20 Questions

IT workers are on the move. Nearly half of all IT workers are planning a job change. Here are the three top reasons why technology professionals are testing the waters:

• higher compensation
• not liking their current company's management or corporate culture
• seeking more personal fulfillment

The following "niche pockets" are seeing a greater than average demand for talent:

• business analysis
• project management

For details on the survey of more than 8,000 employed U.S. adults including more than 500 who hold IT jobs, access Information Week.

So, let's say you are a Web technology professional preparing to shop your talents. Here's a game plan for preparing for a potential interview.

• Step #1 -- review the 20 potential interview questions below
• Step #2 -- select one question a day for the next 20 days and formulate your response

Step#1

A Seattle-based search engine optimization (SEO) company called SEOmoz developed the following 20 interview questions:

1. What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
2. Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?
3. How comfortable are you with writing HTML entirely by hand?
4. What is the w3c?
5. Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code?
6. What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?
7. Describe/demonstrate your level of competence in a *nix shell environment
8. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning?
9. Show me your portfolio!
10. What sized websites have you worked on in the past?
11. Show me your code!
12. What are a few sites you admire and why? (from a webdev perspective)
13. Fix this code, please.
14. I just pulled up the website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
15. What's your favorite development language and why?
16. Do you find any particular languages or technologies intimidating?
17. Acronym time (oh boy!)
18. What web browser do you use?
19. Rank your interest in these development tasks from 1 to 5 (compiled from a list of tasks the job requires)
20. What are a few personal web projects you've got going on?

For details about the rationale for each question access Interviewing Web Developers and consider SEOmoz for your search engine optimization needs as a way of rewarding them for their contribution to the Web development community.

Step #2

Tackle a few of the more time-consuming questions first, one at a time, because they can make the most difference in separating you from your potential competition. In particular, the questions related to organizing your work and training experiences include the following:

• Show me your portfolio!
• What sized websites have you worked on in the past?
• Show me your code!
• What are a few personal web projects you've got going on?

If you are just starting out and don't have an amazing portfolio, that's OK. You're not expected to. However, organizing the work you do have in one clean, easy-to-navigate Website can go a long way to making a positive first impression.

Remember: The World is Flat -- start running!