Using template questions in a technical interview

Posted by Desolate Planet on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Desolate Planet
Published on 2011-03-01T22:20:16Z Indexed on 2011/03/01 23:31 UTC
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I've recently been in an argument with a colleage about technical questions in interviews. As a graduate, I went round lots of companies and noticed they used the same questions. An example is "Can you write a function that determines if a number is prime or not?", 4 years later, I find that particular question is quite common even for a junior developer. I might not be looking at this the correct way, but shouldn't software houses be intelligent enought to think up their own interview questions. This may well be the case, but I've been to about 16 interviews as a graduate and the same questions came up in about 75% of them. This leads me to believe that many companies are lazy and simply Google: 'Template questions for interviewing software developers' and I kind of look down on that.

Question: Is it better to use a sest of questions off some template or should software houses strive to be more original and come up with their own interview material?

From my point of view, if I failed an inteview and went off and looked for good answers to the questions I messed up on, I could fly through the next interview if they questions are the same.

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