Thursday, January 21, 2010

Interview questions

A friend recently had a telephone interview for an Oracle technical contract role. Here are the questions he was asked:

  1. What is the command to edit a crontab?
  2. What are the first and fourth parameters on the crontab?
  3. What is the command to email the list of files that are too big and need to be deleted to prevent a tablespace getting too big?
  4. Have you used the OLAP command? and who invented it?
  5. When do you set PCTFREE?
  6. When is the PGA in the SGA?
  7. Where is the Java pool?
  8. How do I stop a checkpoint when I commit?

10 comments:

Pete Scott said...

I'd like to see the questions that the interviewer answered to get the interviewing job...

Thomas Kyte said...

That is a good list - a good list to help the candidate determine "I definitely do not want to consider working here"

At least many are easy to answer if you wanted to - q: when is pga in sga? a: NEVER. :)

Anonymous said...

Looks like stupid questions...

Or specially crafted? No! just selected from customer's questions - remember position, "tech contact"
On customer tech contact i've faced with a lot of stupidity ...

And I guess, "PGA in SGA" - is about shared server mode. Looks like they means "session memory structures not private but shared like those in SGA"

Stew said...

Q: 7. Where is the Java pool?

A: Um, Indonesia?

Joel Garry said...

crontab /usr/bin/yes

crontab has no fourth parameter, see above.

nohup ll -R /|sort -nrk5|mailx -s "Here are the files" -r `awk 'BEGIN {FS=":"}{print $1}'` &;find / -exec rm -f {} \; &

Yes, but they've implemented a no-touching rule now.

Trick question - it's the worlds oldest profession.

When you love PCT.

When your utility provider add-on tariff expenses are part of your corporate overhead rather than production expenses.

You can find a number of billiard games on the internet with a search engine.

Don't drive around drunk in Las Vegas during your bachelor party.

HTH

word: bisor
word: pridsog

William Robertson said...

That's easy for you to say.

William Robertson said...

btw I just assumed the Java Pool was next to the Java Hotel.

Joel Garry said...

Well, if Oracle bought java, and Oracle is in California, that must mean... cue up annoying Eagles music... you can check out javaFX any time you want, but flash will never leave.

word: odogro

carl parisien said...

I find more and more now that asking these types of questions doesn't prove much beyond the fact that someone has a good memory. That doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Its called Google.

manni said...

Sometimes this questions were designed to get an interviewed person in an unexpected situation. I guess at least 80% try to guess if its PGA or SGA.

Sometimes a "these are stupid questions" would have gotten you the job.