Technical Interview Tips

Dear Prospective Junior Software Engineer:

1. If we ask you to explain Object Oriented Programming, please don't just say that an object is like a car, that can have different colors.  Please go on to tell us how a piece of code can be an object, and how two other pieces of code can use that object in different ways.
2. You might want to review any skills listed on your resume and look them up on the Web to remember what the major elements of them are.  We never ask picky syntax questions, but other places do.
3. Before the interview, why not review what you did at the jobs that are on your resume? If you have any code saved from them, then glance through it.  If not, then try to remember what you can.
• Corollary: When you leave a job, if you can't save any printouts or documentation from what you did there, try to write down what you remember, before the whole unpleasant episode is all blocked out of your memory. (And, no, I never did that either, but it's a good idea...)
• If you are straight out of college, then review some recent major programming assignments and remember how you solved them.
4. If you're unemployed, it would be a good idea to be doing any of this sort of thing:
• Volunteer on an Open Source Project
• Create a website and play with it
• Download Eclipse and write a toy app for an Android.  You don't even have to own an Android--you can use the simulator, then test it on a friend's Android.
5. If you haven't done any coding for a while, why not sit down and try to write a small program, so the general idea of how to program is fresh in your mind?  Then when we ask you to write something in pseudocode, you won't stare in blank panic.
6. You are not in a Presidential debate.  If we ask you a question, please show that you can understand a question, and answer what we asked.  If we ask you a high-level question, please answer it at a high-level and then offer to delve into more detail. We need to know you'll be able to explain things at a high-level to our clients.
7. If your last job was in a different industry and we ask you about the code you worked on there, please don't waste time explaining the many specific details of something that doesn't relate to us.  Just give us the few details that are needed to illustrate the problem you solved by how you structured your code.
8. We need more people.  We are really, really, looking for any reason to hire you.  We just don't want to regret it.  If all else fails, try to show you can express some software principle in a cogent manner.  It might help.

Thank you, and good luck.

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 (Should I have titled this Techical Interviews Tirade instead?)