Great article, folks, read it if you have any interviewing responsibilities! IMO.
Interviews are recognized as hard. With my experience, somebody asks me about some silly simple code problem, I never know what level they're going for. Is this in a server environment? IoT? Will it have uptime metrics? Is it business critical? Or just some utility.
The answer depends on all that. But no, usually they just want to know if I understand cooperative threads or something. Then I vector off - is blocking permitted, or do modifications occur in a driver or interrupt routine, other time-critical code? What is the threading situation? Hyperthreads? Multi-core? Different architectures e.g. DSP vs app processor? Power critical? Scheduling constraints?
No, they just want to see if I understand standard library locking mechanisms. No, I haven't used them in years (I do IoT etc where lockless queues and zero-kernel-call mechanisms are important) but let me Google something!
If the interviewer even appreciates my questions, then we can have some kind of meeting of minds. Else, it's a waste of time for both of us. We're just too far apart, operating at different layers of the software layer cake.
So thanks for listening to my personal rant about interviewing. Like belly buttons, everybody has one.
Interviews are recognized as hard. With my experience, somebody asks me about some silly simple code problem, I never know what level they're going for. Is this in a server environment? IoT? Will it have uptime metrics? Is it business critical? Or just some utility.
The answer depends on all that. But no, usually they just want to know if I understand cooperative threads or something. Then I vector off - is blocking permitted, or do modifications occur in a driver or interrupt routine, other time-critical code? What is the threading situation? Hyperthreads? Multi-core? Different architectures e.g. DSP vs app processor? Power critical? Scheduling constraints?
No, they just want to see if I understand standard library locking mechanisms. No, I haven't used them in years (I do IoT etc where lockless queues and zero-kernel-call mechanisms are important) but let me Google something!
If the interviewer even appreciates my questions, then we can have some kind of meeting of minds. Else, it's a waste of time for both of us. We're just too far apart, operating at different layers of the software layer cake.
So thanks for listening to my personal rant about interviewing. Like belly buttons, everybody has one.