Senior software engineer Interview Questions

* I answered well

Could you post some of the interview questions on PHP and Ruby? It would help other people.

Yes

Nahh

What you need to know is that you only have to edit two files. One is the Test file and is obvious from looking at the code. The other file is called DefaultEventManagerImplementation or something similar. This is the class that you have to understand and focus all your time on understanding what is going on in here. When i went for the interview i was taken to a room, handed a bit of paper describing the system, and told i would be left alone to look at the code for 10 minutes. Your pair then comes back into the room and starts drip feeding questions. ( The point here is you do not know how many questions he is going to ask ). In the 10 minutes alone, i had read the paper ( not very useful ) and started clicking around the 10 or so classes that are provided to try and understand the code. I had no real understanding of the code within this first 10 minutes. As you are then asked your first task, you feel obliged to start making changes. This was my mistake. My advice to anyone is spend the first 30 minutes understanding the DefaultEventManagerImplementation class. Tell your peer you want to understand this before hacking at the code. He can go if he wants, but dont touch the code until you understand this class. If you do this, you will sail through the four or five tasks which are rather simple, and finish within the hour. If you do what i did, and start modifying things after 10 minutes ( which they try to make you ) you end up confused and making mistakes as you are not familiar enough to confidently make the changes. I got everything working but took about 1hr 20 mins. If i spent 30 mins up front i would have killed it in an hour, easy. DO NOT TOUCH THE CODE until you are comfortable with what is going on.

Thanks for sharing. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about that 'DefaultEventManagerImplementation' ? e.g. the existing methods implemented already and their logic; the expectation of your changes there ?

Sort + loop over array with break early condition - O(nlogn + n)

individual responses to each which demonstrated some experience and technical backing. Where a direct question couldn't be answered, i was honest and provided best background answers and knowledge which could be used to derive a solution from.

Took little more time (but still completed in 50 mins when duration was max 1 hr) as I got stuck in unnecessary prototypes of fread() and other file operation functions. Actual logic was with converting from little endian format to displayable format. I felt they were not happy as they expected me to remember every single syntactical details. And I didn't remember consult the Interviewer, basically interact more. First one is not possible, all programmers refer to google for syntactical help. And on second, I wasn't even sure if asking questions was allowed. Maybe in Australia its ok but in India you can't ask all the details to interviewer (cultural difference probably). Here they want to you interact more with interviewer to check your team building and team fitness.

Talked about past projects, challenges I encountered and technologies used.