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What are some typical questions in the YIF Telephonic interview?

What am I to take from an interview if the interviewer asks me C++ trivia questions like what is copy constructors, virtual destructors, difference between a reference and a pointer?

  • Notable points: 1. My day job is based upon ruby on Rails. 2. I have contributed to python. 3. This was a telephonic interview. 4. Prior to the interview they had an online test which had questions based on graph theory (shortest path, minimum spanning tree, dynamic programming on directed acyclic graph) which was fun to solve thereby giving me incentive to opt for the future rounds. 5. The domain of the company in question is 'Algorithmic trading'. 6. This was second telephonic, first one had extremely trivial questions like find a missing element in array, count set bits in a number etc. 7. I told the interviewer clearly, I do not write C++ professionally. 8. The interview was for a role with 2+ year of work experience.

  • Answer:

    Normally, I'd say these were stupid questions, but the ones you mention are actually important for C++, and you do need to know them.

Eric Pepke at Quora Visit the source

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These are not trivia questions, to repeat . I believe the interviewer wants to know if you have background in these. This would be expected if you had listed C++ in your resume even if you don't do it professionally. I think this is an example why it's good to have background knowledge in a wide range of languages even if you don't get to use them regularly.

Miguel Paraz

Even if you told them that you don't code in C++ on a regular basis they would like to know if you remember the basics or not. Besides algorithmic trading may involve coding in C++ so they have to ask you about it. About the questions itself. This type of questions test the basics of the candidate. You may find it easy to answer these questions but there are many ways in which you can answer. For example, if they ask you about minimum spanning trees then  it would be good if you know Kruskal's or Prim's algorithm but much better if you know them both. It will be even better if you could talk about the space and time complexity of these solutions. It will be excellent if you could list down cases in which one algorithm would perform better than the other. You can also list down the data structures that can be used to further optimize the algorithm if applicable. Finding a missing element in the array is a similar question. You can directly say that linear search would give you the solution. You can ask if the array is sorted or not in which case you can use binary search. You can ask about the contents of the array which can help you optimize further. For example if you know there are only integer elements in the range 1-100 then adding them up might also give you the result. This shows out of the box thinking. Also you need to have the basics of programming memorized. You can google the solutions to these trivia questions but when it comes to programming knowing them already will save you a lot of time and effort. For example there is a way to swap 2 integers without using a temp variable. You can google the solution but if you know it already then you can use this while coding.

Rachit Gupta

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