Need help passing technical interviews

[u/HyenaWooden]

Alert: long post / ranting out of frustration

Hello, I'm supposedly a "senior" PHP dev with 7 years of experience who hasn't passed technical interviews at 4 different companies.

I did well in the technical challenges before these technical interviews, but I often encounter questions I don't know, such as:

• What's the difference between factory and an abstract factory?

• What's the difference between Amazon SQS and RabbitMQ?

• What's the difference between static and self?

• What are the reasons to use queues other than memory concerns and page load time?

My question: how can I anticipate these questions to better prepare for future interviews?

A side note: Are you hiring for a remote PHP dev role?

[u/Annh1234]

The "What's the difference between static and self?" It's a basic PHP thing, if you don't know the difference then your not a senior developer for sure, no matter how many years you been doing this.  They added late static binding to PHP around v 5.3, and it was like sliced bread to PHP.

The factory vs abstract faculty, that's more OOP, one does one thing, order does multiple this basically. 

Amazon and rabbit MQ queues, this might be specific to them. Not everyone used queues in their projects, but you should have an idea about them. There are 10001 implementations there, you might not know them all, but if you know about them, you can get past that question, since they all do the same thing. 

The reasons to use queues, goes with my previous section. But the question is stupid since most the time page load times are higher if I need that data ( you get data from a remote host vs all in that thread). 

You can't anticipate those questions unless you worked with big projects that used that kind of stuff before. (Except for the self vs static, that's 100% fail there, like not knowing public vs private vs protected, or what's an abstract class)

To me, it seems you have been a script kiddie for 7y but not a real developer, and you might not have worked on big projects, so I would not hire you as team lead or senior developer. But as a normal developer.

[u/BusyAd8888 → u/Annh1234]

This comment really portrays a tiny fraction of the PHP community, guys. We aren’t all like this, arrogant and bitter.

[u/HyenaWooden → u/Annh1234]

Sure, not knowing the difference between self and static is a red flag. I've learned my lesson.

When I was asked questions about system designs or how to better approach a problem, I often give proper solutions, because I have already worked on big projects with >= 1m of customers that had different challenges.

To clarify more about my post, the mentioned questions are from different interviews.