When you are interviewing someone for an SQL Server job, and you want to know what their capabilities are, or could be, how do you evaluate their potential.
There are a lot of blogs and editorials out there with SQL Server interview questions. They include things such as “What is the difference between a merge, loop, or hash join in SQL Server?” or “How do you identify slow performing queries, or areas where a query is performing slowly?” I think these are really great questions for finding out what skill an individual has acquired to date that are specific to an SQL Server operations DBA, or someone tuning queries.
What do you do when you need to hire someone, not only for what they know today, but for what they are capable of knowing tomorrow? Does that change the interview questions you may ask? For me it changes things radically.
I would much rather give an interviewee a problem to solve without specifying any language or technique to solve it. Then we might review their solution together and see how they might refactor their solution to make it better. I find that asking the question, “How would you test this?”, is a great starting point to have them figure out how they might write a better program.
The problems don’t have to be complicated for you to perceive how the individual approaches problem solving, and their ability to perform the discipline of creating software, or implementing solutions.
How do you determine the capabilities of a person interviewing for you? What is the best or worst question you were asked during an interview? How important are specific skills when you are evaluating individuals, and does the importance change from one situation to the next? Join the conversation with your comments, or by sending an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben