07 Apr, 2008
The Technical Interview for Getting an IT developer Job
Posted by: Anca Alimanescu In: Career Management
The Technical Interview might be a little scary if you are a beginner and you are trying to get your first job as a developer.
You can wonder yourself how much in detail they will get, how technical the questions will be, if they will try to stress you or, on the contrary, they will try to create an relaxed athmosphere.
This is why I will try to describe a little my experiences with the technical interviews.
As far as I have seen, sometimes the technical interviews can be not at all technical or they can get really, really technical.
This depends mainly of the company’s policy and the type of person they are looking for. Also sometimes the technical interview comes befor the Human Resources.
In most of the cases at each of these interviews there are around two persons present : the project manager or the manager of the company and a more technical person that is interested in testing your technical skills.
It usually starts in the same way, by asking you to present yourself. The approach this time should be more focused on the technical details and mention the proffesional experiences by emphasising the aspects that you know the company is interested in. For example if they are looking for a .Net developer, it would be a good idea to focus on getting into details about your .Net knowledge and projects, but mention and just overview you experiences with the Java technology.
While you describe the projects you worked in, some of the questions may be how long the project lasted, how many people were involved, who the client was, what was your role in the project, why was a certain technology used and not another.
Sometimes these are all the questions you might get at the technical interview.
Other times things get a little into more details.For example, after you finish presenting yourself usually the technical guy will look over each of your projects and start asking you from general question related to each of them to more detailed ones.In one of my interviews for which I was applying for a job as a .Net developer the questions were like this :
- What is Agile Programming?
- What are the project management models that you know ?Ex : v-model, waterfall model
- What do you know about Corba ?
- If you have used UML, what is the version of UML you used ?
- Describe the Model View Control architectural pattern.
- What is CRUD and what is it used for? (create, read, update and delete)
- Have you worked with .Net Nuke and if yes can you tell what it is ?
- Which are the features of an NTier application ?
- What are the web parts in .Net?
- What are master pages ?
- What are the Design Patterns ?
- What is the difference between a Data Grid and a Grid View ?
- What are the Generics in C # ?
- What are the sealed classes ?
- What is a string builder ?
- What is the size of the string variables ?
- What is an web service ?
- What is the difference between the C++ API and a web service ?
- Regarding SVN, what the chain of changes were.
After some technical questions like this, usually the company and the company’s projects are presented and also the role they might have in mind for you. And the salary question comes up again as well as the availability to start, the mobility you have for going to work to a client’s place.
