This month is a great topic to me. I think growing and improving your career is a skill that most of us could improve, especially in our younger years. The invitation from Kevin Feasel is a good one from which you can learn a lot.
I am looking forward to the responses from others.
If you want to host an invite one month, ping me and request a date. Most of 2024 is full, but I have a few months, and I certainly am happy to schedule you into 2025. This is a great way to participate in the community, meet others, and challenge yourself. You just need a blog.
In this post I’m going to give two questions, one as an interviewer and one as interviewee.
My Favorite Interview Question for Candidates
When I interview someone, I usually have a list of things to ask them to better help me compare candidates, but these are associated with digging into knowledge, however this question really helps me.
What have you learned recently?
I don’t expect candidates to know everything. I expect to have to teach them quite a bit about my environment. However, what I want from them is an effort to learn. My view is that some people are constantly learning things and others are content to rest on their previous knowledge/experience.
If someone hasn’t learned anything recently, I don’t necessarily write them off, but I might probe about what they have been doing, as well as how they prepared for a new job or the interview. Perhaps they’ve been busy with something (crisis, illness, etc.) and haven’t been improving in the short term, but if someone hasn’t learned anything in the last year they’re proud of, or they can’t remember when they last invested in themselves, I have a hard time investing in them as an employee.
Note, I will dig into ensure you learned something and aren’t just giving me an answer.
My Favorite Question as an Interviewee
In a lot of my jobs as a technologist, or a data professional, the job is the job. It’s very similar in many places. These days I do more architecture and advocacy, but if I were approaching a new job, I’d ask this:
What are the expectations around working hours?
I’d add context to this, but what I’m looking for are information for these items:
- core working hours
- on-call/non-core hours
- punctuality
I don’t mind working hard, but I don’t expect to work a lot of non-core hours every week, or even too regularly. I don’t mind 40 or even 50, but beyond that I’m not going to be happy.
I’m also not someone that punches a clock. If you expect me to be online (or in an office) every day at 8am, you’re going to be disappointed. I might be there at 7:45 or 8:15. I don’t avoid work, and I do my best to be early for meetings, but if nothing is scheduled, I will vary my start time. I usually warn a potential boss about this.
I used to ask about travel, but I’m over that. I don’t mind or worry about travel too much.
Voice of the DBA 
Thanks, Steve, for all you do keeping T-SQL Tuesday as an institution with a long history of existence.
I like both of your questions a lot. On the interviewee side, understanding hours expectations is crucial. I’m very big on understanding opportunity cost—if I’m working 5 extra hours a week for Company X, that’s 5 hours I can’t do whatever it is I’m doing when not at work. For some people, the opportunity cost is relatively low: they love the work and have nothing better to do. For me, if you want 55-60 hours a week, I’d better be getting paid commensurately because that’s a lot of time I’m trading off for a company.
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Steve – Off topic Q but I can’t find any posts from you on this nor would I really expect to since this is not SQL. That said email is an important part of all our jobs; even SQL Server has an email feature in it. I’d love to read your thoughts on the issues of the New OL (assuming you’ve seen it), the new version of Outlook being pushed by MS that looks like the web based OL in Office 365.
I switched to the new OL today b/c the IT Director said we had to in order to make use of some external service that would require us to use the new OL. Within less than 10 minutes I had to switch back. I couldn’t believe how bad and dumbed down this thing is. It’s not like switching from classic MS Teams to the new Teams, that switch didn’t involve loosing most of your capabilities in the app nor did it dumb down teams. It’s also not like switching from SSMS to Azure Studio. It really is going from a very powerful/flexible app that has been very useful for 100’s of millions of users to something that more resembles the Alpha or beta version of a first time email application that’s written in HTML. Here are just a few things you loose:
Sort by Sender, Subject, attachment, ect by clicking on the column header This is gone because there are no more columns in the Inbox pane. You do have a few sort options but only a few and you have to take a few extra steps to get to where you can change teh sort
Any/All customizations aside from a handful. If you go into the OPTIONS area there are now only a very few choices. Custom views are gone entirely
I googled this and there are many who have been complaining about how much of a step back/down this new OL is and this isn’t like the normal complaints you always get when a product changes. If they did this with SSMS it would be like loosing the ability to do everything but connect to a DB and run queries in 1 query window only.
Have you seen the new OL yet and if so what do you think about it?
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I haven’t seen new Outlook, though I saw Grant post that he was struggling with it. I use Outlook (desktop) and mobile, but I haven’t clicked the “try new” yet. I also hate the focused inbox.
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FWIW, I almost never click the “try new” stuff until I see others post about it. It stinks when you have dependencies on other services, and I understand why vendors support only one thing and not multiple.
I also understand the “dumbing down” of software in many cases, often because too many people have grown used to using mobile devices and really limited views and functionality. I dislike that same paradigm being ported to desktops.
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When Grant says struggling he’s possibly being too kind. I’d argue that the mobile OL app on my Android as limiting as it can be, is still better to use than this new OL; it’s that bad.
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Even though it’s not SQL related this whole issue with New Tech that’s bad could make for an interesting post. At my place of work, when our boss in IT told us we’d have to switch to it and admitted our first reaction is likely to be like his, that this sucks he was right; a lot of this suck’s feedback. We have a thread of feedback form those of us in the dept and when I shared a humorous comment I found on MSD’s own outlook forum from an unhappy New OL user the reply I got from our boss was if you you can’t figure out the struggles (with the new tech) and overcome it then you get left behind which is true when the tech is at least acceptable. I doubt many learned the workings of many of the failed Microsoft products (MS Bob, Windows Vista, Windows Rt & More) and got left behind b/c of that. That’s a more appropriate mindset when the change is just not liked but doesn’t prevent one from still doing with the tech what they have been doing like with the Office Ribbon fiasco. When MS rolled out the new UI, the Ribbon, for their office sweet it was not met well with many. It was so unpopular that once MS stopped making it optional, an entire industry was created consisting of software that did just one thing, undo the Ribbon.
Just b/c it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good or shouldn’t get pushback from users and employees should never be discouraged from saying something if it’s not positive or be told they’re not a “team Player” for speaking negatively of some product. Imagine how much less functional/useful MS SQL Server would be today if all the users were told if you say anything negative about the latest update then you’re going to be left behind so say something positive or not at all.
An even better example would be Red-Gates rollout of the SQL History feature in SQL Prompt which replaced Tab History. I’m confident that as long as their were no personal attacks or rude language that Red-Gate welcomed the feedback including the bad with the good so they would know if there are any issues and what they are so they can address them and better serve their customers. The alternative, making users feel like they need to just be quiet if they can’t say something nice just leads to unhappy customers and possibly a loss of business where the vendor doesn’t even know why they lost customers b/c negative feedback was discouraged.
Anyway just a thought
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