Some interview questions

After some interviews, it is really helpful to have some "good" interview questions ready. Here are some sample questions:

From http://blog.mostof.it/being-a-better-developer/

• What is your favorite programming language and which ones do you hate? Why?
• If you could add any feature to the programming language you use the most, what would it be?
• Show me a cool project you’ve worked on. How did you do it?
• Tell a story about something you did that ended in a catastrophe.
• You have a day off. Do you get annoyed when a colleague calls you to ask a quick question about a piece of code you’ve written recently?
• You are required to work with a huge chunk of code and you have no idea how it works and there’s no documentation and no tests. What do you do?
• What’s your favorite game in the Zelda series? Which other games do you like? Have you once wished you had developed minecraft?
• Which sites do you love? 
• Which books would you recommend as a must-read?
• Last but not least, tell me something about the following principles: DRY, SOLID, YAGNI, optimistic vs. pessimistic locking, MVC vs. MVVM, (list can go on…)

You also need to check his another post, "On the road to being a better developer". http://blog.mostof.it/being-a-better-developer/

From http://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2011/06/top-programming-interview-questions.html

• Write a method which will remove any given character from a String?
• In an array 1-100 numbers are stored, one number is missing how do you find it?
• In an array 1-100 exactly one number is duplicate how do you find it?
• In an array 1-100 many numbers are duplicates, how do you find it?
• How do you find second highest number in an integer array?
• How do you find middle element of a linked list in single pass?
• How do you find if there is any loop in singly linked list? How do you find the start of the loop?
• How do you find depth of binary tree?
• Print out all leaf node of a binary tree?
• Write a program to sort numbers using quick sort?
• Write a program to implement binary search algorithm
• Write a program to find all prime number up to a given numbers?
• Write code to check whether a no is power of two or not?
• Write a program to find out if two rectangles R1 and R2 are overlapping?
• You need to write a function to climb n steps you can climb either 1 step at a time or 2 steps a time, write a function to return number of ways to climb a ladder with n step.
• Write code for Generate Random No in a range from min to max?
• Write program for word-wrap which should work on any screen size?
• Design an algorithm to find the frequency of occurrence of a word in an article?
• Write a program to implement blocking queue in Java?
• Write a program for producer-consumer problem?

From http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/33816/how-to-recognize-a-good-programmer

• Get them to talk about what they're interested in. 

From https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phone-screen-questions

•  Coding. The candidate has to write some simple code, with correct syntax, in C, C++, or Java.
•  OO design. The candidate has to define basic OO concepts, and come up with classes to model a simple problem.
•  Scripting and regexes. The candidate has to describe how to find the phone numbers in 50,000 HTML pages. 
• Data structures. The candidate has to demonstrate basic knowledge of the most common data structures.
• Bits and bytes. The candidate has to answer simple questions about bits, bytes, and binary numbers. 
• Write a function to reverse a string.
• Write function to compute Nth fibonacci number
• Print out the grade-school multiplication table up to 12x12
• Write a function that sums up integers from a text file, one int per line.
• Write function to print the odd numbers from 1 to 99.
• Find the largest int value in an int array.
• Format an RGB value (three 1-byte numbers) as a 6-digit hexadecimal string.
• Design a deck of cards that can be used for different card game applications.
• Model the Animal kingdom as a class system, for use in a Virtual Zoo program.
• Create a class design to represent a filesystem.
• Design an OO representation to model HTML.
• Design a parking garage.
• Design a bank of elevators in a skyscraper.
• Model the monorail system at Disney World.
• Design a restaurant-reservation system.
• Design a hotel room-reservation system.
• Last year my team had to remove all the phone numbers from 50,000 Amazon web page templates, since many of the numbers were no longer in service, and we also wanted to route all customer contacts through a single page.Let's say you're on my team, and we have to identify the pages having probable U.S. phone numbers in them. To simplify the problem slightly, assume we have 50,000 HTML files in a Unix directory tree, under a directory called "/website". We have 2 days to get a list of file paths to the editorial staff. You need to give me a list of the .html files in this directory tree that appear to contain phone numbers in the following two formats: (xxx) xxx-xxxx and xxx-xxx-xxxx.How would you solve this problem? Keep in mind our team is on a short (2-day) timeline.
• Let's say you're on my team, and I've decided I'm a real stickler for code formatting. But I've got peculiar tastes, and one day I decide I want to have all parentheses stand out very clearly in your code.
• So let's say you've got a set of source files in C, C++, or Java. Your choice. And I want you to modify them so that in each source file, every open- and close-paren has exactly one space character before and after it. If there is any other whitespace around the paren, it's collapsed into a single space character.For instance, this code:foo (bar ( new Point(x, graph.getY()) ));Would be modified to look like this:foo ( bar ( new Point ( x, graph.getY ( ) ) ) ) ;I tell you (as your manager) that I don't care how you solve this problem. You can take the code down to Kinko's Copies and manually cut and paste the characters with scissors if you like. How will you solve this problem?
• What are some really common data structures, e.g. in java.util?
• When would you use a linked list vs. a vector?
• Can you implement a Map with a tree? What about with a list?
• How do you print out the nodes of a tree in level-order (i.e. first level, then 2nd level, then 3rd level, etc.)
• What's the worst-case insertion performance of a hashtable? Of a binary tree?
• What are some options for implementing a priority queue?
• Tell me how to test whether the high-order bit is set in a byte
• Write a function to count all the bits in an int value; e.g. the function with the signature int countBits(int x)
• Describe a function that takes an int value, and returns true if the bit pattern of that int value is the same if you reverse it (i.e. it's a palindrome); i.e. boolean isPalindrome(int x)

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html

• Write a function that determines if a string starts with an upper-case letter A-Z
• Write a function that determines the area of a circle given the radius
• Add up all the values in an array
• Even though the format of the interview is, superficially, just a candidate writing some code on the whiteboard, my real goal here is to have a conversation about it. “Why did you do it that way?” “What are the performance characteristics of your algorithm?” “What did you forget?” “Where’s your bug?”
•     How might you design a program that lets people play Monopoly with each other over the internet?
• What would be a good data structure for a photo editor?
• How would you implement code to operate the elevators in a high rise?
• How would you implement the rendering engine of a web browser?
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