October 5, 2012 at 12:49 pm
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
These two candidates come as stark contrast to each other. Both have Advanced Degress, hers is technology related, his is an MBA, both have BS in CS. He has no other education since his MBA, she completed 5 Microsoft courses in 2010, 3 more in 2011, and 2 this year alone.... blows me a way.My feeling from the two resumes is that she lives for her work. He lives for... something else.. don't know. His resume doesn't smell right to me. I go with the first instinct.
Hows that? Do I pass? Can I have a cookie now? Please? 😀
You fail - actual field experience, in particular doing experiments and learning what, why, when, and except, can give a lot of very valuable information. The Microsoft courses are nice, but they aren't meaningful in and of themselves.
Now, if you want someone that lives for their work, that's a personality judgement, not a skills assessment.
October 5, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Abu Dina (10/5/2012)
Hmmm... I made a lame attempt to answer the 8 questions. I then researched the answers online.You wouldn't have hired me! Lol 😀
Noone can know everything about SQL Server. The dev questions I got, but the administrative ones I know I don't know two of them well enough, particularly about LSN alignments.
On QotD's I bluff my way through, I'm the only one who cares if I get it wrong and as a comedy gameshow once said: "The points don't matter."
However, in an interview, there's one strength I want to hear from any candidate. One thing I eventually want to hear from them. "I don't know." The one true strength in any administrator or developer is to realize they're in too deep and need to research. What I WANT is a strong response to my followup question: "What do you do to find out once you realize you need this for your work?"
That is a key point to me in any interview. I have some very selective spikes in my knowledge, because of some really odd things I've had to work with. High activity BLOB access in particular are a place I'll wreck a lot of people on (around here there's always someone better, but in reality...). But all that does is, instead of giving me an opportunity to show off, is to run someone up a tree to where either they accept they aren't god's gift to databasing and are willing to admit it (something I want to hear) or they start smoke and sunshining me, at which point they're shown the door. There's a lot I don't know either.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
For better assistance in answering your questions[/url] | Forum Netiquette
For index/tuning help, follow these directions.[/url] |Tally Tables[/url]
Twitter: @AnyWayDBA
October 5, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Nadrek (10/5/2012)
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
These two candidates come as stark contrast to each other. Both have Advanced Degress, hers is technology related, his is an MBA, both have BS in CS. He has no other education since his MBA, she completed 5 Microsoft courses in 2010, 3 more in 2011, and 2 this year alone.... blows me a way.My feeling from the two resumes is that she lives for her work. He lives for... something else.. don't know. His resume doesn't smell right to me. I go with the first instinct.
Hows that? Do I pass? Can I have a cookie now? Please? 😀
You fail - actual field experience, in particular doing experiments and learning what, why, when, and except, can give a lot of very valuable information. The Microsoft courses are nice, but they aren't meaningful in and of themselves.
Now, if you want someone that lives for their work, that's a personality judgement, not a skills assessment.
Just to throw this out there... I don't have a college degree, not even an associates. I took some college at one point and we didn't play nice together. I also don't have a single certification. I'm self taught and a contractor, I rarely (until this last contract) held any position longer than 6-9 months. I've been mentored and I'm constantly learning, but I sure as hell don't live to work, I take your money in exchange for my work so I can live my life.
Imagine judging me on those parameters... I'm not one of the gurus but I like to think I'm pretty good. Don't read too much into paper knowledge. They give you a head start early in your career (first few years), but after a certain point they're not as important unless they're bringing an alternate skillset (like mathmatics or sociology) to the table.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
For better assistance in answering your questions[/url] | Forum Netiquette
For index/tuning help, follow these directions.[/url] |Tally Tables[/url]
Twitter: @AnyWayDBA
October 5, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Evil Kraig F (10/5/2012)
Abu Dina (10/5/2012)
Hmmm... I made a lame attempt to answer the 8 questions. I then researched the answers online.You wouldn't have hired me! Lol 😀
Noone can know everything about SQL Server. The dev questions I got, but the administrative ones I know I don't know two of them well enough, particularly about LSN alignments.
On QotD's I bluff my way through, I'm the only one who cares if I get it wrong and as a comedy gameshow once said: "The points don't matter."
