Technical interviews are often used as a means to test what you could be capable of, not necessarily what you currently are.

At one interview, I was shown a whiteboard and was asked to write some C to reverse a string. The company didn't even use C in their daily work and it was purely a test of thinking on your feet and problem solving, which in itself is all well and good so I didn't complain. For the record, I got a second interview but didn't get the job in the end.

A lot of stuff you get asked might not even be used. I've worked with development leads with several years of experience, and these guys didn't understand Big-O notation and only knew the bare basics of data structures they used every day. The synthetic structures they were using (e.g. Java Collections Framework) were just something they used with little regard to the internal implementation.

After working with these people, I found myself caring less as well. You drive a car every day but do you really bother about the material used to build the carburettor or how the fuel pump works? No; it serves a purpose, does the job and beyond that who cares? At the last job I did (last year), I spent a while beforehand reading up on binary trees, circular queues and other delights. Started the job and discovered I'd have been much better off memorising the JCF and reading up on XML.

These interviews are there to wheedle out those who are definitely incapable.

I'm getting back to you after the interview. Questions were fair, people who know their stuff could answer fairly easily, it went pretty well for me too.

It was on the phone (I'm curently working out of the US), about 30 minutes. There were 10 groups of questions, each of them started with a basic one to check that you understand what this was about and then it got harder and harder.

Examples:

- 1st question: What's the keyword virtual used for?
if correct, 2nd question: What structure internally manage virtual functions?
if correct: How, in details?

- What's a quaternion?
What is it used for?
Pros and Cons over other orientation representations?
What about interpolation? (because I forgot to talk about it as an advantage)

- What's a mipmap?
Pros and Cons?
How is it stored in memory and why is it a good thing?

Questions about basic C++ stuff, 3D graphics, and maths.

Thanks for you answers ;)

Can someone who knows physics discuss the ball question? I don't remember much from HS but I thought you would need to know the dynamics of the ball? If you assume that it falls at the rate of gravity then how do you know if it hits terminal velocity before the 5 seconds are up? Or am I overanalyzing a simple question?

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
Can someone who knows physics discuss the ball question?

distance = g/2 * t^2 = 5 * 5^2 = 125

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
Or am I overanalyzing a simple question?

Yes.

Quote: Original post by gOOze55

... or not :/

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090128184018AAJlRqX

That is dangerous, as it assumes terminal velocity is not reached inside of your time frame.

Quote: Original post by CDProp
A friend of mine had a technical interview with some other company once that was pretty funny. He was asked how to manipulate the binary representation of a signed integer in order to negate it. The answer he gave was "flip the bits, and then add 1." They were like "um, no" because answer they were looking for was, "flip the sign bit", which of course is incorrect for almost every modern processor. I just thought it was interesting that these guys asked a question that a) could be looked up by a resourceful programmer in 5 seconds if needed, b) they apparently didn't know the answer to, and c) requires knowledge that they evidently make no use of whatsoever at their company.

I find this difficult to believe. First year, second semester university computer science was all about that kind of thing for me. When are number representations and such taught at other universities?