I had an interview today. I didn’t do all that well at all and I got a little bit schooled.
This always seems to happen on my first technical interview with any serious technical ‘harrasment’. I also have a load of knowledge tucked away in my brain, none of which the guy wanted to know about sadly.
Here are the things he did want to know about that I really got flustered and couldn’t answer. Embarrasingly I gave myself an 8 out of 10, when I actually performed like a 5.5. I think he rated himself as an 8, and then quite easily proceeded to destroy me. 😦 boo.
So… back to the hard core technical stuff for me as I spent too long this week on the finance side and not enough on the actual RAD side, silly me.
Ranges: How do you create a range that will grow as and when data is enetered into it.
- Name the 5 types of join on a database
- how can I get a range to grow when data is added ( VBA & Excel)
- How can I change the Last Used cell in Excel.
- C++ pointers
- Basic C# questions.
Ooh, and make sure that you can eloquently discuss the previous projects you have had on your CV. Especially be prepared to get right into the nitty gritty. I was silly enough to let information like the usings and data types etc I was using in one of my projects I only stopped working on about 8 months ago. Not great either.
If I have a column with data in it.
ab
cd
ef
and I want to add in another item of data, but have the range grow. What can I do.
5 Types of Join – I was going to write the answer in here, but now I realise that what I need to do… is have a post dediected to SQL. Any decent RAD developer is going to have to dig around in a database from time to time. I think the problem I had is that I let the info go too stale, and didn’t keep on top of it. I mean sure I seriously believe 100% I could do the job. I would merely look in w3schools / Wikipedia for a few minutes and then be away and fine. However… interviews just aren’t like that. You need a decent answer, confident and concise right there, at the time to give the person that warm fuzzy glow that gets one hired.
Snippet :
Here are the first few things I selected to look at. A simple glance over these for 30-90 mins before the interview would have given me a massive boost in the interview:
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_join.asp
http://www.tomjewett.com/dbdesign/dbdesign.php?page=jointypes.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_%28SQL%29
Summary ( for my own revision )
Dynamic Ranges:
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/DynamicRanges.htm
Last Used Cell:
Run a small macro.. ActiveSheet.UsedRange. Or you can do this in the Immediate window if you don’t want it to be anywhere in the code.