As some of you gentle readers may know, I\u2019ve been a-lookin\u2019 for a new job over the summer and into the fall. A mainstay of the industry now is the dreaded tech interview, which wasn\u2019t really a thing last time a went a-huntin\u2019 close to ten years ago. But now they\u2019re all the rage.<\/p>\n
In a way it makes sense, cuz whoever is interviewing you needs some way to evaluate your skills and all that. There\u2019s no way they can judge if you can write advanced, subtle and poetic code, so they settle for a much lower level test: can you regurgitate some basic stuff? Still, it\u2019s not always easy to think on your feet and come up with a good answer on the spot. I haven\u2019t used alot of this stuff in my day-to-day in years. Doing a tech interview is a skill in its own right, a kind of performance like jazz improvisation, and it took me a few times to get good at it.<\/p>\n
Along the way I compiled a handy quick reference guide<\/a>. Basically every time an interviewer asked me a question and I didn\u2019t know the answer, or more commonly just wasn\u2019t able to express it in a clear, structured and smooth manner, I wrote down the question, went home and looked it up, and added to my guide. Then I circled back and studied up for the next interview. Before too long I started getting a fair number of repeat questions, and was able to nail more and more of them.<\/p>\n This is not meant to be any kind of comprehensive tutorial, just enough to remind me to spew forth some talking points. As you can see by the topics covered, I cast a fairly wide net with my skillset in the kind of position I\u2019m going for. Really this is a symptom of the state of the industry these days, the way jobs are balkanized by programming language, more than my own itinerant tendencies. \u201cAre you a java guy or a javascript guy?\u201d Oh please. I know like twenty programming languages. And if I don\u2019t know any particular thing I know how to look it up. It\u2019s also a fairly interesting snapshot of what languages and frameworks an in vogue these days, totally different than 2007.<\/p>\n So here you go<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As some of you gentle readers may know, I\u2019ve been a-lookin\u2019 for a new job over the summer and into the fall. A mainstay of the industry now is the dreaded tech interview, which wasn\u2019t really a thing last time a went a-huntin\u2019 close to ten years ago. But now they\u2019re all the rage. In … Continue reading “Technical Reference Guide 2015”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}