Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

How can a novice become an employable developer in six months?

There should be companies willing to hire you fresh out of school, but they will often test you on your knowledge. Ask around about the companies you’re planning to apply for and what sort of qualification test they run and prepare accordingly.

Some will test you on specific programming languages and their minutiae. This is kind of a bad idea, as it tests only for rote memorization, a skill increasingly less valuable in the age of search engines. If applying for a company like this, you might want to ask previous applicants about the scope of the questions and study accordingly.

Better companies will test you by asking you to write software to some exercise problem(s). It can be during the interview itself. Some will ask you to do it on paper or on a whiteboard. Even better companies will provide a computer for you to use your programming language of choice and with internet access available as reference. The best interviewers will walk through the exercise with you, sort of a pair-programming exercise, so they can better gauge your abilities. If applying for a company like this, review your algorithms and their usage and try a few practice problems so you can more easily recognize which approaches are applicable to each problem