[tptacek]

Some favorite systems programming interview questions:

* Tell me about some routines you tend to take with you from project to project; what's in "libyou.so"? Crap devs won't have any.

* Your code crashes inside the allocator. Walk me through debugging it.

* Tell me about the most interesting problem you debugged without relying on the debugger or print statements.

A question I always ask in dev interviews that isn't as systemsy is, "your typical linked list code, does it embed the list pointer in the struct, or do you have a separate list node struct with a void* in it?"

I like the questions that have no direct right answers.

One question I think you should always ask in every dev interview: "I am going to describe project XXX; it's relatively small. Give me a complete, detailed estimate of how long it will take you to do XXX." I like this question because (1) it flags people who can't estimate properly, (2) it forces them to talk through an actual project and break down the steps, (3) it catches people who don't think about testing.