However, in an interview, there's one strength I want to hear from any candidate. One thing I eventually want to hear from them. "I don't know." The one true strength in any administrator or developer is to realize they're in too deep and need to research. What I WANT is a strong response to my followup question: "What do you do to find out once you realize you need this for your work?"
That is a key point to me in any interview. I have some very selective spikes in my knowledge, because of some really odd things I've had to work with. High activity BLOB access in particular are a place I'll wreck a lot of people on (around here there's always someone better, but in reality...). But all that does is, instead of giving me an opportunity to show off, is to run someone up a tree to where either they accept they aren't god's gift to databasing and are willing to admit it (something I want to hear) or they start smoke and sunshining me, at which point they're shown the door. There's a lot I don't know either.
Wow... You're so right Craig.
---------------------------------------------------------
It takes a minimal capacity for rational thought to see that the corporate 'free press' is a structurally irrational and biased, and extremely violent, system of elite propaganda.
David Edwards - Media lens[/url]
Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for inaction while other heads fall.
Howard Zinn
October 5, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Abu Dina (10/5/2012)
Hmmm... I made a lame attempt to answer the 8 questions. I then researched the answers online.You wouldn't have hired me! Lol 😀
On the contrary, Abu...
First, the questions are fairly well advanced for their given areas (well, except for the one about the execution plan). I've not yet run into a DBA candidate that could answer even one of the 4 DBA questions I posted but have obviously still hired many a DBA in my life. Similar holds true with the SQL Developer questions. I consider the questions to be "bonus" questions that I'd teach the new employee if they didn't already know them (they need to know these things for the jobs I want them to do) and serve only as tie-breakers if they could actually answer them.
Second, you've already shown one of the traits that I value just as much as experience. You took the time to find out on your own for your own edification. There's a lot of value in that and I cherish that in a candidate. After all, how do you get "experience" without that trait? 😉 They don't teach things like the Tally Table or how to count without loops in Books Online or any Microsoft course that I'm aware of.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 5, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Perry Whittle (10/5/2012)
Jeff Moden (10/5/2012)
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
A caveat to this, Sir Moden, is that someone could actually have 10 years exp, but the question is the quality/type of exp they have.That's precisely the point I was trying to make about "experience". Years served is not necessarily a good indication of knowlege or skill.
So, pre interview, what are you using to measure whether you'll even bother sitting the candidate in front of you?
Unfortunately, none. I'd like to say that I go by something I see on the resume but most of the companies I've worked for get their candidates exclusively through recruiters. That means two things... I don't trust the recruiters to properly filter the candidates (they reject some of the good ones for many odd reasons) so I tell them to send me anyone with "SQL Server" on the resume and I typically don't get very many candidates (usually something less than 8). I think that may be because I'm in an area of the country that is big on DB2 and Oracle. There's not much big stuff available for SQL Server in this geographic area.
For those reasons, if someone is sent as a candidate and even if they mispell "SQL" on their resume, I give everyone a shot with the understanding that I reserve the right to terminate the interview as early as I think I need to. Quite literally, it usually takes me less than 15 minutes to figure out if a candidate will know what I need them to know or not. Any time spent after that is figuring out how much they know so I can compare the candidates and pick out the best one (or how many I'm trying to hire). Yes, I've been known to put off hiring rather than "settle" for someone that doesn't meet expectations. No, my expectations are really as high as most people would expect. For example, I don't really expect most DBAs to answer the 4 "tough" questions I posted (it does, however, show how they deal with "tough" questions they don't know the answer to). I do, however, expect and demand them to know how to do full and transactional log backups and restores to a point-in-time even if they don't know the mechanics that SQL Server GUI uses to determine which log files to use for the restore (which is what the LSN questions were all about).
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 5, 2012 at 9:42 pm
Nadrek (10/5/2012)
Abu Dina (10/5/2012)
Can you give an example of a "tough" question?0. Ask a question that they can answer based on rote memorization
Then
1. Why?
2. Explain more.
3. So, is that better or worse than Y?
4. <trick question to expose blatant lying or, on a phone interview, Google as the actual candidate>
Zactly! "Conversational interview" that builds on previous answers.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 5, 2012 at 9:45 pm
Nadrek (10/5/2012)
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
These two candidates come as stark contrast to each other. Both have Advanced Degress, hers is technology related, his is an MBA, both have BS in CS. He has no other education since his MBA, she completed 5 Microsoft courses in 2010, 3 more in 2011, and 2 this year alone.... blows me a way.My feeling from the two resumes is that she lives for her work. He lives for... something else.. don't know. His resume doesn't smell right to me. I go with the first instinct.
