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Job interview questions

  • February 13, 2006 at 11:25 pm

    #89419

    I am going to be interviewing candidates for a developer job in the next few days (Thursday is the first one scheduled).  I'm looking for suggestions for interview questions that will challenge the candidate with a real-world T-SQL problem that is non-trivial, but can be solved in a few minutes if the candidate knows his/her stuff.

    Suggestions?

    So long, and thanks for all the fish,

    Russell Shilling, MCDBA, MCSA 2K3, MCSE 2K3

  • February 14, 2006 at 6:48 am

    #620648

    There have been several threads along these lines in the past.

     

    However you might try working out a couple of table designs and a list of the data you would have in each and a sample list of result sets you would like to create from the data and ask them to build a query to perform that. Overall however it depends on the work you intend them to perform and what required knowledge they need. You might ask what effect a RIGHT JOIN has on the resultset, or how to get a count of the number of affected rows into a variable after an operation, or how to get the last inserted identity column value for use in further inserts of related data. Do you need only their sql knowledge or do you need to mingle with a programming language such as Visual Basic, C++, C#, etc. Check out the braindump sites and use the past questionaires from this site to come up with a good canidate list. But always go with more than you intend to use and have them ranked according to complexity (in your opinion) and pull from each to subset to rank your canidates if you like.

  • February 14, 2006 at 1:12 pm

    #620811

    Thanks, I like the idea of several questions ranked in difficulty.  I've got resumes from people of all skill levels, from a MySQL web developer to a very experienced DBA.

    So long, and thanks for all the fish,

    Russell Shilling, MCDBA, MCSA 2K3, MCSE 2K3

  • February 15, 2006 at 10:00 am

    #621097

    Here is the website that posted some interview questions.  My boss used them to interview potenital SQL developers and he thought they were very good.

    http://vyaskn.tripod.com/iq.htm

     

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