Phone screen questions for Mac OS X Developer Positions?

Question

Can someone suggest some basic interview questions with a phone screen for potential Mac OS X desktop developers?

Just something to help determine if the candidate really did the real development on the Mac, unlike someone who knows some keywords and tries to fake his way into a personal interview.

TIA.

Answer 1

For the senior developer, ask for some information about the radar they submitted. Any senior developer should, after all, encounter a Cocoa bug, and a good radar will be good.

I agree with Lou about memory management. Any serious Mac developer should know the rules of memory management, including three magic words . Anyone who says "I use only garbage collection" does not develop very long, because it appeared only with Leopard, and it is not available on the iPhone.

A senior developer should be aware of Core Foundation's memory management rules and should be able to explain what a "free bridge" is. (The real CocoaHead should then exclaim how incredible and elegant the free bridge concept is, but maybe it's just me.)

A senior developer should be able to name a few Framework outside of Cocoa. In particular, they should be familiar with at least one Framework, which is not connected by default, and they need to add to their project (any serious developer has encountered this problem).

Any Mac developer should be able to easily explain what might cause EXC_BAD_ACCESS .

Any Mac developer should know what happens if you send a message to nil.

A senior developer should be able to explain NSInvocation, at least to the level of how you use it.

A senior developer should be able to explain the use of the swizzling method, at least in a broad sense.

Any Mac developer should be able to explain the MVC paradigm and describe how to break down a simple problem into models, views, and controllers.

Answer 2

I like to ask: "If you could change the X language (Objective-C 2.0), what function would you add (or remove)?"

This usually shows which candidate is appropriate for the language. For a personal interview, I always ask them to write a very small program on paper.

Answer 3

Describe the basic memory management tools in Objective-C. Expect them to understand preservation, release, auto-advertising, GC, auto-save properties, etc.

Describe ObjC support for static and dynamic binding. Compare the contrast of each of them.

Make them program something in ObjC - something simple, but they should read it to you on the phone - I think, make sure that he needs something that is not just C, if you're interested.