yoshii (1/31/2015)
Thanks to Jeff and others' contributions. All discussions are valuable.@jeff. Thanks for the valuable feedbacks!
In my opinion, communication not only happens verbally, but also at implication level and non-verbal level. Actually, research shows that only about 30% of communication is in verbal form. Cheating is not the best sounding word. If I got you wrong, my apology. It's just I know that there're people who do not recommend reading interview questions before going into an interview.
for trick questions, in my opinion, ur examples are elaboration of technical facts, which stay on the technical side. I think trick questions will be more like you are being presented with 2 options, while u know there're advantages and disadvantages for both options, but u are being asked to choose one from the other. let's say you choose something different from the interviewer and the interviewer use ur choice to predict how u will work in his place, while you actually is willing and no problem of adapting to their practice. or any questions that may lead you to think ''so what's the story behind? something happened at this comany/team before?'' In short, a behavior test hiding behind technical facts.
about money, i have no problem spending money, if I think I can benefit from the products. However, after using it, I have no problem writing a review on how I like or dislike the products.
Thanks again, wish everyone well in his/her career path.
You're correct. A lot of times such choice "trick" questions are meant to test your non-technical skills. In most cases, I've found that there is no actual right answer because what they're really looking for is how you solve the dilemma of having the choices and your ability to justify/communicate what the though process was to make the choice. But you already know that. It shouldn't even be a bother for you.
Continuing in that vein, I've been known to talk briefly about possible advantages and disadvantages of both choices and wrap it up with quickly writing up some POP code to prove or disprove my own assumptions. That's also when I volunteer the fact that I can usually and very quickly whip up the code to generate a million row test table or two that runs in just a couple of seconds to test with.
Of course, that also plays right in with one of the questions that I ask during interviews. "How would you create and populate a single column table with a sequence of numbers from 1 to a million"? I'd fall out of my chair if someone actually volunteered the 4 different common methods that people use for that along with the reasons why you'd want to use one over the other and when. As it is, most people can't even tell me how to do it with a loop and that's the other point I've been trying to make. If you know what you're doing for the job you're interviewing for, take the advice that Brent's team gave. Take a deep breath and relax. If you don't know the stuff, then interviews are going to be a real bitch and no number of practice questions are actually going to help.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.