July 1, 2015 at 9:13 am
... we hired some guys fresh from the local university. They had excellent credentials and grades, and yet they struggled that first year. On their one year anniversary one of them told me that he was very unhappy with his computer science degree, because it didn't prepare him for the real world environment.
This is an excellent point, and similar to my own experience hiring freshly-minted CS grads. Business analysis doesn't seem to be included in CS curricula, but any decent application or database developer needs to wear the business hat as well as the propeller.
To address this shortcoming, we developed classes in business analysis, keyed to help our new university hires learn about how business was conducted at the company. The classes were successful, and made the 'newbies' more productive earlier in their careers -- but as you noted, it still takes time to learn the ropes.
July 1, 2015 at 9:20 am
Alvin Ramard (7/1/2015)
Ed Wagner (7/1/2015)
Alvin Ramard (7/1/2015)
Jeff Moden (7/1/2015)
Ed Wagner (6/30/2015)
Alvin Ramard (6/30/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/30/2015)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (6/30/2015)
GoofyGuy (6/30/2015)
None of the following are technical questions, they're just simple and conversational, but they reveal a lot.
One question I often ask is, 'What are the title and author of the last book you read?'
It evokes some rather interesting responses.
Personal, Lee Child.
"Why you should run like hell when someone asks stupid questions during an interview" by Ben Dover 😉
"Disaster Recovery Using DBCC TimeWarp" by The Thread
Now there's a book that would be interesting. 😉
Indeed. Awesome title, Alvin. It really should be a book since so many folks find out the hard way about backups and restores.
Too many horror stories with backups. Remembering one person being interviewed for a DBA position was asked about the different types and how you might use them. As an example, he suggested weekly fulls, daily logs, and hourly differential. He wanted to argue when the interviewer mentioned that he might have the last two mixed up. ... SCARY!!! ... :w00t:
A DBA who doesn't know backups...sigh. I know there are multiple types/flavors of DBAs nowadays, but I would argue that the first thing on any list for a DBA is the backups. You need to know how to take them, when to take them and where to store them. This leads to the entire purpose for taking them, which is how to restore from them. You have to know that you can restore when you need to, which means both practice so you know how and verification so you know your backups are viable.
I guess I know how the rest of the interview went.
The interview didn't go well. Interviewer scored him as 4 out of 10. Management hired him since he was the best they interviewed. He was hired for a short contract position related to implementing partitioning. I don't think we were any closer to do any partitioning when he left.
Shortly after that, IT was outsourced to IBM and then things really started to go downhill.
I know exactly what you mean. A previous employer of mine outsourced the infrastructure team to IBM with the stipulation that when it was successfully implemented, the software side would be next. It was a complete disaster and the software side was never done. The company even ended up buying out the last years of the contract just to get them out. It became more about how to do something rather than getting it done. The meetings were dizzying and the bureaucracy was unreal.
July 1, 2015 at 9:21 am
GilaMonster (7/1/2015)
Rod at work (7/1/2015)
I have to respond to this, especially when you say that it appears there's a DBA/Developer factory pressing out people all using the same mold. That reminds me of a time, early in my career, when we hired some guys fresh from the local university. They had excellent credentials and grades, and yet they struggled that first year. On their one year anniversary one of them told me that he was very unhappy with his computer science degree, because it didn't prepare him for the real world environment.I'm probably going to be a little insulting in this, but...
Your company was partially to blame there.
You cannot take new graduates and expect them to magically perform like someone with multiple years of experience. No matter how good the university, no matter how well they teach the students, they can't reproduce the kinds of chaos, complexity and politics you get in real world companies.
Tossing a new grad in the deep end is planning for failure.
My company takes new grads in every year. They get a 2-month training course that builds on what they learned at university, then they are put onto a dev team with other experienced developers for the next 4 months. Then we consider them junior developers.
Gail, I don't think that was insulting at all. That's called being real.
July 1, 2015 at 9:32 am
Jeff Moden (6/30/2015)
Eric M Russell (6/30/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/30/2015)
Eric M Russell (6/30/2015)
Jeff Moden (6/29/2015)
...As some of you may know, I've interviewed a lot of folks for the position of "Sr. Developer" and "Sr. Database Administrator" over the last several years and with great disappointment. Most of the "developers" claimed over 5 years experience and all of the "DBAs" claimed over 10 years experience and yet roughly 90% of both groups couldn NOT even tell me how to get the current date and time using T-SQL. Only one of the "DBAs" could tell me how to do a native backup and restore. Of that group, many claimed extreme performance tuning knowledge and yet only one out of a group of now more that 30 candidates could tell me a decent definition of what a Clustered Index actually is never mind how a Non-Clustered Index is related to a Clustered Index.
...
So after one year and 30 inteviews, not one candidate could answer these basic questions?
You need to find a new head hunter or start posting job openings in places where real DBAs hang out.
Actually, it's more like 3 years and agreed. We went through multiple agencies, none of which I liked to begin with but I didn't have a choice in the matter.
