Question

I have a first job interview for a software engineer position but in the email they state that I will have to write out a program at the interview stage. Does everyone do this?

What kind of program might it be for a graduate?

The job is for a .NET developer, but I can use any language, so I will stick with C#. I’m actually S**Ting it; I have no clue what they are going to ask me to do.

Answer 1

Many companies will spend much of the interview time asking candidates to write actual code (usually on a whiteboard or piece of paper though sometimes on a real computer) as this is a great way to see if they will be successful in the job. Some things to keep in mind:

1. Talk out loud. Often interviewers care about your thought process and approach to the problem as much or more than they care about the actual code you write.
2. Ask questions. Interviewers will often intentionally make a problem ambiguous just to see if you’ll notice and seek clarification. Ask things like: “Who is the audience?” “Should I include exception handling?” “Shall I optimize for performance or just make sure it works?”
3. Don’t get flustered if you’re struggling. Tell the interview what you’re thinking and they’ll often point you in the right direction. Partial credit counts.
4. Get a good night’s sleep before your interview. Lots of whiteboard coding and related discussion can be surprisingly grueling.

Good interviewers will be able to extract what you’ve learned over the course of your lifetime, so don’t worry too much about last minute study sessions. It’s too late. That said, it’s not a bad idea to brush up on basic language syntax and core data structures and algorithms.

Here are some sample problems you may want to practice writing out on paper:

1. Write a function to calculate the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence.
2. Write a function to sort 2 arrays of numbers (without using existing libraries).
3. Design a Deck class and a Card class and write a function to shuffle a deck of cards.
4. Design a Circle class and write a function to determine if 2 circles intersect.
5. Design a LinkedList class and write a function to reverse the elements in the list.