Technical Interview

Technical

Technical interview questions often consist of brainteasers, riddles and such, designed to measure your analytic and problem-solving skills. Common questions are along the lines of "How would you improve this pen?" and "Why are manhole covers round?"

Simply put, manhole covers are round to prevent them from accidentally falling through the holes. (Square and rectangular covers could fall through diagonally.) To further impress the technical interviewer, you might add that round covers are easier to move away from the holes, because they roll. You might also add that, because a cylinder is the strongest shape against the compression of the earth, the manhole cover must be round to match the cylinder beneath it.

But many technical interview questions don't have "correct" answers.

For example, unless it's obviously broken, there is no single correct answer for "How would you improve this pen?" For these types of questions, technical interviewers are not interested in the correctness of your answers. Rather they are interested in the way you logically arrive at your answers and share your thought process along the way. They are also likely to be interested in your ability to "think outside the box".

Sharing your thought process with your interviewer demonstrates your communication and analytical abilities. It also helps to engage you and the interviewer in a dialogue, from which you might pick up clues that steer you in the direction the interviewer would like you to go. For example, if an interviewer asks which of the U.S. states you'd remove, a good first response might be, "What do you mean by 'remove'?"

Because there are an infinite number of technical interview questions interviewers can throw at you, and many consist of hypothetical scenarios with no single correct answers to boot, there are few "canned answers" you can memorize in advance.

For the hypothetical, you must already have answers on the tip of your tongue or the ability to quickly manufacture them in your head. That's what technical interviews are all about.

But you can at least hone your analytic skills in preparation to answer technical interview questions, by practicing answers to the brainteasers, riddles and such floating around the Web. Many were submitted by interviewees after actual technical interviews. Some even include complex questions from top-notch companies that love to challenge interviewees, such as Microsoft.