How necessary are the programming fundamentals?
Since I started interviewing applicants, my two favourite questions are:<p>a) What&#x27;s the difference between an array and a set?<p>b) Describe how a hash table works.<p>The reasons are:<p>a) It is important to know the difference between ordered and unordered collections and I don&#x27;t want to be in a position where I don&#x27;t trust that my teammate will use the right data structure in their PR.<p>b) a hash table works with the same principles on which scalable services are built: database sharding, traffic loadbalancing (with stickiness), kafka stream processing, etc.<p>In my experience, those two questions are a good indicators on how the interviewee will perform in the rest of the interview.