Amazon Interview Question Software Engineer / Developers
The longer one has been out of school, the more difficult it will be
to remember fine details that were learned in school. After students
have graduated, they use their textbooks and notebooks as references.
It just isn't practical to commit lots of things to memory. It's also
unrealistic to expect that someone will be able to relearn a lot of
facts about things they worked on or learned several years ago in time
for an interview.
The great irony to all this is the companies who give these types of
interviews complain that they can't find anyone qualified to do the
jobs they need. In the (wasted) time spent trying to test trivia,
they could hire some of these people, and give them a couple of weeks
to get up to speed on the information they need to work on the
projects. Especially people who went to respected schools in computer
science -- they have been educated to learn on their own, not memorize
that which can be looked up. But folks like this struggle to find
work because they can't answer the questions that involve
memorization.
I totally agree with you. By monitoring the questions on this site, it seems that some companies are much heaving on what I called "trivia" questions ("what's a vtable", for example). While there may well be some coorelation between good candidates and people who can answer these questions, as an interviewer myself, I would much rather spend my time figuring out if someone can code or can think. Facts and trivia are just that - facts and trivia. Anyone can learn them. Not anyone can code.
That being said... if you know that a company is going to test you on trivia, better study up!
Actually, I was surprised that Google was one of the companies that
asked trivia questions, such as:
What port does DNS use? (I had forgotten, and in my mind, was trying
to decide between 53 and 79. I decided to admit that I wasn't sure,
and that I would just look up the answer in /etc/services if anyone
asked me.)
What is the tcpdump command to print out DNS packets? (I wasn't sure
there was an explicit command to do DNS, but I knew that it was
possible, if nothing else, to get a hex dump of an ethernet packet
from tcpdump, so one could do the appropriate location and decoding of
the DNS packet in the ethernet packet, so that's what I said.)
These are the sorts of things that I would (and have) handled
perfectly in the course of an everyday job. It isn't as if anyone
would judge me on the basis of having memorized that information.
Also, I've never heard of a situation where having to look something
up like that in a man page or on the web would result in such a great
loss of productivity as compared to someone who memorized it all.
Each interviewer at Google decides on their own questions to ask so even though I'm not a big fan of trivia questions, some people still ask them. The hiring committee though takes all the feedback and decides how to weight each question / answer.
It's hard for me to say why you were asked those particular questions. Some people ask them under the reasoning of "if they really did XYZ, then they should know the answer to this question..." or under the reasoning of "if you're a good software engineer, you would have to know about..." So, hard to say really. Perhaps you professed some knowledge of these technologies and the person was verifying your skills, or it was particularly relevant for your job... or, of course, maybe the person's just not a very good interviewer. :-)
Quote from your paragraph "No matter where I go, I found most people are not that smart and if you are willing to learn, you can be the best. Of course, you must have the potenial first. Like you are willing to learn and you like your job..."
- Danny November 16, 2006Exactly, however, it sounds contradicting your earlier statement, "but how about the one who has been out of school for several years and I cant remeber anything about mergesort or quicksort or how to find the shortest path blah blah".
Maybe you can "learn" again?