Just to be sure, are you interested in old COBOL/400 or in the current ILE COBOL?

You asked about COBOL/400. Are you sure you want questions about something so old? The COBOL/400 manual for V5R4 shows a date of “June 1994″.

Tom

I need both COBOL/400 as well as ILE COBOL interview questions document

IMHO, asking others for questions to help you pass the interview, if that’s what you are planning for, is deception. I would suggest reading the manuals.

IMO, it’s not particularly critical what questions are asked. Ask a set of general questions about whether the program should alter fields in the record area under the FD entry or it should instead alter values in Working Storage and do WRITE FROM, or questions about how to exit a program, or questions about how EVALUATE works, etc. Just ask enough questions to know if COBOL is a language that the interviewee actually knows. Don’t waste time looking for questions that will trip people up.

For an interview, I would present a couple one- or two-page program source listings that each had a couple errors. I would ask the interviewee first how they would locate the errors and then ask them to tell you what the errors are.

IMO, it’s less important that they find whatever problems exist in the listing than how they respond to the task:

Are they unfamiliar with what they see? Are they nervous? Do they seek answers? (Are they willing to ask questions about what they see?) Are they confident? (But be wary of arrogance.)

Focus on how they handle a COBOL programming related task while in a pressure situation (under scrutiny in an interview). Some superb developers will not commit programming language details to memory — they’ll assume that reference manuals are intended for that purpose. Other developers will put energy into memorizing details, but they’ll neglect aspects of how to actually use the trivia they’ve memorized.

Hmmm… come to think of it… What kind of interviewee are you looking for?

Tom