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| Tips for Phone Interviews |
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The most important thing to remember
is that you are working towards obtaining a personal, face-to-face
meeting with a prospective employer. If you can create the
proper first impression on the telephone your chances of
being invited for a personal visit are greatly enhanced.
Here are some tips you should keep in mind:
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| Be
enthusiastic and assertive. |
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Remember that you don't
have the benefits of expression and eye contact to
show your excitement and interest. Be ready to provide specific examples
of
projects and accomplishments which showcase your skills. Avoid: speaking
too
fast, having music or other noises in the background, chewing or smoking,
speaking too close to the receiver - anything that can create an unpleasant
image of yourself.
Look at the interview from the interviewer's
perspective. Do not ask
questions that appear to be selfishly motivated. This is the most common
mistake people make on phone interviews - you should not even bring up
the
subjects of money or benefits. Your only goal at this point should be
selling the company on your skills and experience - talking about money
prematurely can only have negative effects.
Prepare your answers to the obvious questions
such as:
Why are you leaving your present position?
(Have a positive reason for this move).
What are your strong/weak points?
What were your biggest accomplishments in your last position?
What specific projects have you worked on?
What contributions can you make to our company?
The best way of answering this last question
is to do research on the
company you will be interviewing with: check out the company's web site,
do
your homework, find out what they are doing and be prepared to point
out how
you can help them achieve their goals. As a parting comment let the
potential employer know that you are very interested in the position
and
why. The enthusiasm you display could be the deciding factor between
you and
another candidate.
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| TECHNICAL
TIPS FOR PHONE SCREENS |
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SAMPLE C++ QUESTIONS:
Q. Do you know OO Programming? If so, what is a
Polymorphism?
A: A concept allowing types such as a list of anything.
Q. What is an inheritance?
A: The ability to derive new classes from existing classes. A delivered
class.
(Subclass) Inherits the instance variables and methods of the base class.
(Superclass) May add new instance variables and methods. New methods may
be defined with the same names as those in the basic class, in which case
they override the original class. For example: Bytes might belong the class
of integers for which an add method might be defined. The byte class would
inherit the add method from the integer class.
Q. Can you describe what a constructor
is?
A. The initialization method called upon object creation (allocates memory
space)
Q. Can you describe what “virtual” means
placed in front of a method?
A. Specifies that the correct method to be called for a derived object
is the derived rather than the base method.
Also, be prepared for "behavioural"questions
to test your analytical skills, or logic questions. Here
is an example:
You have 9 coins that all look the same. One is a fake that is slightly
lighter in weight than the others. With a balance scale, how can you
figure out which coin is the fake, if you are only allowed two weighings?
A balance scale is a scale where the weights of two objects can be compared,
such that the side that has the heavier object goes down, and the side
that has the lighter object goes up. One weighing is when we’ve
put items on each side of the scale, such that we are ready to determine
which side is heavier or if both sides weigh the same.
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| SAMPLE
PHONE SCREEN QUESTIONS: |
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1) Why are you
currently looking for a new position?
What types of products, companies and positions are you looking for?
Theme to the answer companies like to
hear:
Individuals should be software oriented, have a very strong idea of what
they are interested in working with: "want to produce products that
will eventually be put on the commercial market"
2) What are you currently working
on? What is the product?
If I were a customer, why would I want to buy this product? How many
people are working on it? How long have you worked on it? What are the
other people doing on the project in comparison to you? What specific
features have you been responsible for?
Theme to the answer companies like to
hear:
Should be able to give you a very detailed description of project; show
good reasoning and strong sense of analysis: evolution of career thinking'
toward their work..."I did this
because...I've worked on these features...and this is what it meant".
3) What is your strongest programming
language? Describe your networking background. What
Operating Systems are you most familiar with?
Theme to the answer companies like to hear:
Should have strong C/C++ skills; feel comfortable coding on a whiteboard
for an interview. Also should have solid skills in networking.
4) What is your technical specialty?
TIP: Companies love PASSION for technology. Please keep in mind that
you
always want to sell yourself on phone screens. EVEN if you aren't too
sure that you're interested in the company just yet. REMEMBER that you
don't have real power in the interview process until the company commits
to the idea that they are interested in you. At that point you can bring
to the table any questions/issues that you may have, and the company
will be eager to answer (or address) them for you.
Here are some additional coding questions
that they might ask as well:
What is an abstract class?
What is a virtual function?
Code at whiteboard during an interview: Linked list questions are common.
You might be asked to find a string in a string. Write a routine to display
a binary tree, implement a queu and describe the design tradeoffs. which
would you feel most comfortable doing at the whiteboard?
Can you write a link list in reverse on the fly?
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| QUESTIONS
TO ASK QA CANDIDATES IN A PRE-SCREEN: |
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What operating systems are you comfortable
with? |
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What languages do you know the best?
(ex:C/C++, PERL, VB) |
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Have you ever done quality assurance
or testing of a commercial software product? (Ideally
- yes) |
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What networking protocols do you feel
comfortable with? (should be TCP/IP at the least - others
are good to have) |
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What is your background in network
administration? (should be proficient; leads/managers
are good - for Build only) |
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Are you open to relocation to if applicable? |
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What is your current compensation
model? (stock, salary, bonuses, etc) |
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| DATABASE
QUESTIONS: |
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What RDBMS's have you worked
with? For how many years each?
What is referential integrity? (answer is: a rule that requires that all
foreign key objects must match to a primary key object. There will usually
be rules defining how integrity is maintained during update, delete and
insert. For instance, cascade, restrict, null, default.
What is a join? Answer: horizontally combining data from one row of a table
with rows in another or the same table, but only when certain criteria
are met.
Can you tell me what an outer join is? (answer is: will allow a row to
appear in the joined table even though there is no matching value in the
table to be joined.)
What is a transaction and why is it important? Answer: a sequence of one
or more actions which together form a logical unit of work. Generally the
actions are somewhat interdependent and all must be successfully completed
or undone for the database to remain in a consistent state.
What is deadlock? Answer: two processes - each are waiting for an object
the other process has locked.
Can you tell me what 2 phase commit is?
Where are you developing in the database layer?
Describe a B-Tree.
Can you tell me the ACID properties of a database? |
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