re: #161 chunkymonkey

25 years programming experience and you’re not an expert?

heh

i know that my fellow software engineers on this blog will have had to suffer through many s.e. job interviews of 2 to 6 hours of intense technical questions, after which one often feels nothing like an expert on anything. here’s a sample of typical s.e. interview easy warm up questions:

-Why are manhole covers round?
-What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore? Which one would you use to protect access to an increment operation?
-Explain the significance of “dead beef”.
-Write a C program which measures the the speed of a context switch on a UNIX/Linux system.
-Given a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 5, write a function which produces a random integer in the range 1 to 7.
-Describe the algorithm for a depth-first graph traversal.
-Design a class library for writing card games.
-You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
-How are cookies passed in the HTTP protocol?
-Design the SQL database tables for a car rental database.
-Write a regular expression which matches a email address.
-Write a function f(a, b) which takes two character string arguments and returns a string containing only the characters found in both strings in the order of a. Write a version which is order N-squared and one which is order N.
-You are given a the source to a application which is crashing when run. After running it 10 times in a debugger, you find it never crashes in the same place. The application is single threaded, and uses only the C standard library. What programming errors could be causing this crash? How would you test each one?
-Explain how congestion control works in the TCP protocol.
-In Java, what is the difference between final, finally, and finalize?
-What is multithreaded programming? What is a deadlock?

impactinterview.com