I recently changed jobs. I interviewed with multiple people at several companies over the course of a few weeks. In all, I talked to 20-30 people about Flash Developer positions. While the task of juggling multiple interviews while still working for my former employer was quite challenging, I have to say that I really enjoyed the interviews themselves. It was fun to meet new like-minded people and talk to them about the state of development.

I was surprised by how much I learned from the interviews. Some of the interviewers’ questions exposed weaknesses in my skill set and inefficiencies in my workflow. Getting stumped by some of those questions helped me to identify areas in which I need to improve. Addressing those weakness has already paid immense dividends.

So what were some of the most common interview questions I encountered in the process of interviewing for Flash Developer positions?

1. What are the principles of Object-Oriented Programming? Unless you’re an animator, you must know about OOP. You should be able to explain Classes, Objects, Methods, Inheritance, Encapsulation and Polymorphism at a high level.
2. What does your Flash development environment look like? Using the IDE is considered “amateurish” by a lot of upper-level developers. Tools like FDT, IntelliJ and FlashDevelop offer many superior features (especially for coding) that speed-up workflow. Familiarity with these tools is a plus in the eyes of interviewers.
3. What are some of the third party code libraries you use? Familiarity with libraries like TweenMax, FLARToolKit, Away3D, Papervision and Ribbit will come in handy.
4. What’s your tweening library of choice? Why? TweenMax and TweenLite have a smaller footprint than Tweener and older tweening libraries.
5. What development methodologies were used in your past projects? Agile, XP, RAD and Scrum are some of the most popular. If you haven’t been on a project that employed one of these methodologies, at least be familiar with them.
6. What Flash frameworks do you use to speed-up development? It’s usually a matter of preference and project specifics but I like Gaia and Robotlegs. Frameworks aren’t necessary on some smaller projects. Again, familiarity is important.
7. Describe the Event flow. Know about the Capture, Target and Bubble phases and how objects are notified of Event dispatch.
8. What’s the preferred method for embedding a SWF in HTML? SWFObject is the clear choice. It degrades gracefully by displaying alternate content for Flash-disabled browsers.
9. What are some steps you take to optimize Flash content? It’s hard to be succinct on this topic. A good answer should make mention of garbage collection, bitmap caching, alpha and filters.

Remember that most interviewers are adept at identifying BS when they hear it. It’s best to opt for honesty when you don’t have an answer.

Good luck!