Technical Questions for Software Development Jobs

Autodesk, Software Developer, June 2006

Electronic Arts, Software Engineering, June 2006

Cast Software, 3D Graphics Software Developer, January 2007

What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface class?
How does the garbage collector in Java affect design decisions? (use of finalization methods)
Are member variables initialized before or after the constructor?
In what order do classes in a hierarchy get constructed and destroyed?

Qualcomm, Software Engineering Intern, February 2007

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Imaging Research Assistant for Cardiac MRI, February 2007

PlateSpin, Windows Software Developer, February 2007

What is an exception?
Should all exceptions inherit from a single root exception or should we have a forest of exceptions?

IBM Canada, Compilation Technology Build, February 2007

Can you give an overview of the entire compilation process?
What is virtual inheritance?
What is sizeof(c) if c is an instance of a class that overrides a function in the base class? (don't forget virtual function table)
What are the sizes of char, int, long, and double?
What problems can pointer aliasing cause during code optimization?
Would you use floating point data types to write financial applications? (no, e.g. accumulation of errors in a summation)
How is memory management different in the heap than in the stack?
What is an automatic object and how does it behave?

Siperian, Software Engineering, February 2007

Implement a function that returns a string that is the concatenation of all the strings in a given array of strings
What is the difference between == and .equals() in Java?
How do you ensure thread-safe code in Java?
How many ways are there to sort? (think-outside-the-box question: e.g. sort file list in Windows Explorer, sort a file in UNIX)

NVIDIA, Software Engineering, February 2007

What are the components of a process?
How many threads does a process have?
Given that a process has a string s, how can you get s to appear in the right-click menu of an icon in the system tray?

Side Effects Software, 3D Software Developer, February 2007

What is the current average speed of all hockey pucks in Canada? (close to zero)

Amazon, Software Development Intern, February 2007

Can you write a function that will reverse the bits of the integer parameter?
How would you design the class structure for a virtual zoo? (need some knowledge of animal kingdom)
Given two 3-character words w1, w2 and a dictionary, how would you write a program to find a sequence of 3-character words, if it exists, such that the first word in the sequence is w1 and the last word in the sequence is w2, and every pair of two consecutive words in the sequence consists of words differing by only one character, and every word in the sequence is in the dictionary?
Given an array of integers, design an algorithm to determine a subinterval of the array such that the sum of the integers in the subinterval is the maximum possible. (use a greedy algorithm in one sweep through the array)
Given an array of integers, find two that add up to a given value, if they exist.
How can a function in C++ return more than one value?

Sybase iAnywhere, Software Developer, February 2007

Microsoft, Program Manager/Software Design Engineering, February 2007

Considering that RAM is getting cheaper, what is the future of virtual memory?
Implement a function that computes the acute angle between the hour and minute hand given a time in hours, minutes, seconds.

Google, Software Engineering, February 2007

How can you design a class that would prevent a user from instantiating it on the stack? (first make constructor private)
Given a two-dimensional array of black and white pixels depicting either an orange or a banana oriented in an arbitrary direction, how would you determine whether the image represents an orange or a banana?
Implement the constructor, destructor, and overloaded assignment for a reference-counted string class.