The company I applied to flew me to Geneva (from the US) for an interview/test session. To my surprise the 3hr written test material (multiple-choice questions) was more (about 70% of the questions) about advanced DBA work (DB server tuning and such) while the position advertised was for a .Net web developer. Well, obviously, there is nothing I can do about that now but is this typical? I wonder what they were trying to get at...

Luckily I had some clue about the DBA questions from my past experience and the job-relevant ones I could answer without problem but needless to say I was a bit irked...

The 2 hr oral interview however went very well. Based on the fact that they'd paid for my flight can I hold out a smidgen of hope?

At least you know the job is not that advertised before you start...

The rest of us have to wait until we start to find out this wee gem of information

Of course, I'm not surprised they're hoping to get as much value out of the potential candidate as they possibly can but I was just wondering about the fairness of it all. Oh well, chalk it up to the list of many things done differently in Europe...

Interesting, this has happened to me recently at an interview.
I applied for a Netware/Unix job and they spent the entire interview talking to me about Sharepoint portal.
I queried them after about 20mins of not knowing the answers to their questions, and they told me the job spec had changed.. quite a change.

My interview(s) was surreal, for a highly qualified IT job it was basically an 2 hour chat the first time and a 1 hour chat for the second interview. Hardly a technical question in sight.

On the plus side, the job is exactly as advertised and I'm loving it

Hi... not sure whether it would make you feel better but I listen to this...
I applied for a Senior Position with a leading Logistics provider. The test had "weird" questions i.e. "what is the contrary of wicked".... not to say about the "personality test". 2 hours of my life completely wasted.
Cheers

..and the correct answer is obviously "swiss". The synonym is obviously "foreign"

dave

Most serious DotNet projects require access to the database and so a good knowledge of database suff is important. If I was interviewing you, you could expect at least 40% of the interview would be DB stuff, 35% DotNet specific and say 15% for deployment issues. Leaving 10% for general stuff.

Best Regards,

Jim.

Oh, I'm well aware of the kind of database stuff you need for a data driven .Net web application. I've been programming MS Access for 11 years, Coldfusion for 7, .Net for 2 and been a network admin for 3 also. I'd like to believe I know T-SQL fairly well, can write stored procedures and triggers, familiar with data architecture design, table normalization and all that but I don't believe I need to know how to do performance optimization and tuning of a SQL server box. If I have to do that than there is something wrong with that IT department. We have our DBAs for the admin tasks and hire consultants for tuning our server farms. You don't do that sort of stuff on a dailiy basis.

Anyways, I agree with your percentages but for DB stuff not DBA stuff. I think there is a difference.

Can you please post your complete CV, just in case there is any doubt about the extent of your experience ?

dave

Well I have spent 17 years here working as both a contractor and an employee for Swiss multinationals and I have yet to have a DBA fix performance problems for me! Usually you're your stuff is to slow - fix it!......


Jim.

Dave, sent you a PM.

Jim, I hear you. We got in a fight with our server guys over here way too many times over stuff. You come to work Monday and find that sh@#$ hit the fan. We know we didn't touch the code so call the server guys "Did you do anything over the weekend?".
"Who, us? No way!"

...hours pass by, and from experience we know they didn't hit the beach this past weekend (whish they did)...

Then, a call comes "Try it now" ... and voila!

But it always starts with "Your code sucks, fix it!".

I agree with you on the performance stuff too. As far as SQL server goes from version 2k on it does a heck of a job on it's own and unless you're massaging data at a scale of Google, you'd better leave it alone anyways.

I wasn't serious.
dave