October 3, 2012 at 10:31 pm
References and demeanor... if you lack the ability to judge the skills you have to look a bit deeper/think differently - look at fit, job history, desire to learn, etc. If the person you're interviewing strikes you as bright, capable and not afraid you might have the right guy/gal regardless of experience.
Never screen based on acronyms, look for that guy or gal who can/will do their level best to deliver because it is part of their nature - contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of folks out there looking for a job they can care about, look for those people and they will rarely let you down.
October 4, 2012 at 2:17 am
I think it's harsh to rule out the second guy purely on the basis of the use of strong adverbs and the first person. My own degrees are from that era and that is how I have been advised several times to word a CV to get it through the recruitment company vetting. Admittedly there is a difference between strong wording and empty boasting, but you may want to think that this is a good candidate who wants to make his CV stand out. Also I've been told to acronym cram my CV because a) I've got 20+ years experience to fit into 2 sides of A4, and b) automated procedures at recruitment companies are looking for these words.
October 4, 2012 at 6:17 am
CptCrusty1 (10/3/2012)
Guys and GalsThis has been invaluable to me. We interviewed a couple dorks that clearly didn't have what it takes and were able to tell that quickly. I do Data Analysis/Mining, adhoc stuff, etc., been doing it for longer than I care to admit, my boss too. Our combined knowledge, while still limited about DBA's, helps, but all your input provides more details.
Through this, now lengthy, thread, we've hired a recruiting firm that is doing some more of the vetting for us as well. Our quality of candidate has improved dramaticly. Now we're dealing with the people they think they know everything and crow about it in the resume's.
So I'm going to throw this out there. I'd like to think I'm a real good read of a personality via the resume. I'd like to think I can tell a lot about the structure of the resume, the language, and even whether it's not consistant and someone has been spoon feeding them.
2 different resume's. Candidate has 17 yrs DBA exp, been around for a long time (BS CIS 1984, BS Psych 1973). His resume read like he was a relaxed individual. Very comfortable with himself which is different than being very confident. A highly confident person can be dangerous with data, lose cannon type thing. Everying I got off the resume indicated he was just not a very high strung person.
Next Candidate has 12 yrs dba exp. Lots of statements like "singlehandidly", and "sole contributor" when referring to a 2 man team meaning he did everything... Lots of first person "I did this", "I did that" probably much younger (BCS in 1997).
I'm interviewing the first one. I got him on the phone and did a phone screen and he was exactly like his resume.. calm, collected. Not really worried about whether I hired him or not. Comfortable in his own skin.
Anyone esle do it this way?
No. The first candidate sounds fine but I believe you may have mistaken a highly confident person for a loose cannon in the second candidate. I hate resumes that say "was a member of a team that...". While I agree that it's very important that someone know how to play well with others, I want to know what that person actually did on the team and a resume or CV is the right place to do that! I like people that take ownership of problems and are able to work very effectively as individuals because the best teams are made up of individual contributors. It's much easier for me to direct a self motivated and eager individual contributor than it is for me to create motivation.
In my opinion, both of the candidates you cited have their own merits and I'd call both of them in for an interview or at least do a phone interview.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 4, 2012 at 6:26 am
Lee Crain (10/3/2012)
GSquared,All good questions.
If I knew I was not qualified to perform the interview myself, I would start by writing as good a job description as I was able. Then, I would look to someone I knew to be a credible source for a recommendation of someone qualified to perform the interview.
It's not a perfect solution but in that situation, what else would be a good solution? You have to start somewhere. And, like most things in life, outcomes are not guaranteed.
One more thing: I would sit in on the technical interviews to observe the candidate's demeanor when answering questions. Observations of body language can often reveal things about a person's command of a subject.
(emphasis added)
My primary interview technique is based on exactly that kind of thing. I actually do a type of personality test in every interview. It's conversational, and pretty darn revealing about a person, without invading privacy or taking a long time. About 2 minutes, usually.
To me, intelligence and personality matter a lot more than command of the subject. The right people will learn, and learn fast, to cover skills they don't have but need. The wrong kind of person, won't do the job well even if they're the most skilled DBA (or anything else) in the world.
Never yet been burned by working it that way. Get burned routinely when other people override my calls on that subject.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
October 4, 2012 at 8:24 am
CptCrusty1 (8/24/2012)
Hi dudes and dudettes...The boss and I are conviced that we need a dba since the 3rd party firm providing dba services isn't doing the best job. I know lots about SQL development; however, I know very very little about being a dba.
We received a resume from a person indicating many years exp with 2000/2005/2008 as a DBA; however, outside tricky SQL Questions, I'm not sure where to go from there.
I'm looking for:
--Generic DBA type things.
--Stuff that a mid-lvl dba should know.
--Advanced stuff that is rather obscure.
If you are kind enough to respond, please preface the answer with the level of difficulty you feel it has... . Oh... and the answer too.
When hiring the person, I'd like to make an informed decision. Thanks all... I really appreciate it.
