Re: Case study for interviewing Oracle DBA

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 21:14:58 -0500, Ryan <ryan_gaffuri_at_comcast.net> wrote:
> Has anyone worked out a way to determine whether a candidate has a problem
> solvers attitude? You can have all the knowledge in the world, but if
> everything is a crisis to you and you do not want to be 'held responsible'
> for anything... you are pretty useless.
>

Give them a problem to solve, something realistic but that you would expect someone in that role to be able to solve without recourse to Oracle Support. Give them the bare bones (e.g. "You get a call from the server operators because a database hasn't started up after a cold backup") and let them talk you through how they would approach the problem, giving them the results of any actions they say they'd do. This should test their attitude as well as knowledge. It should also help show up those candidates who tend to 'jump the gun' or go for the complex solution first without considering the simplest.

Stephen

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