Interview With ARM

I had an interview with ARM last week, and I truly believe that if it were not for Dr. Downing's wonderful Object-Oriented Programming class, I would not have felt nearly as confident going into and during the interview. While Arm really is not the type of company that requires an army of computer scientists, it is interesting to see how they are currently looking to see how computer scientists will adapt to different environments and how they can apply an abstract view to different problems.

One of the recurring themes of the interview was the subject of a GUI they were interested in designing. Even though I do not have much experience with GUI's, I am still confident that I would be able to create one without a tremendous amount of difficulty. After all, it is just object manipulation and message passing. Regardless of whether an object is representing a frame on the monitor or some abstract data structure, it is still just an object that can be asked to do things and/or produce some result given a message or what state the object is in.

Pertaining to experiences in this particular OOP class, the interviewers were also interested in experience with version control software, issue trackers, and most importantly, proper documentation. The engineers loved to see that I have experience with git and svn, and loved the fact that I keep almost all homework under version control even more. Two of the code samples I sent were in fact projects from OOP, and they thoroughly enjoyed looking at code in which each function and method was documented well and easy to read.

While I do not have the job yet, I am anxious to see how the job will play out if I am hired. As of right now it seems I would be working mostly with engineers, and I am very curious of how my abstract brain can apply itself to the lower levels of the computer world.