>Recently I’ve been interviewing iOS developers for a senior dev position at a fellow consultancy.
It is not an easy task to evaluate the level of knowledge and experience of another developer. You need to put aside your own subjective judgement and what is the most important - shut up and listen.
After going through several rounds of such interviews here are the questions I typically ask:
- What was the latest version of iOS you worked with? what do you like about it and why?
- Have you worked with Swift? What do you like about it? What you don’t like?
- How memory management is handled on iOS?
- What do you know about singletons? Where would you use one and where you wouldn't?
- Could you explain what is the difference between Delegate and KVO?
- How do you usually persist data on iOS?
- How do you typically do networking?
- How do you serialize data on iOS (JSON from the web or local app data to Core Data and other storages) ?
- What design patterns do you know and use on iOS?
- What is Autolayout?
- How do you handle async tasks?
- How do you manage dependencies?
- How do you debug and profile things on iOS?
- Do you code review?
- Do you test your code? What do you do to make your code testable?
Let’s go through each of them individually to get a sense what answers for each tell us about the interviewee.
1. What was the latest version of iOS you worked with? What do you like about it and why?
The purpose of this question is to inquire if the interviewee actually keeps up with the latest development from Apple.
Expected answer: he/she tells you what the latest version of the system is and what he/she has worked with lately. And tells you about one of the new features of the system that he/she is excited about (i.e. I love new multitasking on iPad because it’s going to make user experience way better and opens up a lot of opportunities for us developers to build new cool things, etc.).
2. Have you worked with Swift? What do you like about it? What you don’t like?
This question will
