It seems there's a HUGE discrepancy between what I expect someone who's studied programming for a few years at university, and what one actually knows.I don't feel like I'm asking overcomplicated questions in interviews. Some of my usual questions are :What's the difference between a reference type and a value type? If it seems the interviewee doesn't really understand his own answer, or if he doesn't know the terminology I'm using, I get into more details by asking him to explain me what happens when I write int i=0; in a method, what about object o=0, object o = new MyClass(), etc...Basically, I do everything I can to trick the interviewee into telling me about the callstack, the heap etc, and I try to stay into language-agnostics concepts. If the interviewee tells me he did a lot of C, or C++, or c#, I dive deeper into the specific language, and possibly into the implementation details.If needed, I ask the interviewee what a callstack is, or where arguments passed to a function in the imperative language of his choice are stored. most of the interviewees have just no idea about what a callstack is, let alone boxing considerations, etc.What's the difference between an abstract class and an interface. In which cases should you use one over the other ? Usually, I also ask them to imagine a design of a small library with a use case aiming at using some inheritance and some abstract factoriesMost of the interviewee have just no idea of what inheritance real purpose might be. They usually know some keywords (virtual, override, etc), but don't really know when to use them, let alone explaining what a virtual-table is.Even-though I screen CVs beforehand, even for people with 5 years of experience in real life projects involving complex architectures, I would say less than 25% of all my interviewees can answer those two questions properly. And when I say properly, I don't mean 'in-depth'... just to have an approximate idea of what the concept is.Regarding juniors, I'm fine with hiring someone who doesn't know how to organize his time very well, or someone who's not used to industrial build processes for example, but I have the feeling that if one hasn't heard the word callstack after a few years of studying Computer Science, he's either stupid, or unmotivated, or chose his university very unwisely.Do you think I'm too extremist here ? Is it common to learn these basic concepts after you've completed university ? Do you know of people who weren't familiar with these, and became very good software engineers after a few years ? And do you think my company might have an issue in attracting talented people, or do you experience the same kind of issues with in your own hiring process?Edit. regarding the immediate type thing, it was just a literal translation from French to English, as we usually do our interviews in French. I've fixed it in my question. But still, I think you all understand perfectly what I meant, which kind of makes my point, doesn't it?
Should I expect recent grads to be familiar with basic programming concepts?
hiring