The following are a series of questions I wrote when interviewing candidates for a research assistant position with a Statistics group when I was an Undergraduate at the University of Washington. The position involved implementing high-performance statistical algorithms in C++.
The first question is fairly basic, and each subsequent question builds off the first ( roughly ) getting more difficult with each question.
The questions test for some basic CS knowledge, including:
- Basic loop structures
- Very basic understanding of optimization using multi-threading ( parallel for loop over independent tasks )
- Loss-of-significance when working with floating point values
The questions test for a lot of C++ specific knowledge, in particular:
- Understanding of Templates or Overloading
- Template Meta-Programming ( I did not expect many people to actually know how to use TMP, but if they did they got MEGA brownie points )
I expected candidates to be able to answer Question 1 mostly correctly. I also wanted to see candidates sort of understand Question 3, since loss-of-significance was a big problem in our research group, but most students seemed unaware of why it happened. Correct-ish answers on any of the other questions were mostly brownie points.
I've been told the questions are a bit "Too Math-y" for a typical software interview, which seems like a fair evaluation. In retrospect the questions dive a bit too deep into the specifics of C++ and do not cover enough basic CS knowledge.
The repository is in two parts, one being the actual question write-up ( with and without suggested answers ) and the other being example code to accompany the suggested answers.
To read the questions look under Questions/With_Answers or Questions/Without_Answers depending on your needs. The questions are provided in .tex and .pdf forms. In order to build these from raw .tex files yourself you'll need to have the minted packaged instead along with xetex. Build using xetex --shellescape *.tex
The sample code can be found under Code as a bunch of header files.