
Ask HN: Do you anticipate technical questions during live interviews? - charmides
My partner was recently at one of the first interviews in her life for a software engineering position. I was surprised to hear how it went. The interviewers quizzed her on arithmetic problems and asked many direct questions about specific APIs and programming languages (e.g., &quot;What is the difference between an interface and an abstract class in Java?&quot;).<p>During the ten or so interviews that I&#x27;ve been to, I have never been put on the spot regarding my technical knowledge. Instead, my interviews have always been more like a casual dialogue where I describe some of the previous projects that I&#x27;ve worked on and answer soft questions about my expectations. A few times I&#x27;ve been asked to submit code that I could complete at home.<p>I&#x27;ve been wondering whether my experience is uncommon. Therefore I would like to ask whether you anticipate and prepare for technical questions about some of the technologies that you&#x27;re expected to know.
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mytailorisrich
> _" What is the difference between an interface and an abstract class in
> Java?"_

This sort of question is quite common when interviewing for a dev. position.
There may also be a short coding test to take during the interview, which will
test both your reasoning skills and your dev. skills.

If the job is to develop in Java, for example, and since you put on your CV
that you know Java (since you got a face to face interview) they will probably
quiz you a bit to check to actual knowledge and experience of the language.

I would definitely prepare for this sort of relatively basic questions.

~~~
charmides
Do you frequently get direct questions about your technical knowledge during
interviews or is your experience more like mine?

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mytailorisrich
I had direct questions similar to the one you describe in all interviews for
hands-on technical positions I can remember.

~~~
charmides
Sounds like my experience is more unusual then. I would love to hear from
other people. Java has been front and center on my CV since I graduated from
college and for the ~10 mid-size and small companies that I've interviewed at,
not a single one has put me on the spot regarding my knowledge. Not that I
would mind. My partner was a little thrown off, though.

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davismwfl
It depends where you are interviewing. If you are interviewing at startups or
pure tech companies you can expect a fairly deep technical interview that most
of the time while factually valid is not necessarily true to the daily job
requirements. If you are interviewing at most SMB's (outside the tech startup
scene) or any Enterprise company then you will get more a skills & experience
based interview, not a deep dive technical interview. The skills & experience
interview will be what have you done, ask you some questions around your
experiences, ask you questions around things you claim expertise in, like a
programming language, check you for team fit etc. But then they move forward,
there is no long drawn out technical interview about algorithms etc unless the
job is specifically hiring that as a primary skill. This IMO is the way
startups should be hiring for anyone with more than 3-4 years of experience. I
get using pure CS interviews when someone has NO to very little experience
because you can only rate them on what they should have learned in school, but
once they have experience then their abilities change, and they won't remember
every algorithm, especially when they can look it up in 10 minutes because it
isn't something needed everyday. Instead, they'll remember all the things to
deliver product, issues to avoid, how to architect solutions, how to debug
problems, all of which are FAR more critical than remembering how to code out
a specific algorithm.

I have never seen anything wrong with probing someones knowledge on their
claimed expertise, but I also went through the dotcom days where we did this
same tech style interviews and as the implosion was taking place it was
obvious doing these interviews was hurting companies not helping. Hurting
because companies were full of super book intelligent people that couldn't get
a product out the door that worked to save their lives. I saw it daily in my
work, so many companies, cool ideas, good product market but they'd spend
forever and a day working on technical details versus shipping product, huge
waste of money and time. Most companies I know of back then that are still
around today in some form moved to more experienced based interviews with
technical screens around the specific issues you will be addressing regularly
in whatever position you are applying to. And left the CS skills type
interviews for new grads, and even then toned that down some. Some places like
Amazon and specific tech companies (Microsoft) still use highly CS driven
interviews, but they also have the highest number of new grads applying so
that mostly makes sense. And when you apply to those companies at the higher
levels with more experience the interview styles change generally.

So I don't think your experience is uncommon overall, it just depends where
you are interviewing and what your level of experience is, if they are doing
it right.

~~~
charmides
Thank you for the insight; this makes a lot of sense to me.

