Re: Off topic - questions recruiters asked you in the technical interview?

In addition to job related questions I always ask questions to help determine a persons attitude toward the work environment. The likelihood that they will be a team player and follow standards. And I always ask at least a few questions where the correct answer is "you can't do that in Oracle." These are the questions that most quickly catch the frauds.

But I too ask easy, intermediate, hard, and DBA questions to get a good guage on the person's skill set. A typical intermediate level technical question would be something like this:

1. You have two tables with an identical structure. We will call them tables A and B.
2. Some data is unique to A. Some unique to B and some in both tables.
3. Write a single SQL statement that will display, as its result set, the records that are unique to A, those that are unique to B, and will simultaneously identify which table they are in.

Daniel Morgan

Alan wrote:

> Could be anything. Questions could range from syntax to theory to business
> situations. We look for experienced people, so our questions are deigned to
> determine if the candidate has real working experience, or is just "book
> smart". Our questions start off easy and get harder. First question (and
> you'd be surprised how many can't answer this) is, "How do you get the
> system date and time in a Select statement?" Even if the candidate misses
> that, we'll ask a few more easy ones just to be certain. We then go on to
> things like, describe an outer join, what is a Cartesian product and how can
> it be avoided, how can you use TRUNCATE in PL/SQL, tell us about a situation
> where you had to deal with a difficult user, and so on...
>
> <bgwillia_at_vcu.edu> wrote in message news:a91t8e$6g14$2_at_mercury.vcu.edu...
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm about to have a technical interview over the phone on Oracle. The
> > position is for a SQL coder with some knowlege of the vi text editor and
> > maybe a little bit of UNIX to boot. Since I've never had an Oracle
> > technical interview I wondered from the seasoned professionals about what
> > was asked and to look out for. Or maybe what was the strangest Oracle
> > question you got in a technical interview?
> >
> > btw, I did one on COBOL/CICS and messed that up badly :-(
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Boyce Williams
Received on Fri Apr 12 2002 - 13:20:40 CDT