Tips for Technical Interview Questions
As an Information Technology professional you sell your knowledge and experience. As a general rule the more knowledge and experience that you have the better your remuneration so it is vital for an employer to verify that you are indeed as technically apt as you claim.
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One of the most direct and open methods to validate these skills is through a technical interview. These types of interviews normally consist of technical and behavioral portions of the interview that are normally clearly identified by the interviewer through announcements such as “We are going to ask you some technical questions now…”.
Entry level candidates are not immune to technical interviews. The level of detail required in the response, however, varies significantly in comparison to the same type of technical interview question for a senior position.
It would be reasonable to expect that an entry level information technology candidate has a general basic knowledge of the field that they seek to enter but it is unlikely that demonstrated working knowledge would be required.
Entry level or not, most information technology solutions are not necessarily clear-cut. This gives you the scope to demonstrate your technical knowledge about the subject through many different angles.
Take for example a question regarding your ability to respond to a hardware failure on a server. I’m sure that many tech heads would be capable of rattling off a detailed explanation of the hardware inside the server along with the latest drivers and most reliable vendors.
A complete answer, however, might also include;
- Your ability to identify the need to establish a communications plan in order to notify clients and keep managers in the loop of the incident status.
- Quickly determine the scope and impact of the incident. Your ability to identify the key business applications that were affected and make alternate options available such as initiating backup restoration or redundancy actions on alternate hardware.
So as you can see, even without in depth technical knowledge an entry level candidate could still appease the interview panel by demonstrating their understanding of the relationship between the technical fault and the business processes around incident restoration.
Sample Technical Questions:
Q1. A computer cannot surf the net. Initial analysis shows that the network is fine and that only this computer is affected by the problem.
Possible Answers:
1. The TCP/IP default gateway is missing or incorrect.
2. Browser proxy settings are missing or incorrect.
3. Proxy server authentication is failing either by error or because the person does not have permissions.
Q2. All users in a building have lost access to their network drives and email. What steps do you take to rectify the problem?
Answer:
Ascertain the start time of the problem
Ascertain whether any current changes could have caused the problem
Record events in preparation for escalation
Notify team leader and relevant managers
Escalate the details to the network operations team
Assist with ongoing communication to users
Q3. What is the network mask for a /24 prefix?
Answer:
255.255.255.0 (source: How to subnet)
Q4. The resolution on the monitor will not go higher than 640 x 480, what could be the problem?
Answer: The driver for the video card is incorrect or faulty.
Q5. Cannot see any files in a network drive. What could be the problem?
Possible Answers:
The network drive is down or unavailable
The computer is not connected to the network
The user has not authenticated to the network
Network permissions are not properly set
Share permissions are not properly set
