Lol ...95% percent of the time, If it aint white space, it's a spelling mistake. Just spent the last 2 days in Java looking for something important that turned out to be a mispelled word off by one character.
Thats a loaded question. Depends on what city, depends on what company, depends on what industry said company is in. Lots of programming jobs out there but they still dont take just anybody, some are just looking for people with fundamentals while others are looking for seasoned programmers that have a grasp on big O notation and memory allocation. Some companies have apprenticeships usually looking to be filled by people looking for a career change. Dont see as many as I use to but still out there.
Programming is about problem solving so you will be given a test in the office and maybe a take home test before invited into the office. The test isnt about getting the right answer, its about your path of thinking through it and the questions you ask to get close to a solution.
Established companies can be strict while start ups can be very lenient. Very least you should know laws of object oriented programming like encapsulation, inheritence and polymorphism. Familiarity of the different data structures, their pros and limitations for a given solution. If the company has a Rest platform, you should know CRUD operations and HTTP. Serializing and deserializingn. If a company uses any special libraries, familiarity with those can help, and of course...testing. The concepts of software engineering are most important because they are most likely going to have to teach you their own way. For example, you can know Javascript coming in, but my company as some many custom scripts and built-in with code packed behind keywords that most javascript developers would be stumped trying to figure out what they're looking at.
Participation in group projects like hackathons and open source projects go a long way and get more eyes on you and anything else that involves peer reviewed code
How can you find out details like that? Get on LinkedIn and send an email to a developer at a company you're interested in or even the hiring manager. The software they use usually isnt a secret. It can be hard or easy to get in. But if you network with the right people someone is always willing or available to knowledge share and provide job leads.
