Fri 30 Dec 2005
Posted in Interview Help at 5:57 pm by jhom
During my time looking for jobs in mid-2005 I did attend a few interviews for banks, and encountered certain common themes. These can primarily be broken into the following areas which you will need to know and understand. Even if you’re not going for a bank it’s good to know how to answer the topics listed below. Good luck.
Understand OOA concepts like why Composition is favoured over Inheritance, and also why you would use Private Inheritance. Memorise a few design patterns so you can talk about at least one. The Head First Design Patterns book is good at explaining this, which gives examples in Java, but I was able to easily recode a few examples into C++. GOF Design Patterns book is also good but tends to send you to sleep! This is really useful for understanding how/when to use Abstract Base Classes, inheritance etc.
Learn about Unix and/or PC applications programming,and practise at it. It does help to be able to say that you’ve written applications. It’s also useful to know the commands for IPC, threads, processes, shared memory etc. and how they work. There’s loads of stuff on the web and it’s well worth reading up on.
Scott Meyers books on Effective C++ are good and edition 3 is out now (1/2 price from Amazon) - well worth getting. I would also recommend Josuttis book on the STL which is quite daunting at first but once you get into it it’s good. There’s a good section on auto ptrs, containers, lists, which I’ve had to answer a few times now.
Get to know constructors and destructors in fine detail as well. Know things
like private/protected destructors, singletons etc. Again Scott Meyers books are good.
Run-time race conditions are also a good one to know about, eg. why the
double-checking in singletons can break in a multi-procesor environment. Also how compilers can sometimes “swap instruction order” for cache efficiency.
Another one is calling an over-ridden virtual function in the derived class
constructor - the result depends on when the vtable is created and is actually compiler dependent, although I think most interviewers expect the answer to be that the vtable isn’t there when you call the derived class constructor and so you end up calling the base class function.
What happens with implicit type-conversions. Here temporary run-time objects are created and destroyed to perform the operation. This can cause run-time problems especially if the constructors and/or destructors do a lot of work.
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Thu 22 Dec 2005
Posted in News at 10:36 am by Chris Lincoln
The 2005 PVG traditional Christmas Curry took place in the traditional Raj Lodge on 10th December. Clearly the spirit of PVG is alive and well with around 60 of the team past and further past (Ravi, Ricky, Martin D) making the trek (pilgrimage?) back to Old Harlow. Some of course like Rade did not have to stagger far – others came from further afield.
Laila had done an excellent job negotiating the menu and the price (I paid more then twice the price for not as good a meal in Witham a few days before). While it was in full flow with all the old familiar faces around the tables it was hard to believe we were not going to trek back to V4 to work on SN10! Everyone who came was absolutely glad they had got there; so those of you who didn’t missed a great re-union. See you there next year.
Pictures courtesy of John Davis.
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Mon 19 Dec 2005
Posted in Interview Help at 8:48 pm by ace
Here’s a few interview questions I heard about:
Describe a paper clip … without drawing a picture.
Write a limerick with the first line “There once was a lady named Prue”.
Write down pi to as many decimal places as you know. The person who told me this stuff knew pi to .. like … 40 decimal places! Geek! 
He said it was the only thing he learned from his school days that he’s gotten to use.
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Mon 12 Dec 2005
Posted in News at 11:01 am by Paul Venkatesh
It is now just over a year since most of us got the push, and I get the distinct impression that a number of people are beginning to get itchy feet. This site will allow you to post articles that you think may be of use to other members of our ex-team such as interview questions, job listings etc. You will have to register your details, and you should be able to publish new articles, although initially, I will have to OK them.
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Fri 9 Dec 2005
Posted in Interview Help at 7:39 pm by Paul Venkatesh
This section is to post any interview questions that you have been asked that you either want help answering or you think other people may like to peruse to prepare themselves.
So just to start the ball rolling, a C question.
Give a one-line C expression to test whether a number is a power of 2. (No loops allowed)
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Fri 9 Dec 2005
Posted in News at 7:37 pm by Paul Venkatesh
This section is for you to add any job listings that you think may be of interest to other members.
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Fri 9 Dec 2005
Posted in News at 4:56 pm by Administrator
The first annual ex-PVG curry will take place on Saturday 10th December 2005 at the Raj Lodge in Old Harlow. Please meet at 1pm. It looks as if there will be 40 people attending. Thanks to Laila for organising this.
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