Whatever, I’m done.

Well, since I hear everyone is enjoying these today, I just finished my last phone screening and here are the nuggets I’ve discovered this time.  Man you just learn so much interviewing.  If any of you really cared for me though you’d shoot me right in the ass.

Q:  What’s a bookmark lookup? (his resume says he’s a query tuning expert)

A:  If there’s no PK on the table, SQL will keep a bookmark table that tells it what the PK should be and it uses that to lookup the data.

Q:  Say you have a prod server with the DB on D:\ and you need to restore it to a dev server that has no D:\.  But it does have an E:\… how would you restore that DB to E:\ instead of D:\?

A:  You have to restore it to the full recovery mode.

Q:  What is IsAlive vs LooksAlive? (he’s also a big clustering guy)

A:  LooksAlive mode when you want to hide the cluster from hackers so you put it in LooksAlive mode and IsAlive mode is when you have an internal box and you want to allow it to be seen from the network. (I’m so far beyond speechless I don’t even know what to do with myself.  Now I know why VanGough ripped off his ear.)

Q:  When would you use log shipping vs mirroring?

A:  Log shipping is what you use when you want to run it in full mode and mirroring is the same thing only you do it in simple mode…

Somebody make it stop!! The voices are getting so LOUD!!!

19 thoughts on “Whatever, I’m done.”

  1. I thought I would be afraid to interview with you, but after reading these maybe I should re-consider. I would love to see the list of questions you ask your interviewees.

  2. Thank you for at least providing us with all of this fantastic entertainment. Sorry you had to put up with the idiocy, but at least some good came from it.

  3. The true value of a phone screen! At least you only wasted a few minutes over the phone rather than having to see them in person (and hold in the laughter..)

  4. That was nasty… I had done some interviews and I thought that the candidates were bad. Now I know better. 🙂

  5. As one boss told me ” You must be asking questions that are too difficult. Stop being so picky”. It told boss that I didn’t know enough to ask hard questions. My questions were along the lines of “what is a clustered index, what is SA in SQL Server?, how would you go about designing a table”. Even questions such as “Give me the rough TSQL to pull the data from all the columns and all the rows from a table” were met with blank stares.

    So I invited our Oracle DBA manager to sit in on my interviews. After one day of screening he went right to the CIO and said that we need to fire our headhunter. Then he thanked me for suffering through 50+ screening calls.

  6. Brings back memories of when I did interviews.

    Q: What’s one difference between a clustered index and a non-clustered index?
    A: One’s ordered, the other isn’t.

  7. Pingback: Anonymous
  8. Hilarious. One of my wonderful co-workers actually heard a phone interviewee typing the questions (presumably into his/her search engine of choice) and then responding with similarly nonsensical answers. Something like this…
    Kendra: What’s the biggest db you’ve worked on? #Fail 500. Kendra: 500 what? #Fail: click, click, pause, “KB”. Kendra: KB? #Fail: yes, 500KB.
    Kendra: OK, how would you move a db from server A to server B. #Fail: click, click, click, pause, “um, copy the db files.” Kendra: Using? #Fail: Windows Explorer?
    She took notes as well, I’ll try to get her to post to her blog.

  9. I spent a year doing phone screens. We asked everyone the same 10 questions. I must have talked to 80 or 90 people over the year. The most anyone got right… 7. And these questions were along the lines of “What’s the difference between a clustered and nonclustered index.”

    My favorite answer was the guy who started lecturing me that I was asking questions that were too SQL Server specific… for the SQL Server DBA position. He felt that lowest common denominator SQL is all that should be used since you swap platforms so often… Yeah, my current organization has only been using SQL Server for 10 years. We really should be ready to leap to another DB at a moment’s notice…

    I do feel for you, I do.

  10. It sounds like your candidates had English as a first language though, I wish I was so lucky. I have to give phone interviews to people overseas over low quality (on their side) connections, often through bilingual coworkers who don’t know database jargon. I feel bad for my coworkers as I see them struggle to translate “What’s the difference between a clustered and nonclustered index?” and then to try to translate the answer back. It makes for a very long interview in which I often can’t even ask all the questions I want.

  11. Here’s a few of my favorites:

    Q: How many recovery models does SQL Server have?
    A: Full, Simple, and 2 or 3 others but I haven’t used them very much.

    Q: What is a Bookmark/Key Lookup and how does it affect performance in SQL Server?
    A: I’ve never created one, but if we need it, I am sure I can search online to find out how to create it.

    Q: What is partition alignment and how does it affect SQL Server?
    A: Oh yeah we totally partition align our log files based on the number of CPU cores in the server.

  12. My favorite “hard” question to ask is how do you do a point in time restore for a database in Simple Recovery Mode. It’s amazing how few people know the answer to that one, and how many simply refuse to answer a question with the words “I honestly do not know.” @sigh.

  13. Permit me to point out that Brandie’s question about point-in-time restore for simple recovery is a bad interview question. An interview is a special situation and it’s not the moment for trick questions.
    The candidate may think “here is something I’ve not heard about”, but may not have the guts to say so. An interview is not a situation where you want display weakness. The candidate may also think “gosh, this guy does not know what he is talking about!”, but don’t want to embarras you, as that would be bad thing to do in that situations.

  14. OMG! I am the guy you all are talking about!

    Java Programmer/Designer/Supervisor/…& yes resident DBA. (because I could spell the abbreviated form of Structured Query Language)

    I thought that was typical in a mid-sized company, that values equipment more so than people.

    If I ever have to interview again (most likely will), I’m screwed. I guess the axiom is true, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Some day I hope to grow up and be an expert in a single discipline. Currently it’s just not possible. : /

Comments are closed.