More interview questions - part 2-ish of a sparse series
A while back I was trying recruit a DBA to look after a customer's Oracle E-Business Suite implementation; that is the patching, cloning and kicking the workflow-into-life side of things. It turned out to be a hard search, or perhaps I was a little too demanding in wanting both skill and experience. On occasion I borrowed from that excellent series of interview questions posed by Howard Rogers a while back (see and his later blog posts) One question in particular looked good to ask in that sort of non-threatening, there's no right answer sort of way: who are your Oracle Gurus? I like this question (and not because Howard mentioned me in the answer); it shows the sort of candidate that reads widely or at least knows a few names:
Me: Who in the Oracle community do you look up to?Telephone interview candidate: XXX [names a well known celebrity consultant], I worked with him in the past and he showed me some useful techniques
Me: I'm having lunch with XXX tomorrow, if you like I'll pass on your regards
Candidate: [gasp, choke, drops phone]
The interview seemed to go down hill a bit from that point with the gaps in his knowledge becoming less and less easy to hide.
Although I probably know enough to bluff my way around interviewing for most database generalists, I think I am better at setting the searching BI questions. After all I am probably out to separate the 'think they cans' from the 'have dones'. Sometimes the simple questions hide deep thoughts. For example, if I ask "what are the key deliverables for a data architect on a project to develop a data warehouse?' I would be devastated if my single deliverable was an entity diagram.I would be disappointed to hear that my two deliverables were a logical and physical design. I would get progressively happier if they also included a data lineage diagram, sizing information for initial load, daily batch size and growth rates, a data quality analysis for the source systems (perhaps even data profiling) an ETL strategy, an idea of how to manage data quality and a strategy to backup and restore the data warehouse