After submitting my resume, I was invited for a call interview, followed by a face-to-face meeting at Motorola's offices in Kraków.

There were several questions asked regarding software engineering. Looking back, I would highly recommend reading books such as Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" series, McConnell's "Code Complete", Martin's "Clean Code", Reddy's "API Design for C++", or similar.

Some of the questions asked:

• Write a function to reverse words in a C-like string (no stl).
• Write a function which implements atoi functionality.
• What is a class invariant?
• When to use "const" for passing arguments to a function?
• What is a virtual function?
• How to handle ctor/dtor which fails?
• What is an abstract class/pure virtual fn?
• What is a mixin?
• When it could occur that the function would not return to the place from which it was called (hint: stack corruption)?
• What is a virtual dtor and why/when would you need it?
• Smart pointers: which do you know and what are they for?
• C++ storage specifiers.
• What can be the "static" keyword used for?
• What is the anonymous namespace and what is it used for?
• What is a reference? Can you assign an r-value reference?
• How are post and pre incrementation operators differentiated? Write sample implementations of both of them for a general type.
• What is a template method?
• What is stack unwinding?
• What are the access specifiers for a class?
• What is a difference between a class and a struct?
• Can you think of an example when your program would crash without reaching a main function?
• How can you tell which shell you are running on a UNIX system?
• Write a function to reverse elements in a single-linked list.
• Explain different cast operators in C++.
• Is using global variables a good programming practice? Does the same apply to singleton?
• Name two sort algorithms. Assess their complexity.
• What is a deadlock?
• Some pointer arithmetic problems.
• Variations on constness of pointers and types to which they point.
• What is a null object?
• What is a pimpl idiom?
• Write a sample interface class. Are the ctor/dtor mandatory? What will be the access specifiers for members in the interface class and the derived class which will contain the implementation?
• Design patterns (bridge, facade, proxy, visitor, chain of responsibility, factory method, abstract factory, ...).
• What synchronization objects do you know which can be used in a multithreaded environment?

What is the inferred type of the result of an expression when a numeric literal is added to a 'char' variable? For example:

csharp char a = 'x'; typeof(a + 5) = ?