
When I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, most of my computer science courses were taught in Java. And as a Java developer, I always include an interactive development environment (IDE)-and my two favorites are Eclipse IDE and IntelliJ IDEA. But as a programmer who codes, I know the must-have tools that I cannot live without. There is no single definitely correct answer to this question.

"As you start your first day on a project, what five tools do you install first and why?" One interesting open-ended question that I've been asked several times is:

Most of the time, I'm asked open-ended questions that do not have an absolutely correct answer but evaluate my prior experiences and how well I can explain things. In the many, many technical interviews I've gone through in my professional career, I've noticed that I'm rarely asked questions that have definitive answers.