Hows that? Do I pass? Can I have a cookie now? Please? 😀
You fail - actual field experience, in particular doing experiments and learning what, why, when, and except, can give a lot of very valuable information. The Microsoft courses are nice, but they aren't meaningful in and of themselves.
Now, if you want someone that lives for their work, that's a personality judgement, not a skills assessment.
I believe I've found a kindred spirit. 🙂 Alphabet soup is nice but what does someone really know?
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 5, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Evil Kraig F (10/5/2012)
Nadrek (10/5/2012)
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
These two candidates come as stark contrast to each other. Both have Advanced Degress, hers is technology related, his is an MBA, both have BS in CS. He has no other education since his MBA, she completed 5 Microsoft courses in 2010, 3 more in 2011, and 2 this year alone.... blows me a way.My feeling from the two resumes is that she lives for her work. He lives for... something else.. don't know. His resume doesn't smell right to me. I go with the first instinct.
Hows that? Do I pass? Can I have a cookie now? Please? 😀
You fail - actual field experience, in particular doing experiments and learning what, why, when, and except, can give a lot of very valuable information. The Microsoft courses are nice, but they aren't meaningful in and of themselves.
Now, if you want someone that lives for their work, that's a personality judgement, not a skills assessment.
Just to throw this out there... I don't have a college degree, not even an associates. I took some college at one point and we didn't play nice together. I also don't have a single certification. I'm self taught and a contractor, I rarely (until this last contract) held any position longer than 6-9 months. I've been mentored and I'm constantly learning, but I sure as hell don't live to work, I take your money in exchange for my work so I can live my life.
Imagine judging me on those parameters... I'm not one of the gurus but I like to think I'm pretty good. Don't read too much into paper knowledge. They give you a head start early in your career (first few years), but after a certain point they're not as important unless they're bringing an alternate skillset (like mathmatics or sociology) to the table.
+1000 and ditto that.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 6, 2012 at 7:55 am
Jeff Moden (10/5/2012)
Perry Whittle (10/4/2012)
Generally I think that experience is a better measuring stick, sure you'll have exceptions but overall experience counts.If I hadn't actually been through it, I'd absolutely agree. But my personal experience with conducting interviews has been quite the opposite. For example, one fellow (SQL Developer candidate) claimed 10 years of experience in both Oracle and SQL Server and further claimed, on the resume, to be a "9 out of 10 in both". I inform each candidate that I'm going to start out with easy questions to break the ice and relaxe a bit. When I asked this guy how to get the current date and time using T-SQL, his answer was "I don't know. They always used the GUI for that."
In the most recent round of hiring at my previous company, we interviewed 6 people that claimed to be DBAs. All of them fit the category of "7 to 10 years" of experience according to their resumes. 5 of them didn't know you could backup the log file. Of those 5, 4 of them didn't know anything about index maintenance never mind index fragmentation, 1 of them had never done a backup, and none of the 5 had ever done a restore. The one who had some actual knowledge of what a System DBA actually does didn't know the differences between clustered and non-clustered indexes but did know that one of them "lived in the data" although he couldn't remember which one.
Imagine the fun there when we got into things like "security".
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you get people with 5,10,20 years of experience, and you get people with one year of experience multiplied 20 times. It's the difference between someone who shows up and does exactly what they're told, and no more, and someone who is constantly striving and growing.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
October 6, 2012 at 8:03 am
Jeff Moden (10/5/2012)
Evil Kraig F (10/5/2012)
Nadrek (10/5/2012)
CptCrusty1 (10/5/2012)
These two candidates come as stark contrast to each other. Both have Advanced Degress, hers is technology related, his is an MBA, both have BS in CS. He has no other education since his MBA, she completed 5 Microsoft courses in 2010, 3 more in 2011, and 2 this year alone.... blows me a way.My feeling from the two resumes is that she lives for her work. He lives for... something else.. don't know. His resume doesn't smell right to me. I go with the first instinct.
