Gary Varga (12/9/2016)
Eric M Russell (12/8/2016)
Regardless of whether we're interviewing for a DBA or a developer who will code SQL, one question I ask is:"For the next 15 minutes, explain everything you know about locking, blocking, and isolation level."
Yes, that's a broad topic, but I can tell a LOT about someone's past experience and areas of expertise based on that one question.
Deadlocks. Explain.
Many organizations use pop-quiz style questions with answers (ie: "What is a clustered index?" :doze:), the type of questions you can grab from the internet half an hour before the interview, because it makes scoring and ranking candidates more straightforward. They want to boil it down to something like: Jack scored 18 and John scored 14, so we want to hire Jack.
However, I've found that "Explain this..." or "Tell me about..." type discussions are more revealing. There have been times when a candidate has breezed through a dozen stock SQL Server interview questions (which they probably Googled the night before), but then they totally blank out when asked a question like: "Tell me about an experience you've had involving deadlocking. How did you diagnose and resolve the issue?".
The thing is, once hired for the job, nobody comes to the DBA and asked "Say, Bob, what's a clustered index?". What the business expects from the DBA is someone who can proactively monitor, fix, and prevent problems.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho