#object oriented programming interview questions

[exitrowiron]

My DEI Experience

The very public cancelations of DEI programs got me thinking about my experience as the Executive Sponsor of a DEI program at a major global software company a few years ago.

There were several DEI groups (ex. LGBTQ, Pan-Asians, Blacks, etc.) and I was sponsor for the Black group. It was an enlightening experience for me and I'm proud that I helped many members secure interviews for internal positions and several were promoted.

My company's DEI program didn't have any hiring quotas, instead it was more of a networking and training opportunity for DEI members to share their experiences, learn some new skills and get exposure to sr. executives and hopefully secure the executive's support and encouragement.

As the sponsor of the DEI program, I couldn't help but acknowledge the advantages I'd enjoyed throughout my career as a tall white-guy, with similar tall white-guy professionals as family members. When graduating from Indiana University in 1989, I went to work at Price Waterhouse in St. Louis, the same office my Dad worked at when he graduated from college 25 years prior. I met all the hiring criteria (GPA, interviews etc.) and passed the CPA exam, etc. so the decision to hire me wasn't a favor to my Dad, but it certainly didn't hurt that a few of the partners knew my name and if nothing else, I didn't have imposter syndrome. My Dad had done this job and nearly everyone else doing the job looked like me as did almost everyone in sr. mgt.

My second job was with a company that employed my father-in-law. I don't think that influenced the decision to hire me, but it certainly didn't hurt. At this second company I entered the industry where I spent my career, much of it working for a guy who had attended my wedding as a guest of my in-laws. I'm confident that any of my colleagues would agree that I excelled in my various roles, but having those initial personal connections didn't hurt and there were other candidates and colleagues without the benefit of my network by birth and marriage. Through it all, I recognize that I looked like the hiring manager and the last person to have the job I was seeking.

One of the most enriching aspects of my DEI experience was gaining an understanding of how being a minority introduces an entirely new suite of uncertainties. On the rare occasion I received a less than stellar performance review or was passed over for a promotion, I never considered that my race/gender/sexual orientation might be the reason. But the conversations with my DEI colleagues confirmed that this is ALWAYS in the back of their mind, especially working for an overwhelmingly white company. Every colleague could cite examples of overt, incontrovertible racism they'd experienced (not necessarily at the company) which had made them question whether quiet racism was influencing their experience at our company. For example, was their supervisor just generally a jerk, or was the supervisor especially unpleasant to the employee because of her race, gender, etc.? If you've been on the receiving end of maltreatment, it can be difficult to be objective.

My role as the DEI sponsor was pretty straightforward. I did basic things like help critique resumes and provide interview coaching. I encouraged the candidates to overcome their imposter syndrome and apply for aspirational positions. Most importantly, I tried to be the networking resource they lacked. I sent notes and arranged brief phone calls with hiring managers to introduce the candidate. I was very careful not to inadvertently pressure the hiring manager (I know that just receiving an email from me created anxiety). I simply asked that the hiring manager/interviewer give the candidate an interview. I'm proud that my DEI group experienced above-average promotion velocity in the company.

Americans love to celebrate the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' story and white males especially want to believe that they are self made men. DEI programs can be challenging for guys like me because it can cause introspection which is humbling. It requires a person to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe you had some help along the way or at a minimum, you didn't face the external and internal obstacles of other candidates who may have been just as smart and capable. It is humbling to admit that at the very least, you benefitted from the fact that you looked like the last person who did the job; that's why I think white males are so intent on dismantling DEI programs.

[turingcom]

Job Title: Java Developer

Only candidates with 3+ years of overall software development experience are eligible for this role.

Job Description:

Turing.com is looking for a Java Developer on behalf of a rapidly-growing company dedicated to developing a new service with the highest level of honesty and confidentiality is looking for a Java Developer. The selected candidate will debug, diagnose, and troubleshoot complex production software. The company is backed by strong corporate support from an industry giant and operates in a start-up environment. This is a nice opportunity for developers to work in an agile, fast-paced setting and gain some first-hand experience.

