The Interview Today Went Very Well

The Interview Today Went Very Well

It was a screening interview--but went on quite a bit longer than I expected, which I think is a good sign. The interviewer gave me one of those problems that I did very well on--and he commented that I even avoided the mistake that many people make.

He also asked a couple of questions designed to see how much of what I knew was just programming, and how much was computer science. He wanted me to differentiate a queue from a stack--and then explain conceptually how you would implement these in a programming language. I can tell that he was pleased with my answers.

I took advantage of the discussion of stacks to explain how most programming languages use a stack to implement parameter passing and automatic variable using the base pointer and frame pointer registers, and the experience I have had building symbolic debuggers using that information. He was clearly impressed with the level of detailed knowledge in this area--where I gather a younger generation of computer science graduates may have not even studied this in school, or had little actual opportunity to use this knowledge.

There's another set of interviews in a week or two. The good news is that there are positions here in Boise with Microsoft!

I also had a chance to talk to representatives from several other companies, although the ones in Boise wanted current C# and SQL experience--and the one that was interested in my SNMP experience is in Pullman, Washington, which is about a five hour drive from here.