the stack and the heap?” Like many interview questions, this particular question is either ambiguous on purpose (so the hiring manager can (more…)
Add comment April 19th, 2010
The vast majority of technical positions at companies like Microsoft (developer, tester, program manager, technical writer, support engineer, etc.) require at least a basic familiarity with SQL. So, if you are interviewing for a job you are quite likely to get a few questions about SQL. After questions about JOINS, one of the most common SQL question topics runs along the lines of, “Tell me about SQL logins and users.” Like most interview questions, a good approach for you is to use the “newspaper style” by (more…)
Add comment April 8th, 2010
A very common interview question at technical companies like Microsoft and Google is some variation of, “How would you remove duplicates from a list?” The first step when answering this, or any other, question is to qualify it to make sure (more…)
Add comment March 20th, 2010
Recently I heard a really interesting interview question that was used at a technical company. I don’t know the answer, but as I’ll explain shortly, that’s not the point. The question goes like this. Suppose you have N lines of code (say 1,000,000 or so). Each line of code may be good with some probability p (say 0.95) or may (more…)
Add comment February 20th, 2010
A fairly common job interview question for technical positions at companies like Microsoft and Google is to design and code a hash table. This is a standard homework problem in almost any data structures and algorithms class that computer science majors take and so (more…)
Add comment January 3rd, 2010
One of the most common non-technical questions you are likely to get when interviewing for a technical position at companies like Microsoft is, “What are your strengths?” As with other soft questions, you need to be ready with a good answer because a weak answer could kill your chances of getting a job offer even if you have strong technical skills. Now your answer will be different from everyone else’s answer but there are a few guidelines you can follow. First of all, quickly zero-in on (more…)
Add comment December 20th, 2009
Overall, based on my experience observing hundreds of job interviews for technical positions (developer, tester, program manager, etc.) at companies like Microsoft and Google, I’d guess that the most common category of interview questions are those that involve data structures and algorithms. An example of such a question might run along the lines of, “How would you find the 10 largest values from (more…)
Add comment December 14th, 2009
Over the past 24 months or so I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend in hiring at technical companies like Microsoft and Google. It appears that jobs are becoming more specialized and that this is leading to sort of a two-tiered work force where employees are either on the relatively high-skill end (such as specialized systems developers) or on the relatively low-skill end (such as purely manual testers). Anyway, one effect is that interview questions are becoming increasingly technical in order to categorize potential employees. Recently I observed an interview. One of the questions ran along the lines of, “Suppose you have a collection of horizontal and (more…)
Add comment December 6th, 2009
Many technical interviews at companies like Microsoft and Google involve data structures. One such category of questions runs along the lines of, “Explain to me what a height-balanced tree is.” This question is usually looking to determine if you understand one of the key principles of a binary search tree, namely, that the order in which data is inserted into a binary search tree determines the shape of the tree, which in turn determines how fast the tree can be searched. So, there are several types of tree data structures which are designed to be balanced. The three types of trees you should know about are AVL trees, (more…)
Add comment November 27th, 2009