Apply to this job: http://turing.com/s/0IgxsE

Job Responsibilities:

Mentor junior engineers, establish a rigorous technical culture, and assist in the formation of a new fast-growing team

Advocate and impart standard engineering best practices with team members

Take ownership of the entire software development lifecycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control, build procedures, testing, and operations

Create code that is both dependable and simple to maintain

Job Requirements:

Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science (or equivalent experience)

At least 3+ years of relevant experience as a software developer

Demonstrable programming experience in either Java, C++, or C#, including object-oriented design

Strong computer science basics in object-oriented design, data structures, algorithm design, problem-solving, and complexity analysis

Working knowledge of either the agile or waterfall software development lifecycles

Expertise in at least one current programming language

Excellent communication skills and analytic abilities

How to Become a Turing Developer:

Create your account on Turing.com

Fill in your basic information (name, number, location, previous salary, experience, etc.)

Solve multiple-choice questions

Schedule a technical interview

Final Onboarding

Perks & Benefits:

Earn salaries higher than local standards

Work alongside a community of Google, Facebook, Microsoft engineers

Experience rapid career growth

No visa requirements to work with the best US companies

Better work-life balance

Read Turing.com reviews here: turing.com/s/Gtnirx

Looking for more exciting job opportunities? Find more Turing US software jobs now: turing.com/s/4IimrW

[tap-tap-tap-im-in]

I gotta ramble a bit so that I can put my thoughts together for interview discussions.

I've been working in WordPress exclusively for the last three years or so. I've picked up a lot about the structure and the architectural decisions of the platform. I'm a big fan of the mechanisms for modularity extending and altering all aspects of the application. I think that for as big an application as it is, designed to support the work of many different authors via the plugin and theme system, I think that there isn't a "better" way to do it.

But I also think that for the vast majority of web development projects it's overkill. WordPress is overbuilt because it has to be. It has to allow plugins to modify core functionality of the platform, but it also has to treat them as marginally suspect because the platform will allow users to install outdated plugins as well as plugins from unknown sources. It has to provide additional APIs and security measures in an attempt to silo off that code.

I do still have some questions that I haven't been able to satisfyingly answer. I know WordPress has the ability to concat styles, it does it by default for the administrative section, and it has been a pain in my ass several times on domain changes on nonstandard hostings. So why doesn't it do that on the front end? Why doesn't it support caching the output by default. WordPress is the code that runs first and last on output, so it would make sense for it to do the caching rather than having caching modules rely on catching the output via output buffering, which when nested can make some truly awful fail states that are frustrating to debug. I get why it's not on by default. WordPress is a blogging CMS, the idea is that the content should be changing daily and caching that might make the dynamic content less dynamic. I don't know why the CMS doesn't support compression and optimization by default. All scripts have to register themselves with WordPress to run, so it's a ready made list to compress via minification and gzip.

Anyway, for the most part I like it, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of what I have questions about are features that I'm not aware of or are somewhere in the roadmap but aren't considered priorities because there are well liked plugins that currently solve those problems. Despite the fact that those well liked plugins mean you're installing a minimum of 5 - 6 per site, and that's before you need any specialty features or are considering installing WooCommerce. And the way most of these plugins work, they have to reside in memory.

And I think that's a bad habit that a lot of PHP developers have these days. Object Oriented Programming is a very useful tool. It brings a lot of reusability and modularity to code, and it creates a fantastic discrete unit for organizing functions that are related to each other, either by purpose or by source. But I think a lot of people forget that PHP is not a compiled language. It isn't an application that is running and waiting for user response. It's a process fired by the web server designed to do a single thing and then end. Any state or other persistence is managed by a hodgepodge of database, cookie, and filesystem changes. When you're processing a PHP request you have the opportunity to evaluate the request being made and load in only what's needed to fulfill it. In fact, to write good and fast code, you basically have an obligation to do that.

And yet, most WordPress plugins are designed to load the entirety of themselves immediately. WordPress core is a little smarter about what it loads when, but because it has to provide APIs to so many different moving parts, there are a lot of limitations to what it can leave off when. I've been writing plugins based on the vogon architecture for the last year or so and I really wonder why more people aren't doing that.

