This is something I am guilty of, as I have posted a number of different kinds of interview questions on line.

Nevertheless, one of the community credit bloggers who works as a coder at Starbucks makes a good case for not posting interview questions on line for anyone to get at.

When I posted the interview questions for web developers, security engineers, general questions, and one of the other writers posted interview questions on oracle, I usually find these helpful for me when I am interviewing based on position. Since I have an idea of what I want when hiring, it is usually good for me to have a master list of questions, but it does not mean I will ask them as I have written them.

But the person from Starbucks brings up a good point and their take on it is:

I can think of one occasion where the person being interviewed asked the difference between a dataset and a data reader. He gave one of the most perfect answers I have ever heard, much better than I could have ever given. Right after his answer, though, he was asked to write the code on the whiteboard to load a grid view control and had no idea. If he had gotten the job, i suspect that he would have been googleing really hard to find out how to code any task assigned to him and would have had no chance at solving anything even mildly complex. Source: Community Credit

Note: Cleaned up spelling on this quote.

There are really two points here.

1. Any list of on line interview questions should never be asked directly exactly as is on the internet. Some people are very good at memorizing things, the question should be asked in just enough of a different way that the answer is not immediately obvious.

2. Do not ever rely on random interview questions you find on line, as they might not work for you. While the interview questions posted here are generally good, they like anything generic will never be perfect in total for the company or the person doing the interview. If anything people need to resort back to point number one if they are thinking of using the plain vanilla interview questions, because people will memorize or otherwise do what they think they need to do to get around any process.

If you are in the interview and someone is asking you questions from prep questions that they might have found on the internet, that says a lot about the company you are interviewing for as well. That they are unable to articulate their own internal processes, needs and wants and are relying on vanilla interview questions that they found on the internet. That should be a warning sign for any person thinking of getting a job at that company.

There are issues for both sides of the interview table if the interview has devolved into an interview session that is based solely on interview questions that are available on the internet. That would be a truly disturbing interview to be a part of, anywhere, for any job.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community.