I’ve started interviewing again now that I should be finished with my Master’s degree in a month or so. I’m reminded again of the wide range of interview styles people use. My least favorite is the trivia test. This seems to happen more often with Java-related job interviews than Ruby-related ones.
I may never understand why any employer would value memorizing the Java API over being able to reference the docs and know where to find things.
I had such an interview just last week. Here are some of those questions
- How do you execute a PL-SQL stored procedure from JDBC?
- How do you import classes into the classpath of a JSP page? (apparently ‘no one in their right mind does that anymore’ isn’t a good answer to this one)
Who memorizes that stuff?
My favorite question of all was this : what are the two conditions under which a finally block is not called. I got one of them, (System.exit()) but the interviewer wouldn’t even tell me the other one (“You won’t learn that way”). I googled it later to find the answer not well defined. One of the ways I saw mentioned was the thread “dying” but Thread.stop() is severely deprecated so that shouldn’t ever happen. The other answer I saw floating around doesn’t really fit – when a exception is thrown from the finally block it doesn’t complete, but the finally block is still called.
I was talking about this with Frank and he came up with another way: infinite loop in the try block. I then thought of calling PowerSystem.getMainPower().setPosition(OFF).
Now I can’t wait to get that question again!