Crusty.
I know this post was from a couple of months back, but since it's still active and might benefit others looking for tips on conducting intervires, here are my thoughts.
First define what roles or tasks this DBA will be expected to perform daily or on occasion. The role of DBA is too broad, what specifically does your IT department need; is it backups, clustering, SSIS, ... ?
It's possible that you as a developer know T-SQL performance optimization and can fill that role yourself. Also, if you're still going to hire an outside firm for hardware support or offsite backups, then the DBA wouldn't need to be an expert in that area either, although they still must know enough to confirm that the vendor is doing their job.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
October 4, 2012 at 10:14 am
No. The first candidate sounds fine but I believe you may have mistaken a highly confident person for a loose cannon in the second candidate. I hate resumes that say "was a member of a team that...". While I agree that it's very important that someone know how to play well with others, I want to know what that person actually did on the team and a resume or CV is the right place to do that! I like people that take ownership of problems and are able to work very effectively as individuals because the best teams are made up of individual contributors. It's much easier for me to direct a self motivated and eager individual contributor than it is for me to create motivation.
In my opinion, both of the candidates you cited have their own merits and I'd call both of them in for an interview or at least do a phone interview.
Sir Moden: I agree that "Highly Confident" can very much be a loose cannon. I believe we're on the same sheet of music here. I explained to the boss my opinion that he would be a Tornado in a Tea Cup.
"Member of a team", dead on. Doesn't say much about your specific contributions. He has some other things I don't like on the resume. He lists a couple jobs' tenure as 2005-2006, and 2006-2007. That doesn't tell me much. When in 2005, could be almost 2 years, could be less than a month....
It's hard to type all your knowledge and exp. into a text box.. LOL..
Again people, very valuable stuff here. I consider myself to be an experienced interviewer/resume reviewer, but this is great stuff either way....
October 4, 2012 at 10:54 am
CptCrusty1 (10/1/2012)
OK... so here's a question for you serious DBA's.My DBA Vendor indicated that they had to delete indexes before creating primary key's on a table. They created the primary key, and then had trouble recreating one of the indexes. They were creating a Unique Index and it failed due to duplicate values found. This raises several questions.
Why are they deleting Indexes before creating a PK. Shouldn't this be a very simple thing to add a constraint? I've never heard of doing this in this particular way.
If the index failed due to duplicate values and it doesn't involve the PK field. My understanding is that using a Unique Index is similar to creating a PK in that it's enforcing a unique combination of values for the fields used. In this case, when I looked for duplicate values, I found thousands. This tells me they were either using the wrong type of index, or something drastic happened to the data.
Any feedback would be helpful....
There is a list of things I don't like about this vendor, but that's a different story.
Creating primary keys, foreign keys, and unique constraints on an existing set of data is not always a simple thing.
Whether non-clustered indexes should to be dropped prior to creating or altering a PK depends on if the PK is clustered, which often times (perhaps most of the time) is the case. When a clustered index is created, the pages of any existing non-clustered indexes are completely reorganized, because the clustered key is used as the referencing rowid in non-clustered indexes.
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/category/Are-you-kidding-me.aspx
The unique indexes or constraints may have previously been disabled for for reason, and then failed the uniqueness check when the vendor attempted to re-create them.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177456.aspx
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
October 4, 2012 at 11:40 am
CptCrusty1 (10/4/2012)
No. The first candidate sounds fine but I believe you may have mistaken a highly confident person for a loose cannon in the second candidate. I hate resumes that say "was a member of a team that...". While I agree that it's very important that someone know how to play well with others, I want to know what that person actually did on the team and a resume or CV is the right place to do that! I like people that take ownership of problems and are able to work very effectively as individuals because the best teams are made up of individual contributors. It's much easier for me to direct a self motivated and eager individual contributor than it is for me to create motivation.
In my opinion, both of the candidates you cited have their own merits and I'd call both of them in for an interview or at least do a phone interview.
Sir Moden: I agree that "Highly Confident" can very much be a loose cannon. I believe we're on the same sheet of music here. I explained to the boss my opinion that he would be a Tornado in a Tea Cup.
"Member of a team", dead on. Doesn't say much about your specific contributions. He has some other things I don't like on the resume. He lists a couple jobs' tenure as 2005-2006, and 2006-2007. That doesn't tell me much. When in 2005, could be almost 2 years, could be less than a month....
It's hard to type all your knowledge and exp. into a text box.. LOL..
Again people, very valuable stuff here. I consider myself to be an experienced interviewer/resume reviewer, but this is great stuff either way....
BWAAA-HAAA!!!! Oh no! I was suggesting quite the opposite. The "Highly confident" person might not be a loose cannon.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
October 4, 2012 at 11:55 am
Jeff Moden (10/3/2012)
Nadrek (10/3/2012)
cphite (10/3/2012)
Or, you might check into recruitment firms in your area and see if any of them do technical screening for candidates.Candidates who have poor or surface/rote memorization knowledge? Some of them came from recruitment firms.
