With the change in ownership at my company, I have been interviewing with different companies, and the questions have been varied and interesting. I thought I would share some experiences with you. Here are a sample of some of the questions I have been posed with.
- How would you handle a situation where you were handed a deadline for some functionality and you KNEW it could not be done in that time frame?
- What is the difference between deleting rows, dropping a table, and truncating a table (NOTE: This was for a Java developer job, not a DBA job)
- How do you do String comparison?
- What is the difference between a Map, a List, a Set, and an Object Array (You mean besides the fact that an Object Array is a primitive part of the language and the others are not?)
- Describe how you would manage a software development project.
- Describe a time when you had to debug something and the tools you use.
I believe I've done reasonably well in the interviews I've been in, but the questions to me seem to be all over the place. Perhaps employers have a variety of needs and are trying to determine where I would best fit. Either way, its difficult to be prepared for interviews. Last week I was reciting intricacies of JVM memory reclamation, language features and syntax, and constructs. This week I was describing my use of requirements, Use-Cases, UML and Sequence Diagrams. I can't wait to see what next week brings.
