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0 pointsjameshart4y ago0 comments

This is a "Guess what I'm thinking" question.

Non-psychic candidates will struggle with this challenge, so you might find it produces some false negatives.

Since you already seem to know so much about debugging slow performing database queries on your particular RDBMS stack, though... what was your thinking in looking to bring on board someone else who duplicates that exact knowledge?

Oh, and it'll be a missing index. It's always a missing index.

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lkrubner4y ago

The point is to start with something open ended, so the candidate can talk as much as they want on the subject, broadly, and then, based on what they say and what they don't say, I narrow in on particulars:

"Are you aware of any differences in dialect between the SQL of MySQL and the SQL of PostGres?"

It's not like they lost points for the stuff they didn't know, I simply wanted to be sure I understood the limits of their knowledge. We hired this candidate and they turned out to be great. But I hired them knowing exactly how much they knew and how much they did know.

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