I’m in the middle of a full-blown round of interviewing for a new DBA and I’m in the middle of the initial phone screening process. One of the things I used to do is give someone a gimme question at the end so they end on a high note. Quite often they don’t do as well as they would like so they end up saying I don’t know a lot more than they usually would. So the gimme question is a way to let them feel a little better. The problem is that quite often I’ll ask my gimme, and they’ll get it wrong. Now these are easy questions that someone whose a DBA should easily know. So it backfires on me more often than not.

However, lately I’ve got a new favorite type of gimme question. What I’ll do is let them give me the question they want me to ask them. So I’ll say something like… OK, I’ve got one more question and you get to pick it. So you come up with a question that you want me to ask you and I’ll ask it.
And once they get over the shock of what I’m actually saying they think for a minute and come up with a good tech question. So I ask them their tech question and what surprises me every single time is the amount of times these people get it wrong!!! I don’t understand that. You got to pick your own question and you picked something you can’t even answer?

The funny thing is, I really don’t even care what you pick. There are 2 ways you can go, right? You can go the really easy route and have me ask something like How do you spell T-SQL? Or you could go the complicated route and try to impress me with your knowledge and have me ask you something really advanced.

And to this day I haven’t had anyone really try to impress me, but nobody’s gone the really easy route either.

I don’t know about you, but I’d say this question is effective on a number of levels.

And I really don’t care what the question is, but you’d better be able to answer it.