Or, conducting Interviews...
In the past few weeks, I've interviewed people for several development positions I have in my projects.
I was looking for Dot.Net web developers, with some experience, and at least the basic knowledge required for the project.
The thing is that people came to the interviews and didn't manage to answer the simplest questions.
As an example, if a person tells me that he has extensive experience with XML, I think he should at least know what XSL, and DTD stands for. I'm not mentioning XSD, because you really can work quite a while with XML without ever using XSD.
It makes me wonder about two issues:
Do I expect too much? Or, do people tend to exaggerate when they type their resumes?
What would I expect an Asp.Net web developer to know?
Well, I think one of the basic things I think ANY web developer should know is the life cycle of an ASP.Net page. There are only 4 main events to remember (Init, Load, Pre-Render and Render).
Subtract to that, I think a developer should really know what's the difference between Pre-Render and Render, and what you can achieve with both.
Another issue people tend not to know is: View State. I don't think everyone should know advance uses of View State (i.e. saving it on the server), but the basics… What it does? Where is it being saved?
How to prepare for a job interview?
Few people I've asked told me that "you can't prepare for an interview!"…
I don't agree with that. Usually, you know what type of position you are interviewed for (i.e. Asp.Net developer, Infrastructures developers, etc.), according to that, you can defiantly find some study materials to review your knowledge.
One of my favorite blogs is Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen. He wrote two posts on that matter: ASP.NET Interview Questions and What Great .NET Developers Ought To Know
Besides that, there are many sites that can give you Asp.Net interview questions (the first two are great), all you have to do is just go over them, read carefully those you don't know the answers to, and you're all set.
Good luck.