Basic technical interview questions

About Technical interview - Introduction

A technical interview is a type of interview that typically features questions that are specific to the role you have applied for. Technical interviews are generally used to assess candidates for technical or specialist graduate job positions (such as jobs in IT, Engineering and Science) rather than general graduate schemes.

In a technical interview candidates are likely to be asked questions that:

relate to specific knowledge about the company's technical activities;

relate to understanding the technical work required to be completed as part of the job applied for;

relate to work completed as part of a degree course (if this relates to the job applied for);

equire candidates to solve actual technical prolems that they would be likely to face if employed.

What skills do IT companies look for in prospective candidates?

IT companies look our for various technical skills and soft skills in candidates. In technical skills, companies expect the candidates to have good expertise in their area of graduation. For computer science students, evergreen technical skills are C, C++, UNIX, Operating systems and networking. Candidates having these skills are likely to have better chance of getting job.

Knowing the latest advances in technology and other happenings in your technical domain would be an added advantage.

Good programming practice.

Initialize all variables, give variables descriptive names, and always use comments. Interviewers may be watching your solutions to determine whether you follow good programming practices. Good programming practices make it easy to understand other people's code. This means that there aren't cryptic variables, functions with undocumented side effects, obfuscated algorithms, and sloppy (read: buggy) code. Just because you are being interviewed (and therefore, coding on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper) doesn't give you an excuse to be sloppy or lazy. Commenting code for an interview may seem like a waste of time, but some interviewers do look to see that candidates write comments while coding or before coding, rather than adding them in as an afterthought.

Typical Technical Questions

When preparing for a technical interview, you should review basic structures (linked lists, binary trees, heaps) and algorithms (searching, sorting, hashing). Having a mastery of these topics will likely give you all the necessary knowledge to tackle the problems you will encounter during the technical interview. Also, review the areas for which you're interviewing. If you're interviewing for a systems programming job, review the differences between threads and processes, OS scheduling algorithms, and memory allocation. If you're interviewing for a job that requires experience with an object- oriented language, spend some time brushing up on object-oriented methodology.