The way my plugins work is there is a core file, as required by the WordPress plugin API. This file declares what the plugin is, its version, who wrote it, declares five helper functions, and then registers a number of actions and filters with the various WP APIs. Each of those in turn call an entirely different controller file which sets up the request and loads models and views as needed. But because these are nested inside functions, these includes are not actually done unless that action is fired.

PHP is ridiculously fast, and modern server hardware is also ridiculously fast, so these optimizations are less about execution time and more about memory footprint. According to some admittedly old testing, we're talking about differences of microseconds. But if the PHP process has to do any image manipulation or work with anything nearing medium sized data, the default 32 - 128MB per session memory limit runs out fast. Leaving as much memory free for that kind of work is important. At least that has been my experience.

[personalcoachingcenter]

The Keys to Hiring the Right Person

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/the-keys-to-hiring-the-right-person/

The Keys to Hiring the Right Person

One of our community members sent a note this week saying that he knows of a leader who is hiring from outside the organization, when they already have an otherwise qualified candidate internally without a degree. He asked if I could make a convincing argument for the internal candidate to be considered.

I responded that I could not (nor was I sure I’d want to) as I know nothing about the situation, the leader, or the detailed qualifications of the people involved. However, I couldn’t help but consider the larger questions here: What is the value of a college degree? Should someone with a degree trump an internal candidate who has every other qualification met but no degree?

This is a tough question for me to answer objectively. Between Bonni and I, we have six degrees and both of us have taught lots of college classes – so it probably goes without saying that I see value in degrees. It’s still huge for credibility to get a foot in the door in many professional jobs. That said, there is also a growing chorus of voices of those wondering if the world is changing and if college graduates will have the same success in the future. This recent article in the Economist looks at both sides of the argument.

For me, the key to hiring the right person is considering what they have done with the opportunities they have had, more so that the degree itself. Let me explain:

When I was a college senior, I received a call from Microsoft to interview for a position at their headquarters near Seattle. That was a pretty cool phone call to get at the time – and during the process, the recruiter shared why they had made the call: because of my three years in a major leadership role of our school’s summer orientation program. The recruiter cited excellent experience with past candidates who had an orientation background, so she screened for that. I got the call and was on a plane to Seattle in a matter of days.

Did I need a degree to qualify for that job? You bet. Was the degree the reason they called me? Not at all. I knew tons of people that had the same degree (or better) who never received a call from Microsoft. Certainly, they screened people for degrees first – but what they really cared about was hiring people who had already demonstrated leadership and managed others in some key capacity. In short, they wanted someone with proven skills.

A college degree can provide a great environment to prove yourself (it did for me) and that’s a big reason people screen for degrees. Yet, it’s only one way to prove yourself. I’ve worked with extraordinarily talented people over the years who only finished high school…and, I’ve also had poor experiences in business dealings with people who have master’s and doctoral degrees – and many good experiences too, of course.

A college degree is only one piece of a person’s professional tapestry. When I’m considering working with someone, I want to first know what kind of results they’ve had in the past, how much they’ve taken the time to understand what we do, and what they’ve done with the opportunities they’ve had. It’s one of the reasons that Bonni and I are both involved as advisors for Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) since it provides college students with leadership and business opportunities to make contributions to the world, long before they ever graduate.

The keys to hiring the right person for me: Have they proven themselves already? Do they show evidence of challenging themselves? Have they been willing to make mistakes? Can they communicate and work well with others? And, if they have a degree – all the better.

One big turnoff? People who think they are entitled to something just because they have a degree.

For me, the degree is a strong starting point – but it’s just that…and you can convince me to overlook its absence when the answers to the other questions are strong.

Original source: https://coachingforleaders.com/the-keys-to-hiring-the-right-person/

[overdrivels]

Even more unsolicited resume advice

Corona has probably hit a lot of people hard and it has been a tough time for everyone, especially people who just left college to enter the work force or have been out of a job and had been looking to get back into the force. While this might not solve much, I want to provide some additional advice piggy-backing off a previous post.

<Previous Resume Advice Post>

Again, Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) since this is entirely subjective and very US-centric. A lot of the resumes that come across my desk are for specialized jobs and higher-levels, so I’ve had a bit of a disconnect with entry-level and recent grad-level resumes. Regardless, I still want to help answer some questions that people have and hopefully give a bit of a push to help you into the jobs you want.