It's not just in one company, either. We went through a round of trying to hire a Sr. DBA at one company I worked at and got lucky. None of the dozen DBA candidates were worth a hoot at all. I'm mean they were really ignorant of what a DBA actually does. Then, one company presented Geoff Albin and that's how I met him. My boss thought he was a bit arrogant and he wasn't. My boss thought that because he was the first candidate that actually knew what he was talking about and his confidence came across as arrogance to my boss. My comment was "Get used to it... he's your new DBA and, deep down, you know it. Don't let him go. Make an offer today and accept his counter if he makes one."
If you don't mind me asking, what is the salary range you're looking to hire for?
It varied from company to company (I also do interview for companies that don't have the expertise to conduct such interviews) but typical ranges, depending on the breadth of the expected job ranged from 95K to 120K. It's not like we were drawing flies with lowball offers. Most of the time, that didn't matter for those candidates that the different companies were trying to hire direct because the salary wasn't revealed if the candidate didn't actually pass muster. For those companies that used recruiters where the salary was made known to the candidate long before the first interview, it didn't seem to matter. We still got the same ignorant candidates.
It may be a case of "the good ones already have good jobs with good pay and benefits that they like and aren't likely to leave".
Going with the last line from above:
It may be a case of "the good ones already have good jobs with good pay and benefits that they like and aren't likely to leave".
With today's technology, the good ones could easily do the job without having to relocate and don't want to relocate. I can do everything from my desk except physically touch a server. With the modern servers, setup properly, I can even reboot a server without having to touch it physically. The SysAdmins in Afghanistan could do everything remotely as well except swapping drives or physically connecting a server to a network switch or router.
Too many managers still believe that if you aren't sitting at a desk in the office, you aren't working. But it is okay to work remotely at night when things go south instead of having to drive into work.
Managing remote personal is different, and actually requires more thought in developing objective measures of performance.
July 1, 2015 at 11:35 am
Lynn Pettis (7/1/2015)
Too many managers still believe that if you aren't sitting at a desk in the office, you aren't working. But it is okay to work remotely at night when things go south instead of having to drive into work.
How very true, Lynn. I think that attitude is changing, albeit very slowly.
July 5, 2015 at 8:33 am
Eric M Russell (7/1/2015)
Rod at work (7/1/2015)
Eric M Russell (6/30/2015)
There is a certain type of candidate who all seem to share the same basic resume, which seems impressive on the surface (a tag cloud with 30 different technical skills), but none of them live up to it. It's as if there is a plastic DBA / Developer factory somewhere that presses them out from the same mold, complete with an identical back story and new suit.None of the following are technical questions, they're just simple and conversational, but they reveal a lot.
"I have your resume here in front of me, but could you briefly go over your work history for the past 10 years; the name of each company, your title, and a little detail about the role and day to day responsibilities ?"
"So what is motivating you to leave your current position at company X ?"
"Tell me about the last database performance issue you resolved."
"So, switching gears a bit, tell me, what in your opinion are three of the most important things that separate a good DBA / Developer from a bad one."
I have to respond to this, especially when you say that it appears there's a DBA/Developer factory pressing out people all using the same mold. That reminds me of a time, early in my career, when we hired some guys fresh from the local university. They had excellent credentials and grades, and yet they struggled that first year. On their one year anniversary one of them told me that he was very unhappy with his computer science degree, because it didn't prepare him for the real world environment. When he was in school he'd get assignments something like, "Using quick sort find the middle value or derive it if there's two." But when he got into our work environment he didn't know how to handle mangers request when they asked for a report, "showing all of the machines performance with that thingy in the upper right corner." They just didn't know how to handle people's ambivalent language; how to dig out what it is they really wanted, rather than just what they said.
Now that was a number of years ago. I certainly hope that the local university has improved on how it trains new developers and DBA's. But I suspect that there's still room for improvement.
I wouldn't expect someone a year out of university to know the ropes in terms of how the business works and mastering tools; they're still an intern at that point. It's too bad that the IT industry doesn't have a master / journeyman model like other professions. There are a lot of smart folks who are tossed into the deep end of the pool and expected to either sink or swim.
In my previous comment, I was thinking more along the lines of outsourcing firms staffed by an army of posers with paper certifications.
A lot has been said here about what I said. But let me point out that it was the new hire himself who was disappointed in his college education. Not us. We thought he was doing a fine job and he continued to be a very productive member of our team.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
February 20, 2017 at 10:46 am
It does appear to be a modern thought that once you graduate that you are done learning and are as much a professional as the next person. Even if they have 10 years of real experience.
We all know this to be wrong.
I have found the culprits to be the educators in the experience of my children. Fortunately for my children our household likes to keep everyone's feet on the ground. We celebrate achievement. But we won't just celebrate anything.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
February 21, 2017 at 10:37 am
If you ever think you are done learning, time to call the undertaker.
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