This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is about favorite interview questions. Once upon a time, I used to think of difficult technical questions to ask candidates for a DBA position. However, over time I came to understand that in most cases, I can teach someone the technical stuff they don’t know. I’m more interested in the soft skills: how do they interact with others, can they be part of a team, are they self-driven, do they want to get better, can they admit when they’ve made a mistake, can they ask for help? Obviously, if you ask these questions directly, you’ll get the answer you want, because we know how to answer those questions. If I asked a candidate if they were a team player, not a lone wolf, I would expect that person to say they knew how to work as part of a team. Otherwise, the likelihood of them getting hired just dropped precipitously. So I ask for something open-ended, like this:
Tell me about a situation when you were on a project and it failed. Without giving away names or proprietary information, tell me what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what was your part of the project. Is there anything you tried to do to bring the project back on track? What are some of the mistakes you made? How did the overall team try to address the failing project?