There’s more of this sort of stuff under the tag: ‘adult drivels’.

"What do I write for my Objectives/Summary of Qualifications?"

To be very honest, I only ever see Objectives from people trying to switch careers or from internship/entry-level resumes. At least 98% of the time, we know what your objective is. It's money. I don't care if the objective is to help save the world--believe me, I've seen enough resumes that say something along those lines (worked at a place that kind of championed that and boy is the reality nasty).

Anyway. Write a short paragraph (usually 2-3 sentences, but no longer than a full paragraph) about your skillset. Give me enough detail to want to read the rest of your resume.

Examples:

Finance student with 2 years volunteer experience in business accounting, correspondences with the Federal Reserve, and federal financial law. Specializes in XYZ, etc.

I couldn't make this any more detailed, but you get the gist of it. If not, here's another one.

Recent college graduate with experience in freelance computer repairs for Windows, Mac, and RedHat Linux. Customer-oriented from # years in customer service, and willing to learn new things especially more about network infrastructure and engineering. Currently studying to pass Network and looking to pass Security+ within the next year.  

This is just a personal nitpick, but be careful with very subjective character traits like ‘loyal’ or ‘hard-working’ or ‘effective leader’. Anyone can put that on a resume, but I need you to prove it in your resume. Some industries like this sort of self-description/self-evaluation, but I really don’t trust when people write that stuff down.

(Ex. Someone wrote they were detail-orientated and their resume was littered with typos. Mm, don’t trust like that.)

"I don't know what to write for my job experience. I don't have sales numbers or percentages like these websites are telling me."

You do. You have them, just not consciously.

You worked at Starbucks and trained newcomers? Fine.

"Trained ## new hires on all store procedures, safety, and customer service, and one was promoted to store manager with # months/one new hire won Employee of the Month/and I received formal recognition from corporate."

Or

"Created new training plan/procedures/whatever and implemented it over the course of # months, reducing the time needed for training and increasing effectiveness."

Didn't work at Starbucks? Just joined a club and helped organize a bake sale? Cool.

"Sold $# worth of merchandise for [school club] [sale] which contributed to #% increase in funding for the year's activities, allowing the club to do XYZ.

Don't have the percentage? Do a reasonable guess, or ask. Or just say it helped you guys earn your field trip to wherever. Whatever it helped do.

Didn’t do anything involving cash or numbers? No problem.

“Tutored # students at least # times a week in [subject], working with them using different teaching methods such as [example] and [example]; # students were able to pass their courses with satisfactory grades (insert grades somewhere, if you’re proud of that).”

The point is: [Action] --> [Result].

What did you do, specifically? And what was the direct result? That’s what I’m looking for.

“But I’ve never held a job. This’ll be my first one. How do I write my resume?”

That’s always tough. In this case, you’ll have to play on anything you do have. Volunteer work, school activities, extracurricular activities, personal projects, awards, personal achievements, etc. Sometimes people go for a skills-oriented resume which I don’t actually see a lot.

Basically, standard resumes have your regular stuff:

Personal Information

Summary of Qualifications/Objectives

Education

Job Experiences in chronological order

Extracurricular Activities

Skills

Awards/Certifications

Whatever else

A skills based resume usually replaces the ‘Jobs’ section with a huge-ass ‘Skills Set’ section which contains several main skills you want to highlight for the job and examples of how you demonstrated these skills.

Communication

- Corresponded and tutored students struggling in [subject] class, restructuring and explaining lessons using easy-to-understand anecdotes, resulting in students passing the class with scores of no less than a B. (This is lengthy as fuck, but you get the idea.)

- Successfully led one 24-person raid a month for 2 years in an online game where quick and clear communication and timing was vital.

So, that but multiple times until it fills out your resume.

This goes against my personal opinion about subjective traits, but if it works, it works. 

“Anything else?”

I turn my entire Word document into a table for formatting and then just hide all borders when I’m done.

Always, always export to PDF and do a test print. You never know how it’ll look on someone else’s screen or program. (Especially if you have LibreOffice or something, that really messed up the formatting sometimes.) 

I kind of like Google’s resumes, the one they have in Google doc templates.

To make different things stand out, I mess with fonts. Like sans serif for section titles and with serif for body text. Sometimes I just start going nuts with them, but not too nuts because again, it might not be a font on someone else’s computer.

To test the visual appeal of my resume, I’d usually print it out, paste it on a wall, walk away, turn around, and try to see if I can spot my name and the different section breaks instantly from a distance. If I can’t, I know I fucked up. If I can, great, formatting is clean. One thing I hate as an interviewer is searching through walls of text for important info or section breaks.

If you can, only submit as PDF. I swear, half the time, the Word doc gets mangled by the application platform that people send them through (you know, the automatic uploading thing?) It had definitely cost a few good candidates a job simply because the program mangled the resume’s formatting.

Following these steps still won’t necessarily get you the job. This is cruel, but reality. It could be your resume. It could be just because the role is meant for someone else with a different skillset. It’s not personal. You have to keep trying.

For the last time, TAILOR, TAILOR, TAILOR. You’re fighting with about 30 other people who have put in a hell of a lot of effort to get jobs. They also want the job and have been searching just as long or longer than you. You have to give yourself an edge by not blasting a generic version of your resume at the recruiter. That’s wasting our time and your own time.

Again, all of these opinions are my own and should be taken with a handful of salt and two handfuls of personal judgement.

Good luck on your searches and may the job you want be yours.

[kickthecanrevolution]

Lately I’ve been thinking about the trajectory of my life. I think it started with @heartonthefloor‘s question about a witchy moment and that led me to thinking about all of those years I worked at Nordstrom on the sales floor. Years and years and years. I hated it, I hated selling - I was driven by the commission, competitive but mostly with myself because I was scared about money. I was constantly scared about everything which is likely the case in one’s twenties. I was so lost, I had no ambition and a boyfriend who didn’t like me much as a result. It was hard. Customers were so awful, even in a bougie place like Nordstrom, dealing with the public when they know they aren’t going to be entirely accountable for treating you horribly - being an object - was terrible. I did a lot of shady shit to make my commission numbers, I would charge a ton on my mom’s account and then return it, bring tons of clothes home for Kim and then return what she didn’t want. One more than one occasion, I told someone something looked great because I just needed her to buy it. I threw myself into the Nordstrom culture, so proud of the fact that I worked for a company like that that would go “above and beyond” for customers, I think it tapped a creative problem-solving part of myself. There was a certain freedom to it - I remember we screwed up an alteration for a customer and she left without us being able to locate it. I finally found it (it wasn’t my fault, I just had to deal with it) and she’d left the store super pissed, she needed it that night, so I actually had to get on a ferry and deliver it to her, she lived on Vashon Island. I loved that ferry ride, I loved taking the afternoon to do it - I loved her delighted face when she thanked me. I did not love the customer complaint about me because the dress didn’t have the belt but Nordstrom is also the place where I realized that white women for the most part, have substantial capacity for evil (myself included). 

One morning, our Training Director was at our store and gave us a training on something - I can’t even remember what it was - in our lunchroom. Right then I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I started volunteering at the Dispute Resolution Center for Washington, knowing I needed to start getting anything with “training” on my resume, so I started with Conflict Resolution. I still use the premises from a book they made me read called the Art of Ethical Persuasion, it is so so so so good. Timeless. 

Anyway, I moved to the downtown Seattle Nordstrom store to sell, and that was exciting. And then it happened, a training position came up - a  Washington Alaska Training Specialist. I applied and met Wendall the manager - she interviewed me and I thought she was incredible. I could not believe it when I got the job. 

I was so great at that job. Really, really good. Wendall taught me how to facilitate. She showed me the importance of being neutral, how as a facilitator I can give and take power and that’s an important dynamic in a classroom. She taught me to always wear lipstick and I did it for years. 

