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eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
3575 Posts |
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spirit1
Cybernetic Yak Master
11752 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 11:36:05
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those are hard questions???is he kidding??Go with the flow & have fun! Else fight the flow  blog thingie: http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp |
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mfemenel
Professor Frink
1421 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 11:45:08
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| What a useless article. One of my favorites to ask "As a developer what's the longest day in terms of hours you've put in". You'd be amazed at the answers. My favorite "9 hours I worked though lunch"...thank you for your time...next....Mike"oh, that monkey is going to pay" |
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eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
3575 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 12:19:35
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quote:
Originally posted by mfemenel
What a useless article. One of my favorites to ask "As a developer what's the longest day in terms of hours you've put in". You'd be amazed at the answers. My favorite "9 hours I worked though lunch"...thank you for your time...next....
we usually end our interview with "If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?"One candidate responded that he would like to be a bear so they could kill anything an everything he wanted to. The guy had the job up until that question..-ec |
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eyechart
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
3575 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 12:26:19
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quote:
Originally posted by spirit1
those are hard questions???is he kidding??
not hard questions, but questions that would be useful in a phone screen. Nothing worse then having interviews scheduled with people who can't answer the basics.-ec |
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spirit1
Cybernetic Yak Master
11752 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 12:30:46
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well i don't know but as far as i was interwieved it was like that.I've send a simple mail to the company and said something like:Hi i can do this and that and i'm looking for a job.they'd call me up and give the job  Only one company turned me down and that was because i told them that i needed longer term employmet than 4 months andthat i didn't approve of their no source control policy.but that's just me Go with the flow & have fun! Else fight the flow blog thingie: http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp |
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Michael Valentine Jones
Yak DBA Kernel (pronounced Colonel)
7020 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 13:08:09
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| They seem like good "starter" questions.If they can't answer those questions, there is probably no reason to continue the interview. If someone can't name a table as a database object, do you need to ask more?I would want to ask a lot more questions. I have a list of questions that I usually work from to probe their depth of knowledge, and I also usually give them some SQL problems to answer.CODO ERGO SUM |
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blindman
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
2365 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 14:02:29
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| [quote]The value NULL means UNKNOWN; it does not mean '' (empty string). [/quote}Not in Oracle...I start all my tech interviews by informing the candidate that I'll be asking a range of questions from easy to difficult. I begin with the "easy" questions, like "what is the difference between a view and a stored procedure", so when I had a candidate responde with, "Gee, starting right in with the tough ones!", I knew this guy's prospects weren't good. He bombed SO bad that I felt sorry for him. So at the end of the interview I asked him "What's a simple way to return all the records from a table?" His eyes brightened up and he exclaimed "Select star!". He left the interview happy that he had answered one question correctly...STAR SCHEMAS ARE NOT DATA WAREHOUSES! |
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X002548
Not Just a Number
15586 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 14:09:54
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quote:
Originally posted by blindmanHis eyes brightened up and he exclaimed "Select star!". He left the interview happy that he had answered one question correctly...
[thud]ouch...fell off my barstoo...um office chair again[/thud]SELECT *sheeshBrett8-)Hint: Want your questions answered fast? Follow the direction in this linkhttp://weblogs.sqlteam.com/brettk/archive/2005/05/25/5276.aspxAdd yourself!http://www.frappr.com/sqlteam |
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rockmoose
SQL Natt Alfen
3279 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 14:55:39
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| Ouch, this really hurts.It's like asking a painter, what colors do you know of? |
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Michael Valentine Jones
Yak DBA Kernel (pronounced Colonel)
7020 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 17:55:41
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quote:
Originally posted by blindman
[quote]The value NULL means UNKNOWN; it does not mean '' (empty string). [/quote}Not in Oracle...I start all my tech interviews by informing the candidate that I'll be asking a range of questions from easy to difficult. I begin with the "easy" questions, like "what is the difference between a view and a stored procedure", so when I had a candidate responde with, "Gee, starting right in with the tough ones!", I knew this guy's prospects weren't good. He bombed SO bad that I felt sorry for him. So at the end of the interview I asked him "What's a simple way to return all the records from a table?" His eyes brightened up and he exclaimed "Select star!". He left the interview happy that he had answered one question correctly...STAR SCHEMAS ARE NOT DATA WAREHOUSES!
He’s now employed as a “Enterprise Systems Architect” designing a mission-critical ERP database.CODO ERGO SUM |
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pootle_flump
1064 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 18:01:28
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quote:
Originally posted by eyechart
quote:
Originally posted by mfemenel
What a useless article. One of my favorites to ask "As a developer what's the longest day in terms of hours you've put in". You'd be amazed at the answers. My favorite "9 hours I worked though lunch"...thank you for your time...next....
we usually end our interview with "If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?"One candidate responded that he would like to be a bear so they could kill anything an everything he wanted to. The guy had the job up until that question..
