I suspect if I asked you the “What happens when an exception occurs in a
program?” you would fail it horribly, since what I did not ask was “What
happens when an exception occurs in a Windows program on an x86 processor?”
The what happens on a page fault is one I have responded to “At what level
of detail do you want this, and for what OS/processor are you referring or
is this just a stupid trick question?” sorry a lot of the time the “or …”
is correct. In fact I had one interviewer tell me that I did not know a
thing about page faults, then was at a standards conference a few weeks
later where on of that companies architects indicated my answer was correct
for everything but the one lamebrained project the interviewer had worked
on.
On you routine, which version of the C standard or is the C++ and do you
want the pure standards answer or should one include the rationale? Guess
what the answer can be different.
–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows 2k/XP/2k3 Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr
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“the_el_vez” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> One really good question (IMHO) that I always ask is “What happens during
> a
> page fault?”. It is a completely open ended question yet it gives the
> person
> a chance to show a lot of areas of knowledge. If they are a kernel dev
> they
> will typically have a completely different answer than a file system guy -
> but you can really get a good grasp of what they know from questions like
> this. Another favorite of mine in this same spirit is “What happens when
> an
> exception occurs in a program?”. I have found that people tend to loosen
> up
> because it is not a specific question like “implement strcmp()” - it is
> more
> of a platform to show what you know. BTW - my favorite question is this:
>
> Is there a bug in this routine:
>
> void
> DerefP(
> void
> )
> {
> *p;
> };
>
> I have had hour long discussions over this code. It opens the door to
> discussions of synchronization, compilation portability, coding style,
> performance and on and on. This question is particularly good for finding
> out if people really grasp asynchrony and multithreading. It also is
> telling
> if a person has been exposed to software that directly talks to hardware.
> I
> have been the 3rd or 4th interviewer in an interview loop where the
> candidate had “done horribly” in the previous interviews where they were
> having him implement red-black trees on the whiteboard, and then come in
> and
> bowl me over with the answers to these kinds of questions. However I must
> admit, the first time I asked the DerefP question to a candidate in an
> interview - the response was: “This is the dumbest interview question I
> have
> ever been asked.”. 
>
> “Matt” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>> This question just popped into mind and has little relevance to my life,
>> but I’m still
>> curious (perhaps it could yield new avenues for me and others to study).
>> -----------------------------
>>
>> If you were looking to hire a developer and were a party to the interview
>> process,
>> what questions would you ask the interviewee regarding windows driver
>> development
>> along with OS theory questions?
>>
>> Of course the basics regarding paged vs non-paged pools, IRQL’s, and
>> context. But what
>> else, and specifically…
>>
>> I could careless about the type of driver (ndis, filesystem, wdm, NT…).
>> What are some of the
>> technical questions you guys have asked or been asked?
>>
>> Perhaps something along these lines would make a great article for Peter
>> to Pontificate about.
>>
>> Matt
>>
>> P.S. - I really would like to hear something else than C vs C++.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