My parents gave me a lap top - a 22 lb Dell - and I carried that thing everyday on the bus, I’m not sure why because I had my own work computer but it was probably because I was a weirdo. I was obsessed with it and then I found the software Macromedia Director and was obsessed even more. I ended up making this huge movie for our new hire orientation using Macromedia - it’s a movie you could convert to PowerPoint - and the file was so huge, I ended up calling my friend John who was one of the first software developers at Microsoft (he invented Clippy which I still give him shit about to this day). He had a crush on me, we’d been on one date months prior - afterwards, I asked him into my room to help me with a few things on my computer and I was interested in Power Point, a program I didn’t really understand well. I remember him looking over my shoulder and saying “ok good - so open up a new slide. great. Now go ahead and right-click”. 

And I wrote the word “click”. I really did that. 

He was embarrassed for me and I quickly realized my mistake. He left pretty quickly after that and we never spoke of it again. Oh my God, I am still mortified as I write it down. LOL. 

Anyway, we drove to his office at 1am to see if he could fix this now monster file filled with photos and music.. We finally got it to work but thing was just too big, so Wendall hired a videographer to actually take a video of it while it played on my computer. She spent 1500 dollars on that, money our department didn’t have, but she was so positive and while terrible, I think I still have a VHS tape of it somewhere. 

Wendall taught me everything, a single mom so deeply devoted to her kids and to the community. One day we laughed so hard I ended up peeing on my shoe, and I was mortified but it made us laugh even harder. 

One day I had decided to sit outside for lunch - I watched all of the busy business ladies in their suits rushing by and the homeless intermingled; as I ate my sandwich I thought to myself “I’d really like to do something to help the homeless someday.” I went back in to finish my day and Wendall and her boss - the woman who had facilitated that first training I saw when I fell in love with training - asked me into a conference room. They were eliminating my position that day, but they wanted me to stay on as an HR manager of a Nordstrom Rack downtown, they thought I’d be good at it because they were starting a program to transition homeless people in to their first job. 

I remember being shocked - shocked that I had just said that to myself at lunch. Shocked I was so good at the job and they were eliminating it. Wendall looked at me dead in the eye and said “You are better at this than me, Diane - you are an incredible designer - you should have this job instead of me, I am so sorry.” I went home, and emailed them both a really gracious note and that next Monday, went to be the HR manager which is a whole other insane first day story that involves being trapped in a tiny office with a pigeon and I fainted. I might tell that later but that’s not the point of this. 

The point is how kind Wendall was to me. And now, she’s my property manager up in Seattle and she’s out of a job and that allows me to be kind to her. Kindness creates kindness. I think I have the capacity for kindness, but I need to choose it way more frequently than I do now. 

[askagamedev]

I'm currently a CS student trying to figure out what should I do during my university years in order to land a position as gameplay programmer (e.g - specific classes I should focus on, what kind of projects I should do). things that will look good on the resume in order to get to the interview itself

I encourage hopeful gameplay programmers to take these classes in specific while in school:

Data Structures

Algorithms

Linear Algebra

Computer Graphics (more for the math elements)

Object-oriented programming

Something using C++

Specifically, you should expand your toolbox so you can tell which solutions are more efficient when solving problems. Linear Algebra and Computer Graphics set a mathematical foundation for understanding how things work in 3 dimensions and how to calculate getting from one point in space to another. These skills are incredibly useful to a gameplay programmer, because we often have to deal with solving those sorts of problems. C++ is the industry standard programming language, so familiarity with C++ is a very big benefit. 

For projects, I just encourage you to do a lot of stuff. Make games. Make mods. Make tools for games. Participate in game jams. Do your own projects. Build something cool, get your friends to play it. Take some video of it and show us your work. Apply the lessons you learned in class to the projects you work on - mod a grab system for a FPS or expand the way stealth works. Build your own maps with custom scripted behaviors or create a new way to traverse an old game. Put yourself in a position where you’ve got gameplay problems to solve through code and then solve them through code. The more of that you have, the better your resume will look to hiring managers like me.

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[pythonfan-blog]

OOPS In Python | Object Oriented Programming Python

This "OOPs in Python" tutorial will help you to understand comprehensively all the concepts of OPPs. Object-Oriented programming is an extremely important part of OOPS. With the help of this, we can represent real-world entities in the programming world. Since object-oriented programming is so important, you will definitely find questions related to it in interviews.