Hows that? Do I pass? Can I have a cookie now? Please? 😀
You fail - actual field experience, in particular doing experiments and learning what, why, when, and except, can give a lot of very valuable information. The Microsoft courses are nice, but they aren't meaningful in and of themselves.
Now, if you want someone that lives for their work, that's a personality judgement, not a skills assessment.
Just to throw this out there... I don't have a college degree, not even an associates. I took some college at one point and we didn't play nice together. I also don't have a single certification. I'm self taught and a contractor, I rarely (until this last contract) held any position longer than 6-9 months. I've been mentored and I'm constantly learning, but I sure as hell don't live to work, I take your money in exchange for my work so I can live my life.
Imagine judging me on those parameters... I'm not one of the gurus but I like to think I'm pretty good. Don't read too much into paper knowledge. They give you a head start early in your career (first few years), but after a certain point they're not as important unless they're bringing an alternate skillset (like mathmatics or sociology) to the table.
+1000 and ditto that.
You already know that you & I are pretty close to lock step on this one.
For those interested, I'm a film school drop-out. No degree, not a single certification, nothing from an outside accrediting body to validate that I have a clue what I'm doing with SQL Server. Funny thing is, I still seem able to get jobs.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
October 6, 2012 at 9:09 am
Grant Fritchey (10/6/2012)
You already know that you & I are pretty close to lock step on this one.For those interested, I'm a film school drop-out. No degree, not a single certification, nothing from an outside accrediting body to validate that I have a clue what I'm doing with SQL Server. Funny thing is, I still seem able to get jobs.
Heh... Roger that! God bless Navy training!
Someone on this thread asked what I looked for on resumes and my answer was that I basically interview anyone that applies. That's not quite right, though. If, for some reason, I'm only allowed to conduct a certain number of interviews (that happened once), I will, in fact, move veterans to the top of the stack because of the training they receive in the military especially the lessons they receive in how to communicate effectively.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 6, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Jeff Moden (10/6/2012)
Heh... Roger that! God bless Navy training!Someone on this thread asked what I looked for on resumes and my answer was that I basically interview anyone that applies. That's not quite right, though. If, for some reason, I'm only allowed to conduct a certain number of interviews (that happened once), I will, in fact, move veterans to the top of the stack because of the training they receive in the military especially the lessons they receive in how to communicate effectively.
Me too. I have a positive bias towards vets. It's automatic.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
October 7, 2012 at 1:35 am
Jeff Moden (10/6/2012)
Someone on this thread asked what I looked for on resumes
i did 😉
Jeff Moden (10/6/2012)
and my answer was that I basically interview anyone that applies.
so you get 25 CVs and you interview the lot??
You have way to much time on your hands 🙂
Jeff Moden (10/6/2012)
I will, in fact, move veterans to the top of the stack because of the training they receive in the military especially the lessons they receive in how to communicate effectively.
Sorry, but i don't subscribe to this. There are just as many people in civvy street who have the discipline and work ethos you would be looking for. I also have known many people who have been in the services and trust me you wouldn't employ them to fix your bicycle 😛
I have read the 4 tough questions and wondering why you're so pre occupied with the t-log LSNs. What about the differential base LSN too. In reality a DBA would be restoring a differential backup and not 3 days of log backups during their restore scenario.
Other questions i would be asking would be more along the lines of
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
October 7, 2012 at 2:07 am
Grant Fritchey (10/6/2012)
For those interested, I'm a film school drop-out. No degree, not a single certification, nothing from an outside accrediting body to validate that I have a clue what I'm doing with SQL Server. Funny thing is, I still seem able to get jobs.
Me too, i'm an engineering college drop out (wanted to be a toolmaker originally, who knew). Apart from some early city and guilds IT related courses and MS certs in Windows server, desktop and Active Directory which are a little old now i have no other validation from accrediting bodies but still get contracts, based on my previous engagements. I've even secured a contract without an actual formal interview 😉
My CV contains details of all previous perm and contract assignments (contract for the last 6 years), all verifiable if the client wants to make a call.
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
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