Interview Questions

Well, hello there!

In this article, I’m going to give away some questions I got while I was facing several interviews in different companies. I’m not going to say which company asked what questions (and omitting the many questions asked in my last interview: trivago) 😛

However, let me know in the comment section, for which questions you need to know the answers (at least, what I gave)!

Behavioral

  1. Why have you decided to apply for this job?
  2. Why do you think that you will be a good fit for us?
  3. What was the most significant contribution(s) you made to the current job role?
  4. You have mentioned that you’re good with “some skill” (i.e. HPC). Can you give us an example of how you practically used that?
  5. What did you learn last week?
  6. What is your most and/or least favorite programing language(s), and why?
  7. Why should we hire you, instead of other candidates?
  8. If you are hired, how would you add value to our company?
  9. How would you improve our existing products with the experience you obtained so far?
  10. If you are hired and asked to work on “a technology that you currently don’t know”, will you be able to do it?
  11. What is your “a typical day in your [current] job” like?
  12. Do you like to work alone (on your own) or on a team?
  13. World Famous: What are your strengths and weaknesses?
  14. What’s the worst mistake you made (in your personal or work life)?
  15. What do you expect from this job?
  16. What are your plans for the next x ( x = {1, 2, 5} ) years?
  17. What are your hobbies, and (how) do they help you in your day-to-day life?
  18. Just like you’re leaving your current company, will you leave our company as well?
  19. How much is your current salary? And other employee benefits? (a tricky question)
  20. What is your salary expectation?

Conceptual

  1. What are the Software Development processes that you’re familiar with?
  2. What are the main Scrum Ceremonies?
  3. What is Agile Software Development?
  4. Agile vs. Scrum?
  5. If a one of the team mates doesn’t agree on a team decision, how would you try to settle it?
  6. You found a critical bug in the new feature your just released, just before two days before you release it. What would you do?
  7. Your product owner or project manager pushes you/your team to deliver the product very fast. What would you do?
  8. If you’re given a project to implement, what is the technical stack you would choose? Why?

Technical

  1. What are the SOLID principles? (Sorry, they don’t ask the OOP concepts anymore 😛 )
  2. How do you say if a hashing algorithm is better?
  3. If you’re given an unsorted set of integers, what is the best way to sort them?
  4. Explain ACID principles in the context of databases.
  5. What is the difference between a primary key and an index in a database?
  6. What operations (out of CRUD) can be slower?
  7. If a database has millions of records constantly updating, how would you optimize it?
  8. To optimize the search, is it a good idea to index all the columns? Why?
  9. What is the best data structure to create an autocomplete process?
  10. What is a design pattern? Give some examples and explain when we can use them.
  11. What do you have understood by “database normalization”? How would you do it?
  12. Given two tables, how can we use the correct join to achieve the requirement?

Coding

  1. Check if a given mathematical expression has balanced brackets.
  2. Calculate the number of different binary trees you can create with the given number of nodes.
  3. You’re given rand(x, y) function guarantees to return a random number between x and y. Implement a code segment which will give unique random numbers from A to B. (That means, if A=1 and B=100, your function should return a random number between 1 and 100, where the same number is not returned twice.)
  4. Write an efficient function to sorts an array which has duplicate (+ and -) elements.
  5. Implement a custom memory-optimized string class which will only have 4 different characters to hold, in C++.
  6. Implement a custom (yet simple) shared pointer class in C++.
  7. Ice Cream Parlour Problem
    1. If you have a sorted array, get the two numbers which give the closest sum to a given number.
    2. If the array is not sorted, how would you handle it?
    3. What if the numbers can be negative?
  8. Find if a given string is a palindrome.
  9. Write a program to find the longest palindrome in a given string.
  10. Find the number of characters to be removed from a string to be able to make a palindrome out of a given string.

So, there you go!

Let me know how you’d answer these questions, or which questions you want me to post the answers.

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