posted on Thursday, December 21, 2006 11:25 AM by marathonsqlguy

Interviewing Developer Candidates

We've been looking for a new lead developer at my company, and as the SQL Server DBA I get to take part in the interview process. I both love and hate the process and sometimes I'm as nervous as the candidate, because I know that how they answer my questions will affect their life, and that's some serious karma.

I found what I think are a great set of questions at Tech Republic and have been using these with the candidates. What is disturbing me is that two of the three candidates I've interviewed so far didn't know what the difference was between a clustered and non-clustered index. I've even gotten comments back that my questions were too hard, and that the candidates were interviewing for a developer position, not a DBA position.

Now, if we were a shop which had a data architecture team and the developers used the data structures designed by that team I wouldn't be so concerned, but I've been told more than once that the developers are fully qualified to create the necessary data structures to solve their project objectives. As a result, I expect the lead developer to know the most fundamental archectural aspect of SQL Server before starting a project.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

Allen

Comments

# re: Interviewing Developer Candidates @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 12:19 PM

Hear hear, I completely agree! Even with various data abstractions (stored procs, data access layers and ORM) I feel performance starts at the database layer and no amount of code optimization can make up for poor data modeling.

Joe Kuemerle

# re: Interviewing Developer Candidates @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 12:35 PM

Every single of those questions should be answered without a problem by anyone with 5 years SQL server development

I had the same problem with candidates that I interviewed

I posted 40 questions or so that I asked here

http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-well-do-you-interview-and-do-you.html

I expected that people would miss maybe 3 -4 questions. I had people miss 70% of them (8 years experience in SQl server) kind off sad if you ask me

Denis the SQL Menace

# re: Interviewing Developer Candidates @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 2:08 PM

They sound like common scenarios that you would rightfully expect a lead developer to know at least most of (if not all).

Paul Wilson

# re: Interviewing Developer Candidates @ Thursday, December 21, 2006 3:34 PM

Checked out the questions... and they are reasonable questions to ask... some are bordering on esoteric but you are interviewing somebody who is suppose to be an expert and leading a group devloping!!!

Those questions get at do you know anything... do you know some... do you know alot... Have you done a litte... have you done some... have you done alot...

which is what you want to know...

You Know Who

# re: Interviewing Developer Candidates @ Thursday, December 28, 2006 7:26 AM

This is indeed a "Fundamentals I wish _all_ my sqlserver developers would master" ! You can even say "my RDBMS-developers" for this set of questions, because the concepts should be well understood.
There should be more to a developer than point and click or blind copy/paste.
Once again, we're brothers-in-arms ;)

Johan