Re: Technical Interviews

danielroy10_at_hotmail.com (Daniel Roy) wrote in message news:<1b061893.0305261143.3c81f2f2_at_posting.google.com>...
> I have a generic question about the "technical interviews" we as DBA
> often have to go through to get a posting (I'm a consultant) or
> position: When interviewed by another DBA, do you ever feel that your
> answers should be tailored by the knowledge/myths of the DBA
> interviewing? For example, I got asked just last week during one of
> these interviews if "a full table scan is bad?". An "ordinary" DBA
> would answer "yes" right away. But anyone either doing some research
> on the topic on internet or trying different scenarios himself knows
> that the answer is "it depends!" (it seems to me that this is the
> answer to most of the intelligent Oracle-related questions). Some more
> examples of tricky questions I had to answer include "how often should
> we rebuild indexes?" (the correct answer is that some indexes should
> never be rebuilt, but try to explain that to someone who rebuilds ALL
> the indexes religeously every 3 months) or "How much bigger would you
> make the buffer pool if the hit ratio was only 80%?". It seems that I
> could go on and talk about each of these questions for half an hour
> easily. I went successfully through that interview, but it's only
> because I played the role of a DBA who follows the myths. Had I
> answered honestly to the questions, I'm sure he would have thought
> "what a freak!", and I would never have heard of them again!

This is a real danger, and the answer of course is to establish the level of the person doing the interviewing, and to neither talk down to nor oversimplify for them. This is very difficult, of course, especially with sophomore DBA's who think they know it all. Interviewing for DBA skills is very difficult in the first place, as you have to infer thought processes, methodology and habit from verbalized responses - and some of the best DBA's may not verbalize well (of course, some DBA positions are so political that verbalization skill may trump DBA skill anyways). I tend to answer honestly, and probably shoot myself in the foot sometimes as a result.

Given an intelligent person interested in Oracle, the exact responses probably matter less than whether they can work in the specific group and company culture. So many jobs are different than as advertised, anyways... managers should hire people as different from themselves as possible, to have a spread of experience and problem-solving viewpoints, but how often does that happen? People looking for jobs look for managers as much like themselves as possible, so they can relate to them and give the manager the idea they can fit in and be immediately productive.

>
> Daniel

jg

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