The list of languages and technologies should be ones you're willing to be grilled on. I've programmed in C#, Bliss, Ada, PL/1, and other languages over my career - and was quite good at it at the time - but my resume just says "other languages" so it's clear that I've done more, am nimble at learning languages, can talk about differences between languages, but couldn't answer specifics about them because it's been a while.
I also don't care about syntax. When I'm interviewing, I'm looking for an understanding of higher level concepts. I don't care about corners and oddities - I had one interviewer ask me if I knew about the Java "transient" keyword, which I'd never seen. Once he explained what it was, I could talk all about serialization and its issues.
My question to the interviewee was to check his understanding of OO techniques and to see if he knew what RAII was. Since we do a lot of threading code with locks, I simply wrote "lockPointer->lock(); ... /* arbitrary code */ ...; lockPointer->unlock();" asked him if there was anything wrong with the code, and if it could be improved. If you can't do 5 minutes worth of riffing on that, you're not a 6 or 7 in the language, or in Java, or in OO techniques.
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Date: 2012-04-18 12:11 pm (UTC)I also don't care about syntax. When I'm interviewing, I'm looking for an understanding of higher level concepts. I don't care about corners and oddities - I had one interviewer ask me if I knew about the Java "transient" keyword, which I'd never seen. Once he explained what it was, I could talk all about serialization and its issues.
My question to the interviewee was to check his understanding of OO techniques and to see if he knew what RAII was. Since we do a lot of threading code with locks, I simply wrote "lockPointer->lock(); ... /* arbitrary code */ ...; lockPointer->unlock();" asked him if there was anything wrong with the code, and if it could be improved. If you can't do 5 minutes worth of riffing on that, you're not a 6 or 7 in the language, or in Java, or in OO techniques.