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I never ask for an explicit left or outer join in an interview. It's always a question, like, "Get me the total sales of every salesperson for this quarter give
by endersshadow 15y ago
I never ask for an explicit left or outer join in an interview. It's always a question, like, "Get me the total sales of every salesperson for this quarter given this schema." And then they return it, and I say, "Can I get the list of all salespeople, even if they haven't had any sales?" And that's where it falls apart, sadly.
- draz 15y agounfortunately, I must agree with you. 9 times out of 10 candidates cannot answer the question you've posed. One time I even had a candidate with 17 years of experience (!!!) who didn't even know what a join was (masked in a question form). I let it slide, pretended like it was an "advanced" question, and came back to it later (figured he was nervous). The second time around I phrased the question "so, imagine I want to join data from these two tables so that the output would be first name, and location" (2 different tables). Even then, the candidate did not get the hint.... Instead, he offered to change the schema of the fake database and have all the information in one table....
- reubenyeah 15y agoReally? But how did they avoid learning something so basic?