How to get your first job (as a recent graduate)

Step 6 The Technical Interview

This one goes out to all of the Software Engineers out there.  One thing that is taught in school, but not used much (in assignments), is object orientation.  My first phone interview was with a company in New York.  Within two minutes, the interviewer had started asking very technical questions about object orientation.  Being that this was my first real interview, I drew a complete blank, and subsequently embarrassed myself.  But it was after this interview that I sat back down with my old software engineering books and made sure I was ready for the next time. 

It's really weird doing technical interviews over the phone the first time.  If you're like me, you know how to do what you need to do in code, but maybe can't articulate it on the spot when you aren't expecting it.  This is something I had to get over, and you probably will too.

In general, I found that the technical questions were pretty high-level, and, once you get comfortable with them, they weren't too bad.  If you haven't done a technical interview yet, I would recommend making sure you can do the following:

• Be able to do simple worst-case Big-O analysis on a piece of code;
• Know simple data structures (linked-list, hash table, etc), what they're good for in comparison to each other, and the worst-case run times of simple operations on them;
• And know a little bit about algorithms, how recursive algorithms work, etc.

All of that being said, everyones technical interview will be different depending on the position and your background.  These, however, were the types of questions I encountered.