What would you ask me at an interview?
I'm an analyst, armed with sql, vba, and ssis. I've worked with federal and private employers. I've got a masters degree, and have been in the workforce for eight years. There's a ring on my left ring finger. I wear glasses.
You work for a cool local company heavily into IT. You need a lot of sql and unix. You're interested in the cloud, and probably understand it.
What do you ask? What are you looking for?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What was the most interesting problem you had to deal with?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you see your role is in ensuring our information I'd accessible while remaining secure? How would you go about doing so?
ReplyDeleteKimberley Lam That's a great question! A really interesting one recently was figuring out who to market to for a proposed data-driven marketing campaign. We have ten million consumers, and needed to find four hundred thousand who would be likely to purchase the product. I used behavioral data and economic information to figure out who that was, and wound up with a healthy margin on top. That was pretty interesting!
ReplyDeleteDavid Rothfeder That's an interesting question. With the sort of access I've had to databases in the past, its been essential to keep good pass phrases. Beyond that, as a keeper of other people's secrets, its essential to always treat that data as if it was my own. Beyond that, encouraging everyone to use good pass phrases -- including encouraging our IT to make that easier.
ReplyDeleteYour role will involve managing a team. Can you tell us about a time you had to resolve personal or professional conflict with someone working under you?
ReplyDeleteAdam D That's news to me, and exciting. I've worked with a lot of voluntary contribution organizations, where if folks aren't engaged, they will walk away. As in all situations, sometimes personalities conflict. I've found that responding with patience and kindness remedies most ills and prevents further escalation. As an particular example, I had an organizer not show up for an event he was going to run -- a no call no show. That was pretty bad, but by assuming he had a good reason the organization was able to benefit from his skills in the future.
ReplyDelete[ I think that's a crappy answer. Suggestion? ]
how large is a big database?
ReplyDeleteI think that is a good answer. I'd follow up with 'what are your recommendations for pass phrases? How do you work with others so that they follow these recommendations?'
ReplyDeleteRob Brennan, that is a cool question to judge what scope candidates have experience in
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols when I've had to answer that question in the past, I've tended to focus on specific incidents where I engaged a person who was feeling upset or angry, or where I was upset by something someone else had done, and explained the concrete steps I took in that interaction to de-escalate or to determine the root cause.
ReplyDeleteIf it hasn't been part of your professional experience and aren't expecting it to be, then you can probably worry about it a little less.
What do you want to know about our company?
ReplyDeleteIf we were to set up large scale cloud storage for a client how would you best go about integrating their current local database needs to their new cloud presence, while keeping this change as invisible to the client as possible?
ReplyDeleteAddendum: It's acceptable to delegate IT tasks you're not familiar with to another team, but make those situations clear as well.
ReplyDeleteRob Brennan I think that depends on the underlying architecture! I've worked with companies trying to manage a hundred thousand rows deep in three tables in Excel, and needing to go to extraordinary lengths to get it to work. Right now, my largest sql set is about 50 million records, updated quarterly. That's pretty large, and is transactional level data. The key with anything that size is architecture, indexes, and cores.
ReplyDeleteDavid Rothfeder Pass phrases should be large and meaningful. For example, a password of "NLIAYF" standing for "No Luke I Am Your Father" is pretty OK because it isn't a dictionary word. It'd be even better to make it longer, maybe "NoLIAYF". You really want length and memorability. Forcing special characters and crap makes users use a password just hard enough, forget it, and then rely on the security of their gmail account as security."
ReplyDeleteAdam D Here's an example from organizing: At a large public event I put together, a woman told me some doofus had touched her hair without her permission. This was super gross, and she wanted me to have a talk with him about boundaries -- so I did. I explained that this really isn't acceptable behavior, and we needed him to never do that again if he wanted to continue participating.
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer The company seems really great! There are some invisible aspects of culture that I'm curious about. How much ramp up time do you have on projects? How are assignments handled across teams and divisions? How do you track time?
ReplyDeleteEdward Hickcox While learning your systems for the first few months, I would be really uncomfortable trying to do that. I'd take a "watch one, do one, teach one" approach. I'd want to be a part of a project like that in an observational role first, and ramp up on our processes and best practices.
ReplyDeleteOther than crap (bad idea to risk swearing in an interview, it'll make them wonder what you sound like when you're not trying to impress them), good answer. Maybe add how you'd disseminate these recommendations.
ReplyDeleteNothing 6 characters long offers useful protection against brute-force attacks today.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, we just had a couple interviews, and a question I asked both times was:
Do you have any favorite "go to" tools for solving problems or massaging data?
(An implicit invitation to give an example of using ssms/powershell/excel/whatever to manipulate/present data.)
Isaac Kuo true. I was being short.
ReplyDeleteOn large data sets, it's SQL all the way. Get it in, then it becomes altogether easier to think about just about anything. On the other hand, if I'm thinking through the logic of a problem, I want unstructured white space. The pad of paper remains the greatest tool for this, followed by the spreadsheet.
"I was being short."
ReplyDeleteThat's what she said.
(Sorry for being out-of-the-blue, it's just that that joke works best when it's out-of-the-blue.)
Oh my: A friend saw this, showed it to the management at his company, who then asked for my resume. Jeebs, you guys.
ReplyDeleteDerek Balling No, I cannot! If I needed to answer that question, I would first call up a brother in law and see what he says. See, this particular family member is absolutely in data centers, and gets that scope in a way that I never will. That's how I'd have to solve that problem.
ReplyDeleteTell me about what you do outside of work.
ReplyDeleteDavid Rothfeder Sure! I've got three main hobbies:
ReplyDeleteFirst, Gaming - which involves telling stories with friends, and thinking through how the lives of fictional characters relate to each other. With much of my gaming, I intentionally seek out uncomfortable material to build my empathy.
Second, I started running last summer. When it was warmer, I was doing three 5k's a week. This helps me get out of my head, and centered to the real world.
Last, I read a lot. Sometimes, this is as fun as Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer, sometimes its a history of housing over the last six thousand years. More often than that, I read speculative fiction about the world to come.
Derek Balling Here's a better answer:
ReplyDeleteDeveloping in house architecture also means developing in house expertise. You need to be responsible for the server farms, for maintenance, and for any fallout of doing it wrong. Moving to the cloud means you can focus on what you do best and out source work that isn't your core competency. When in the cloud, disaster recovery is typically a lot easier simply as this is easier with scale -- duplicating an entire server farm is easier than duplicating a disk.
The recent gitlab issues are a great example of this! Here we've got really great coders, who lost 6 hours of data due to a bad keystroke. They just moved out of the cloud to their own infrastructure, and if they were still using someone else's infrastructure and didn't have direct ownership, this would be less likely.
Why aren't you and your sister consultants and ruling the world yet??
ReplyDeleteKatherine Nichols Maybe because distance? That's the easy answer.
ReplyDelete