I'm with you Rachel.
I like questions such as:
"On your current or last job, did peers come to you for help, on what areas
of technology, and tell me about a situation in which your assistance made a
difference. What was the challenge, what had been done before you were
involved, and what happened from there?"
also,
"On your current or last job, who did you go to for assistance, on what
areas of technology, and tell me about a situation in which that person(s)
assistance made a difference. What was the challenge, what did you do
before you involved them, and what happened from there?"
finally,
"Besides the situations we just discussed, describe the last time you either
attended training or did research on your own, learned something new and
taught that to others who were able to apply it." On this, simple things
are allowed, I don't mean J2EE training, it can be something like a method
you hadn't seen before that was useful in your environment.
To me, the DBA is not just the person administering the databases, he/she is
also a knowledgeable resource that leads the way for other I.T. staff as
well as power end users.
- Original Message -----
From: "Rachel Carmichael" <wisernet100_at_yahoo.com>
To: <oracle-l_at_freelists.org>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 7:25 PM
Subject: Re: DBA interviews
> Question 2 -- intimidation. yep. that's definitely someone I want to
> work for, someone who tries to bully me on an interview. Yep.
>
> I can top your 3.5 hour interview.... I interviewed at one company
> where I was there from 9am until 4pm, saw 11 people. Even lunch was
> part of the interview, I talked with HR. We ranged from detailed DBA
> work to design to network/system administration to management theory.
>
> This is an interesting subject as most of the people at my company have
> been offered the "opportunity" to opt-in to a voluntary severance
> program. If I do so, I could be interviewing again. Soon. I'd likely
> fail your interview.
>
> We've done this subject before, I'll repeat what I've said. I don't
> really care if you have memorized syntax. If you get the ordering of
> the "group by" "order by" and "having" clauses wrong I don't really
> care, I presume you are capable of figuring out what you've done wrong
> and looking it up in the docs. I don't write enough SQL myself to not
> have to refer back to the SQL Reference manual on occasion.
>
> I ask:
>
> 1) Tell me your worst nightmare. What went wrong, how could you have
> prevented it and how did you resolve it.
>
> 2) Tell me the thing you are most proud of. It could be the solution to
> the above problem, it could be a really cool way of extracting data, it
> could be the award you won for a presentation. Of course, if it's for a
> presentation, I'm gonna ask you to tell me all about the presentation.
>
> 3) How do you learn? Do you read the docs only? Do you have Oracle on
> your PC at home and play with it? Are you on any email lists? What
> books are on your shelves at home or in the office.
>
> I seem to recall hearing Connor talk about that interview of "draw me
> the Oracle database and instance" and then go further and further into
> depth. It could have been Tom as well or instead, my memory could be
> faulty, it was a while ago and I pay attention to what both of them
> say.
>
>
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Received on Fri Aug 20 2004 - 19:46:38 CDT
