Comments on: When hiring a DBA, test their skills

By: TravisO

TravisO — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:59:46 +0000

While you are correct that most DBAs will spend a large majority of their time optimize existing queries, fixing existing databases, and just overall improvement of existing setups. This is the norm of a DBA, if you find a job where all you do is basid admin of the server, then you're a server admin, not a DBA, and I wouldn't consider you worthy of a DBA job role.

This is like a programmer walking into a job and complaining when he has to rewrite/improve/expand existing code. Writing stuff 100% from scratch is not the norm, having to work in or with other people's code is.

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:17:14 +0000

I’m hesitant to name company names in my blog, since I don’t want to be seen as endorsing one consulting company over the other. I may not have been phrasing that answer right, though: what I meant to say is that these high-end consulting companies use really tough interview questions in order to filter out their own applicant pools. They don’t sell the questions to outside companies, but rather just use them on their own prospective hires. Hope that makes more sense!

By: Megan Von Wald

Megan Von Wald — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:08:53 +0000

Brent,

You mentioned in your 5/14/2008 response that the best tests are those written by very high-end consulting firms. Any suggestions on which firms to use or anyway I can locate one in Denver?

Thank you,

Megan

By: BrentO

BrentO — Wed, 21 May 2008 11:35:07 +0000

Hi, Ron. Thanks for your question. What I’m going to do is publish a new blog post about it instead of adding the whole thing in a comment here, because I bet you’re not the only person who wants to do that. I’ll post it shortly. Talk to you later, and good luck!