Actually I would say that some/most interviewers believe that this is the purpose, and like to use the interview as a chance to show how smart they think they are
(at least the stereotypical "interview" at the stereotypical tech company. Then again, I think Wall Street/financial firms probably do the same. exact. thing.)
Am I the only one that read this and was left wondering what the heck was up with the interviewer, not the candidate?
Why drill a candidate for a technical writer position on hash functions and memory needs and speed and all that?
It seems to me like whichever company this was (I'm guessing Google) that the interviewer only knows how to ask one type of question, almost as if he/she was reading from a script.
Eclipse won't change your file/folder structure (unless you tell it to).
In fact, you can have source code somewhere outside of your "workspace" and just point Eclipse to it, there is no requirement for the code to be inside the "workspace".
I think if you find that refactoring is "barely essential" then you are really missing out. I must use it's features about 20 times a day - from simple ones like "Rename" (seriously how would you do that easily in emacs, when the class is used in 15 places?), Extract Local Variable, Extract Method, etc.
Yes. Eclipse can be flexible with where the source folders are, where your libraries are coming from, etc. You'll (usually) only have two metadata files: a .classpath and a .project, and occasionally, a .settings folder (for any per-project settings you might change such as compiler warnings, etc.)
Otherwise, you can leave your structure intact and unchanged.
I agree - the animations are a cool novelty but these static images give you a lot more information. Kind of an interesting commentary on how you present/visualize data.