r/Glasgow Tools

Title
Author	LexyNoise
Comment	Interviews can vary wildly depending on the place. I've been to a fair few, and I've interviewed people for developer roles as well. I had an interview for a 40 grand a year Systems Engineer job that didn't ask a single technical question. It was all crap like "describe a time you helped somebody" and "describe a time you made something better". Complete waste of an hour. On the other end of the scale, I've had interviews that involved an hour-long sit-down test in front of a computer. Once place did a multiple-choice quiz about PHP and MySQL. Another gave me a MySQL database with records and said "build a PHP page that outputs the records nicely". The most challenging interview I had was my current job, but that's because I work in a very narrow field with a very specialist system - I could name every developer in Britain who specialises in this system. The interviewer knew me and my work history and took it as an opportunity to properly grill me. He'd already decided he was hiring me - it was all for "fun". Here's a selection of the questions I've been asked: * On Linux, how would you search a text file for every line containing a specific piece of text? * What's the difference between an interface and an abstract class? * What's the difference between require() and include()? When I interview people, I tend to ask open-ended questions to judge someone's experience and what their thought process is. Stuff like: * You start to get reports that a system is running slowly. What do you do, and what kind of things do you check to identify the problem? * Someone contacts the helpdesk to say that this feature of this specialist system isn't working. What kind of things do you check? I once interviewed people for a database role and asked some absolutely cuntish questions. But that's because we wanted somebody who really knew databases. You won't get questions like this in an entry-level graduate role: * What's the difference between a BTree index and a Hash index, and why would you use one over the other? * What is a view, what's the biggest problem with them, and how can you overcome that problem?
Reddit Link	https://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/ll3osc/any_recently_hired_softwareweb_developers_in/gns4oq5/
Created	Wed 17th Feb 2021 4:48pm
Status	normal ()

Interviews can vary *wildly* depending on the place. I've been to a fair few, and I've interviewed people for developer roles as well.

I had an interview for a 40 grand a year Systems Engineer job that didn't ask a single technical question. It was all crap like "describe a time you helped somebody" and "describe a time you made something better". Complete waste of an hour.

On the other end of the scale, I've had interviews that involved an hour-long sit-down test in front of a computer. Once place did a multiple-choice quiz about PHP and MySQL. Another gave me a MySQL database with records and said "build a PHP page that outputs the records nicely".

The most challenging interview I had was my current job, but that's because I work in a very narrow field with a very specialist system - I could name every developer in Britain who specialises in this system. The interviewer knew me and my work history and took it as an opportunity to properly grill me. He'd already decided he was hiring me - it was all for "fun".

Here's a selection of the questions I've been asked:

* On Linux, how would you search a text file for every line containing a specific piece of text?
* What's the difference between an interface and an abstract class?
* What's the difference between require() and include()?

When I interview people, I tend to ask open-ended questions to judge someone's experience and what their thought process is. Stuff like:

* You start to get reports that a system is running slowly. What do you do, and what kind of things do you check to identify the problem?
* Someone contacts the helpdesk to say that this feature of this specialist system isn't working. What kind of things do you check?

I once interviewed people for a database role and asked some absolutely cuntish questions. But that's because we wanted somebody who *really* knew databases. You won't get questions like this in an entry-level graduate role:

* What's the difference between a BTree index and a Hash index, and why would you use one over the other?
* What is a view, what's the biggest problem with them, and how can you overcome that problem?