Know Your Stuff
Jason Truesdell
At most high-tech companies, interviewers test you on technologies and
skills you list on your resume.
If you say you know C or C++, expect to be asked to write a string
reversal function; you'll be expected to know the central terminology
like what an operator is, what an operand is, and the distinction
between a declaration and a definition. You might be asked to write a
singly- or doubly-linked list class, a stack, a queue, or a tree
structure. Depending on the complexity of the problem, the level and
description of the job, and the intended duration of the interview, you
may have to write code, just the declarations, or you may just have
to describe a data structure or program flow.
If your resume says you know HTML, don't come to the interview and say you can
write HTML but you have to use a reference book to look up syntax.
Depending on the job, you probably won't be expected to remember
minutiae, but you might be asked to write HTML for a complex table, a
frameset, an ordered or unordered list, and so on. You might be asked
how to position an element on a page. You may be asked to suggest
multiple solutions, even bad ones, just so that the interviewer can find
out how you apply your knowledge to solve problems.
If you've only tweaked HTML generated by tools, you might be able to
demonstrate that you can read HTML (which is how you should have
described your knowledge on the resume), but don't expect to get away
with a claim that you "know" HTML.
If you list a skill in your recent experience or you don't establish a
time frame in your resume, you can expect to be tested on it. If you wrote
COBOL five years ago and haven't touched it since, you should have it listed
on your resume only in the context of the job or project on which you worked. In
that case, you would probably only face fair questions about the problems
you faced in developing your code and how you solved them.
As I've mentioned elsewhere,
high-tech employees, including managers, tend to be familiar with a wide
range of technologies and may test you on skills not
directly related to the job.
Be comfortable enough with your areas of expertise that you won't have
to make excuses when you are asked questions about them.
|
