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My first weed out question is asking them to describe a Left Outer Join. They don't have to get it exactly right, I just want to see if they ever did anything m
by brixon 13y ago
My first weed out question is asking them to describe a Left Outer Join. They don't have to get it exactly right, I just want to see if they ever did anything more than a two table inner join.
For a Web Developer the first weed out question is to tell me the difference between a GET and an POST. Here all I really want then to know is that a GET is what generally see in the URL and a POST is commonly what you see in HTML Forms. I want to see if all they ever did was ASP.NET WYSIWYG web development or if they actually know something about the internet.
These two questions can be done in a phone screen. The faster that you can weed out people the cheaper the hiring process is.
- jasonkester 13y agoCareful using that terminology. You'll get false negatives on people who still think in terms of *= syntax, and will tell you that the words "left", "outer", and "join" are all redundant and probably don't belong in SQL in the first place. I used to be one of those guys, but I'm much less grumpy about it these days so I'd still pass your test. I have a sad suspicion that I'm on the progressive end of the spectrum when it comes to guys who deeply understand SQL.
- ajuc 13y agoYep, I've done a lot of PL/SQL programming, and we've always used (+)= syntax and joins with all the tables after commas and all the joining conditions after WHERE. Now I work on different project and we use join syntax, but I could easily imagine people that do joins all day, and not know JOIN .. ON .. syntax.
- jacques_chester 13y agoI came to Oracle after it adopted the ANSI syntax, so that's what I use. So my experience is the opposite of yours -- when I see the (+) I need to look up the syntax to remember if it's left or right outer.
- jfb 13y agoAnd then I ask, hey, where's my BOOLEAN? And then I drink.
- jacques_chester 13y agoOh god. And the lack of a serial/autoincrement/identity type. So. Many. Effing. Triggers. And 32-character identifiers. sigh
- tmzt 13y agoIt's so much better to use a database that only allows one autoincrementing value per record, or one TIMESTAMP and then only allows you to have either a create timestamp or an update timestamp without writing a trigger. I prefer the way Oracle does it, you may have to do more work but it's more explicit and flexible that way.
- jacques_chester 13y agoI don't. I prefer for the common case to be correctly and automatically handled for me.
- brixon 13y agoTrue, I use it for a conversation starter. You can tell the split second after you ask the question if you will get any kind of reasonable answer. I personally have used the *= syntax more than the LEFT syntax, but that concept has helped filter people since I am not allowed to "test" people.
- zerr 13y agoGood point - that they don't have to get it exactly right. For me, it would be enough if the candidate is just aware that there are different types of Joins for different scenarios.
- Ecio78 13y agoInteresting, so I think I'll pass your first screening even though I'm not a (web) developer but (most of all) a system/network engineer :D
- tmzt 13y agoObviously a GET has variables and a POST doesn't (that's why they are called "GET variables") [I've encountered this belief more than once working with PHP developers. I would hope that the answer was closer to something demonstrating knowledge of HTTP as a protocol.]