Funny thing is if he was selling the product rather than building it then then the quandary would have been 'is this guy a bit of a sissy?' |
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Michael Valentine Jones
Yak DBA Kernel (pronounced Colonel)
7020 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-17 : 18:21:31
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quote:
Originally posted by eyechart
quote:
Originally posted by mfemenel
What a useless article. One of my favorites to ask "As a developer what's the longest day in terms of hours you've put in". You'd be amazed at the answers. My favorite "9 hours I worked though lunch"...thank you for your time...next....
we usually end our interview with "If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?"One candidate responded that he would like to be a bear so they could kill anything an everything he wanted to. The guy had the job up until that question..-ec
Managment candidate: I want to be a monkey, so I can swing from the high branches and crap on every one below.CODO ERGO SUM |
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jezemine
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
2886 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-27 : 00:24:07
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quote:
Managment candidate: I want to be a monkey, so I can swing from the high branches and crap on every one below.
this really made me laugh! wife doesn't think it's funny for some reason. what's with her?SqlSpec - a fast, cheap, and comprehensive data dictionary generator forSQL Server 2000/2005 and Analysis Server 2005 - http://www.elsasoft.org |
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spirit1
Cybernetic Yak Master
11752 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-27 : 04:45:51
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| upgrade her to version 2.1 Go with the flow & have fun! Else fight the flow blog thingie: http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp |
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Sitka
Aged Yak Warrior
571 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-27 : 23:12:26
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Truely the most profound part of this article is the reply byJohnnySacksquote:
Excellent questions (those presented in the article) but should add a couple others:Any developer above entry level should be able to handle cursors blindfolded. What code elements are required to utilize a generic boiler plate cursor loop?In a stored procedure based back end, how would you provide the identity of an inserted row to the front end or mid tier application?Any complicated application will require the use of temp tables. What are temp tables, why are they used, how are they created?What is a transaction?Front end developers managing transactions is a recipe for disaster. I'm maintaining a GUI app that inserts into serveral tables on one button click written by a guy who must have read the 'Learn T-SQL In 15 Minutes' book. Logic goes something like this:1. Insert table 1, get identity2. Insert table 2, get identityIf fails, delete table 13. Insert table 3, get identityIf fails, delete table 2 thendelete table 1... repeat and expand as neededReferential integrity is important as a concept but would most likely be something set up at the architecture level that a developer just needs to know is there
I know all us here recognize the disconnect but our dear Johnny Sacks truely believes what he wrote, as does a large portion of the people that hire both us and him; in fact he probably does some hiring himself.It makes a very strong case for reading a book once in a while after graduating from University, call it a vacation... even our hero, Johnny, while championing one cause totally misses others. Shakespere knew these types well, the ended up dead. This is the what the interview needs to discover. Sorry Johnny back to the soup kitchen with you... unless you are available to handle a small black box staging BI library """to file""", everybody has a role, I'll call you.PS.Application transactions are cool!!, because they represent discipline and intent....meaningless, but cool.PPS.Deveopers suffer from the exact same thing as every educated consumer in the world. They want the idea as they see it, not what they need or want. All we ask as Database professionals, "tell me what you want", Knowing how to answer that question is what makes us better at this stuff than you. We know how to ask that question better than any UMLARCHIP-OOP-CERTIFIEDMASTER. Because we can't even pretend to be practioners without that ability. Now if you, as a developer would rather have a single table with a single row and a single object datatype column called "everything"...go ahead...have at it. But it's been done before and failed, it will fail repeatedly in the future, and it's no way to organize your life, or business, or software because you stand alone and lonely and help no one, except yourself or your local unit; or those walls that you don't even see yet.PPPS. Take the disconnected dataset/serialization and shove it. It reminds me of a constant abstractional concept the masses ALWAYS announce in meetings to show how smart they are. "What if so-and-so is away" who cares, a 95% solution that is a perfect fit 95% of the time is worth 10 90% solutions that are never used but that can fail gracefully 5% of the time" Do the math! Not the Myth, and make more money. Over the last year I have spent 1 hour in an offline state (not the SQL server it is only off on extended power failures or by choice.), that's without even trying to stay online. 1 hour vs. all the effort in maintaining previous state/current state transaction and data handling and syncronization. Moores's law is no longer about speed it's about connectivity."it's definitely useless and maybe harmful". |
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Kristen
Test
22859 Posts |
Posted - 2006-10-28 : 03:31:33
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| "What code elements are required to utilize a generic boiler plate cursor loop?"Extra marks here if you can NOT answer that one!Kristen |
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Questions to ask a SQL developer applicant