[sh87]

I think the key to the questions being asked at an interview is "relevance". How relevant are the interview questions to the actual job that I am applying for ? The off the hand warm up questions are fine, but in my personal experience of 18 interviews, I have not been asked a single question that I would consider relevant to the work I did/will do. Trees? yeah. Design this and that? yeah. Puzzles? you name it. Java specifics and countless Big O and Sigma questions. What about Refactoring? Nope. About designing especially for webapps? Nope. Ok, optimizing legacy code ? nope. Database structure and query optimization? Nope. Data migrations? Nope. Multithreaded support for this piece of code? Nope.

The thing is I have an arsenal of useful information and skills that I have learnt over the years that will not be asked in my next interview. I have personally been developing a list of interesting issues that I face on a day to day basis. I share it with as many people as I can some who participate actively in the interviewing process. Many do not agree with me and I do not hold them for it. I have started small and hope make a change.