How often are you able to reuse code that you develop, and can you provide me an example of when you have done this?
"The longer work in the ICT industry, the more I realize that many applications are similar in nature. This characteristic has enabled me to reuse much of the code I've written or obtained from the libraries for the languages in which I program. An example of this is a network management tool I recently developed. The application is proprietary to my organization, so I was able to reuse about 25% of the code I had developed for a similar application used to manage security across the network. A side benefit of this is that the ICT administrators were already familiar with the security application, so their learning curve was reduced for the new one."
What the interviewer is seeking to learn by asking this question is your level of coding skills. ICT professionals should be intimately familiar with coding, even if they don't develop software themselves. Being able to reuse code makes programmers much more efficient. This is because they don't have to write new code and the code they reuse as already been validated.
"Most of the code I use for the applications I manage is written a either Java or Ruby. The benefit of both of these languages is that there are large libraries of code either written by our organization or from other developers which has been tested and validated. I encourage my team to regularly reuse as much code as possible to make their programming activities more efficient and effective. I'd estimate that 25% of the code we use has been recycled."
