Interview Questions by MK #8

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Title: Sunset seen from the top of Mount Fuji, Source: own resources, Authors: Agnieszka and Michał Komorowscy

This is the first post from Interview Questions by MK series for a long time. The motivation to write it was a short talk with my colleague. His company really want to hire new .NET developers. The situation on the market is difficult for employers so they are also considering juniors without experience. And still they have a problem to find someone. Why?

The requirements are not extremely high. I'd say that they are standard. They don't demand God knows what. The ideal candidate doesn't have to: know all formatting options available in .NET, enumerate classes in System.DirectoryServices namespace, tell about all new features introduced in any .NET version or any other thing that can be checked in the documentation within seconds. However, they want someone with general knowledge. What I mean by that?

• It's good to know how to write a class, properties, derived a class... but it's also good to understand and can explain principals of the object oriented programming. For example could you tell why OOP is better than the procedural programming? Or maybe it isn't? Could you justify why encapsulation is actually a good thing?
• You don't have to know all possible collections available in .NET API but it's worth knowing some of them and their characteristics. Just to mention the list, the dictionary, the stack or the queue.
• You don't have to be very good in algorithms but knowing how to search a binary tree is not the rocket science.
• Writing a code that compiles without errors is only a first step. You should also know how to write a readable and a maintainable code. This knowledge comes from experience but at the beginning you should hear about refactoring, knows that the method with 50 parameters is not the best choice...
• It's not a problem if you have never worked with the continuous integration but you should at least know that there is something like that.
• As a developer you'll probably not work directly with IT infrastructure but knowing what is the load balancing or the computer cluster does not seem very demanding.
• ...

I can continue and continue this enumeration. According to me these are basic things, but still many candidates don't know them. Sometimes even developers with a few or more years of experience.

If you are one of them and you want to have better chances on the job market, I recommend one simple thing i.e. reading books, blogs, web sites... whatever you want. Several minutes (better more) every day, regularly, will make a big difference.

You may also say that you don't care because you'll get a job anyway. Well, it's true at least for now. Nonetheless it'll be only some job.