I submitted my application online and received an email six weeks later to schedule a technical phone interview.

The interview took about 30 minutes and consisted mostly of technical questions.

The questions focused more on recalling textbook definitions than on solving problems or even demonstrating any understanding of basic concepts.

What is hashing?

What can you tell me about exceptions in Java?

What are some differences between linked lists and arrays?

What are the different types of JOINs in SQL?

A few questions on basic command-line syntax in Unix shells:

1. How would you log output and error messages from a command to a file?
2. How would you run the same command on every file in a directory?
3. How would you find the PID of a named process (say if you wanted to kill it)?