Perhaps not everywhere but I've found that's generally the rule rather than the exception. Some of them even unintentionally exclude some really good candidates by giving tests that require rote memorization of sometimes trivial and unused facts rather than experience. As others have stated, some of those questions seem to be based on myth and some are just flat out wrong compared to a real life problem. Others are simply “oolies” that someone found in some book or on the internet.
I've had some really good experiences dealing with people from recruitment firms; and I've gotten a couple of really good jobs that way myself. And, while certainly there are some that rely on tests that are nothing more than memorized facts, the thing is none of these firms exists in a vacuum - you can ask around and get a feel for what kind of candidates the various firms in your region are sending to interviews.
Networking is just as useful on the hiring side as it is on the applicant side.
The point of the discussion was we have a hiring manager who doesn't feel he has adequate knowledge to make a technical assessment of his candidates. One way to deal with this is to have someone else make that assessment for him. Certainly there is a risk of that third party not doing a good job of that, but frankly I don't believe that asking a lot of questions that he gets from people on a forum is significantly better.
Because no matter how good those questions may be, unless he actually understands what he's asking enough to have an informed conversation with the applicant, it's still as likely to be a matter of the other person just having memorized some facts, or just being good at BSing their way through the questions.
October 4, 2012 at 12:27 pm
A great one is
"it's late and you're rebooting the SQL Server but it's taking forever to shutdown and restart, why shouldn't you hold the power button for 4 secs to get a quick restart?"
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"Ya can't make an omelette without breaking just a few eggs" 😉
October 4, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Jeff, I'll go with the first one... I think he's a Tornado in a Tea Cup.
Here's a question... How many years exp. Should a DBA have to be considered Senior level? How encompassing should the experience be.
October 4, 2012 at 1:25 pm
CptCrusty1 (10/4/2012)
Here's a question... How many years exp. Should a DBA have to be considered Senior level? How encompassing should the experience be.
I think that defining Seniority based exclusively on years on the job is not such a brilliant idea. Either way, in my experience most DBA begin to mature after five years or so if they are lucky to work in a challenging environment with gifted co-workers.
_____________________________________
Pablo (Paul) Berzukov
Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.
Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.October 4, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Hi Guys..
i don't think too much difficulty on this post .
simple logic here: while filling DBA position commonly we will get answer from candidate side only, if our criteria is matches with his answer. He is the right person. that question is "explain the Roles & Responsibilities". so we can get more clarity here.
i think you are aware of what kind of DBA support would be expecting(or required)in your organization, in interview ask relavant question's & then take the appropriate decision. its simple right!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SQL DBA support's like:
-> production support
-> Development support
-> MS-BI support.
Here Roles & Responsibilities are different on every area.
Subha
SQL DBA/MS
October 4, 2012 at 1:37 pm
subha.msc2007 (10/4/2012)
Hi Guys..i don't think too much difficulty on this post .
simple logic here: while filling DBA position commonly we will get answer from candidate side only, if our criteria is matches with his answer. He is the right person. that question is "explain the Roles & Responsibilities". so we can get more clarity here.
i think you are aware of what kind of DBA support would be expecting(or required)in your organization, in interview ask relavant question's & then take the appropriate decision. its simple right!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SQL DBA support's like:
-> production support
-> Development support
-> MS-BI support.
Here Roles & Responsibilities are different on every area.
Subha
SQL DBA/MS
The point of the thread is that it's hard to know if the answers are correct if you can't answer the questions yourself.
If a manager asks, in an interview, "How many databases can you have on a server?" and the candidate says, "Six", but the manager doesn't know the answer, how can he tell if that candidate is good, bad, or indifferent?
So, yeah, it's easy to ask the right questions, if you know them. And it's easy to know if the answers are correct, if you yourself are an expert on the subject. But if you aren't, it's not so easy.
And I should point out that telling if the answers are correct is only easy if you have a big enough ego to be convinced your answer is the only possible right answer and that no other answer could possibly be correct. Some questions have only one right answer, but it's a very small number of questions, and usually they're pretty basic questions and won't sort out experts.
Just look at some of the disagreements we get in discussions on this site, between people who are definitely experts on the subject. Ask a question like, "How far should a database be normalized?", or, "What's a relational database?", or, "Is it okay to use Identity columns as a primary key?", and 5 different experts on SQL Server will end up giving you about 20 different answers, and, most likely, all 20 answers will be correct to one degree or another.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
October 4, 2012 at 5:24 pm
CptCrusty1 (10/4/2012)
Jeff, I'll go with the first one... I think he's a Tornado in a Tea Cup.Here's a question... How many years exp. Should a DBA have to be considered Senior level? How encompassing should the experience be.
Years of experience don't matter, IMHO. I've seen some folks that really get it after just 1 year and I've seen some that that I wouldn't trust with a 4 function calculator even after 10.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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