T-SQL Tuesday #174: Your Favorite Job Interview Question

Welcome to another edition of T-SQL Tuesday. This month, Kevin Feasel asks us to think about our favorite job interview questions. He provides some examples from both sides of the table (interviewer to interviewee and vice versa) in his invite post, which you can check out by clicking the T-SQL Tuesday logo. I decided to stick with what my question would be if I had free reign to ask a question as an interviewer.

Under Pressure

As an interviewer, I want to know how someone handles adversity. I might ask something like, “you encounter an outage caused by an issue you’ve never faced before and it needs to be fixed as soon as possible, what do you do?” I’m curious where someone’s mind goes in that situation. Do you go straight to Google? Ask another coworker for help? Close your laptop and run away?

I’d also be curious if someone considers other less technical factors. Would they make sure all relevant parties know of an issue or find out if there is somewhere tracking any recent changes/releases? There isn’t a cut-and-dried right answer or wrong answer and it’s one way to get an idea of how someone thinks.

Be Yourself

I had to shake my head at the idea of “asking your favorite chat bot to do your job for you, like an even-more-dystopian version of Wall-E” that Kevin mentioned in the invite post. Call me naïve, but I can’t wrap my mind around that being someone’s legitimate plan to get through a job interview. But I now know it’s a reality.

If you ever decide to forgo common decency and go into a job interview with a second monitor loaded up with AI to spit out your answers, consider this: make sure you’re not wearing glasses or have any other reflective objects in the background making that monitor blatantly visible to the interviewer.

Thanks for reading!