TNG Technology Consulting Software Developer/IT Consultant interview questions

We started with a short walk through the site with a recruiter from TNG. The formal interview started in a separate room with two additional interviewers. Both were TNG employees which entered the company only one or two years ago. That made a discussion on almost the same level possible. I believe this is a very nice setting for an interview. Everybody was very friendly. They introduced themselves, then I introduced myself. They asked some additional questions regarding my CV. In particular, about my first contact with programming and how I used different programming languages in the past, and how I verified that the coding I did for my scientific work was correct (I did not use unit tests as in industrial software development, I compared my scientific code to analytic results). Technical questions followed: comparing Python and C++ and a discussion about different programming paradigms. Questions were approximately the following: What is the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language? What is object oriented programming? How does one write a class in Python? What is a python initializer? A break followed. Then there was a programming example about the possibilities to walk up some stairs with N steps using only increments of two or one steps at a time. (needs to be solved recursively a[n]=a[n-1]+a[n-2] which is O(n). I suggested a combinatoric solution which solved the problem but was not really welcome and I got their help for the recursive solution.) I was finally asked to write the recursive solution in Python code, which was straight forward. After a break they posed a surprising problem, "the seven planet problem", which I just found on the internet: "https://boingboing.net/2018/03/05/can-you-solve-the-seven-planet.html". Also here they helped me to arrive at the solution. Overall I think that it is definitely possible to adapt to the problems and to use their help to solve them in an "agile" fashion so that they will offer the position in the end. In my case it was not enough, which they told me directly after the interview. They stressed that they were happy that I asked many questions about the company and mentioned to be convinced by the presentation of my scientific work in the past years, as well as my appearance in conversation.

Detailiertes Durchsprechen des Lebenslaufs & bisheriger Coding Erfahrung und vorherigen technischen Projekten.