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Technical Interview Questions +5

When a company states that they want "5+ years of C++

programming experience," what types of things would they want
you to know, and what would be fair game for interview
questions?

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3 ANSWERS

Sergey Zubkov, C++ programmer

Answered Dec 23 2014 · Author has 2.2k answers and 8.6m answer views

To get a job like this in the future, you need to work somewhere for over 5 years using primarily C++.

Fair interview questions would be "what containers have you used and why", "when would you use
multiprocessing and when would you use multithreading, to parallelize some data processing job", "what
IPC have you used, if at all", "what libraries have you used for concurrency and for parallelism", "what
boost libraries have you used, if any, and what did you think of them", "what debuggers are you familiar
with", "how do you troubleshoot a production system where one thread is run bound", "how is std::deque
implemented", "have you used pool allocators", "how would you implement a lockfree stack", "what design
patterns have you found useful in your experience", "when would you choose static polymorphism and
when dynamic", "how would you design an application that does X", etc.

A lot depends on what else the company is looking for, but experienced candidates are generally expected
to have used various libraries, technologies, tools, and designs, are expected to understand the trade-offs of
what they used, and are expected to have opinions backed by personal experience.

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OTHER ANSWERS

Nathan Holmberg, Former Lead Architect at Serato

Answered Dec 31, 2014

Further to Sergey's answer, we also always ask a candidate to work through a real problem with real input
we have had to solve and then discuss the solution they come up with. This helps illustrate not just their
coverage of libraries / data structures but how they apply these in the real world.

Making it  a real problem also keeps it from just being a canned response.

967 Views · View 6 Upvoters

William Mitlyng, DBA, developer, Senior consultant, Add Hoc problem solver after I lost
some of my vertebrae, about half my ...
Answered Jan 8, 2015

The  question foremost in my mind is did a department issue this as a formal request or is this an example
of HR playing Computer Scientist/long termed seasoned programmer. Mr. Zubakov gets my vote for
professionalism.
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354 Views

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