The interview was 3 rounds of questions, 2 people per round. I was informed it would be a mix of soft skill and technical questions. It was wall to wall technical questions. There were at most 2 soft skill questions per round. The attitude of the interviewers were neutral to friendly. And, if you are not given an offer, they will tell reasons why, which is greatly appreciated.
I rate the experience a thumbs down because the reasons do not match the job position offered or what was the interviewers sought.
They say they sought advanced SQL skills, but did not ask anything which illustrated advanced skills. The closest thing was a request to return a result set based on date ranges. This is great in exercising your knowledge of SQL Server's date functions, which I admit I don't know all of them off the top of my head (F1 is a press way for a refresher on function specifics), but it does not demonstrate advanced SQL skills. How about aggregation or result set distribution questions? How about transaction and exception handling? These are more of the day to day challenges I've seen in my 20 years of SQL development. Heck, a question which asked to list out as many SQL constructs you know, explain them, and give an example of usage would have been more beneficial than questions about juggling dates.
A significant portion of questioning involved database performance tuning, specifically in server software and hardware configuration. I provided what they acknowledged were good answers, but they kept pushing for more and more. Failure to do so I guess meant not being qualified for the job. However, the job advertised was SQL Developer, not DBA or hardware systems architect. (My area of expertise is in app and database development, which seemed perfect fit for the position since it was to serve the app dev team.) The questioning in the last round went beyond was the company ad asked for.
An interviewer asked what new technologies I was interested in working with. I described the data environment ISN has and the new opportunities that comes with it. I was describing was is commonly known as "big data," but I failed to use the term and the interviewer failed to recognize what I was describing.
The last reason given for rejection is unfair. They will ask what your career goals are, where would you like to be in the long term. I answered honestly, being a team lead of engineers while still being hands on to create a quality product. Given a company growing at the pace of ISN, opportunities for new leaders are bound to be created. The company responded saying I was more interested in a managerial role than development role. Is ISN saying they do not expect employees to have a career growth path? Employees should not have dreams or aspirations? Why should my long term goals be a demerit? If you are asked this question and want to get hired, answer "I love doing X and will do as long as I can."
