I’d say C++ and Java, but that’s because that’s what I’m peddling at the moment. 
On the other hand, given the current !%?#&%?!# recession, it probably won’t make much difference, since nobody seems to be hiring… 
And these are the folks going out for jobs in the programming industry? I’m glad you were there to weed them out: I knew all but three, and I don’t even work in the computer field!
You would be surprised. I’ve interviewed too many people with “SQL experience” on their resume who couldn’t explain what a join was, or given the SQL for one and two example tables with a few rows in them, correctly describe the result set.
Sam Stone,
These are not the kind of questions interviewers ask. They are irrelevant 99% of the time.
I guess I must have forgotten to read the official government interviewer’s guide.
I don’t work for the government, just in the private sector.
Really, these questions are not asked. Interviewers are more interested in actual skills and experience than academic knowledge. Not that knowledge is unimportant, but it is already part of a person’s overall skill set.
Sorry, but when you are interviewing kids straight out of school, which had a curriculum that is unfamiliar to you, you do both.
I have been both interviewer and interviewee, and believe me around these parts such questions are common for interviews for programming positions. The days are long gone when you could judge a person’s academic credentials just by looking at the school they went to and the grades they got. Nowadays, we hire people with all kinds of educational backgrounds, from all kinds of technical schools, and there’s just no assumable baseline for knowledge.
And unfortunately, it’s just way too easy to pad a resume with BS. “Senior Database Analyst for XYZ Corp” may just mean that the guy shuffled papers and built a little Access database on the side to make his job easier. You can save a lot of time by asking a few technical questions.
In fact, it’s common around here for applicants for programming or science jobs to have two interviews - a ‘technical’ interview, conducted with peers or slightly above, where they will ask you simiilar questions, or ask about a programming job you had before and then give you probing questions designed to tell if you really know what you’re talking about or are just regurgitating something you read in “MCSD For Dummies”. If you pass the technical interview, then you move on to the management interview where they assess the rest of the stuff.
So there.
I am going to have to side with Sam here. I work as an electrical engineer. I ask similar basic kinds of questions that relate to electronics when I interview people. Similar things happened at my last place of employment. Some people are surprised when it turns out to be a technical interview but oh well they are applying for a technical position.
When I interviewed with Microsoft, I got questions very much like those in Sam’s list, as well as similar questions that were more advanced.