The Phone Screen

Phone screens are designed to weed out unqualified candidates who are not worth the time investment of in‐person technical interviews. Inviting someone to on‐site technical interviews only to discover that they really do not have the basic skills needed for the position is a waste of everyone's time—especially the software engineers conducting the interviews. Phone screens are used to avoid these scenarios. A software engineer's time is valuable, so some companies use nontechnical interviewers or automated testing systems to do their screening. This chapter provides some tips on how to take a phone screen. It discloses screening problems that are representative of the simple knowledge‐based and coding questions interviewee is likely to encounter in a phone screen, but are certainly not an exhaustive list. The problems include memory allocation in C, recursion trade‐offs, mobile programming, FizzBuzz, reversing a string, removing duplicates, and nested parentheses.