Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
Those are actually decent questions, I wish more people doing interviews went into that type of detail. -miah On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 12:37:29PM -0400, Duane Morin wrote: > On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Adam Russell wrote: > > Just curious, what sort of technical questions do you ask candidates for java positions? > > Ok, I'll get into this if people promise not to jump on every last > question and say "What? You'd not hire me because of THAT? You suck". > We gotta think big picture here, people. I like to think of these > questions as "poking stick" questions. You poke aruond, and when you find > what looks like a gap, you then have an avenue to pursue. > > Also, of course there's no consistency. I've seen places where you get a > written exam. We don't do that. I ask the questions I think are gonna > give me the kind of reading I want. The guys that come after me ask > different questions. > > Random sampling of questions... > > * Can you tell me what constitutes a well-formed XML file? (Since I got > so much arugment over the 'triviality' of this question I changed it to > drawing a bad XML file on paper and asking people to tell me why it is a > bad XML file) > > * When working with servlets, what's the difference between a redirect and > a forward? What is a servlet filter and how is it different from a > servlet forward? > > * Given a primitive such as an int or long, write some real code to count > the number of bits that are set. This is one of my favorite questions, > because there are a variety of creative ways to go about it just from a > problem solving perspective, and you can also talk about different ways to > optimize it (for size/speed). Sure, the problem as described is trivial, > but it's a toy problem. And if somebody says "Wow, that's dumb..." then > I've already laerned more about their attitude than I need to know ;). > One of the best answers I ever got was somebody that told me three > different ways to answer it, the pros and cons of each, and then chose > one and wrote that. > > * Reverse a singly-linked list. > > * I have a list of several million strings, but I know that there are only > about 100k unique ones. I want to make myself a frequency table that > tells me how often each string occurred. Write me a data structure to do > it. Everybody makes a hashmap, which is fine, but most people end up > creating several million Integer objects when it can be done by only > creating 100k. > > * Crawl all the HREFs out of a given HTML file. > > * Tell me about the differences between Vectors and arrays and examples of > when each might be useful. > > * How would you implement an LRU cache? > > > If I ask somebody to write code it is always for a 'toy' problem that can > be easily encapsulated and written in like 10 minutes. It's always > interesting to see people who claim to write Java every day get flustered > over some pretty basic stuff. And I'm not talking about memorizing the > API (although I'd like to think that everybody knows how to get/put a > hashmap), I"m talking about Java syntax like this: > > boolean table[arr.length]; > for (int i =0; i < table.length; i++) { > table[i] = false; > } > > That's wrong and redundant, btw. :) Or this: > > if (map.contains(s)) { > map.put(map.get(s)++); > } > > which is wrong in more than just a "not memorizing the API" way. > > > > Hope that was interesting to you. I get nervous when this subject comes > up because it always turns into a flame war over what is ok to ask and > what's useful or not. I wasn't kidding when I joked that "If I need to > know that I can look it up on google" is a very common response. By that > logic I could do brain surgery but nobody seems to be willing to write me > a paycheck. > > Duane > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss at blu.org > http://www.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |