I took the MCM test today, and finished it. I needed the time allotted and it was, well, an experience.
I’m glad it’s done as I have a number of other things to work on. I’ll get results in a few weeks and in the meantime, I’ll get permission to see what I can write about the experience.
Heading out to get coffee in a few minutes. And then on to the testing center for my MCM Knowledge Exam.
I’ve reviewed a number of things in the past week and have been studying regularly, but not overly hard for two months. I’ve learned a lot, and tickled a number of memories, but I have no idea how well I’ll do. I don’t expect to pass, but I do expect to get an idea of where I stand in terms of SQL Server knowledge.
Most people are aware that there are certain questions that you cannot ask someone in an interview. There are also a much larger list of questions you should not ask, but that still leaves you with a huge number of potential questions that are available for candidates. Whether these questions actually help you find a better candidate is up for debate and a topic for another day.
There are some famous questions asked in interviews at Microsoft, with a book titled after one of them : How Would You Move Mt Fuji? The classic one I’ve often heard is “why is a manhole cover round?” with quite a bit of creativity given in the answers. Those aren’t the strangest questions, however. I found a survey that asked for oddball questions, and had quite a few responses. The top 25 are given in a list and there are certainly some that I would question in there.
With many of us in the technical field being asked different types of questions, I thought this might make a good poll for the data professionals:
In a few dozen interviews in my life, I don’t think I’ve been asked anything that I would consider oddball, and I’m not sure what I’d do if I did get one. I suppose it would depend on how the person asking the question behaved. It might certainly affect how I felt about working for the organization, and if I would continue in my quest for the job.
Steve Jones
At every company I’ve ever worked, it’s been easy to tell the high performers from the low ones. There’s often a correlation between those the level of performance and the satisfaction people have in their jobs. Higher performers are often happy, and low performers are not. That isn’t necessarily 100% true, but it has seemed to work that way in most of my jobs.
I don’t know if there’s any causality there. Are people happier because they do better I their jobs? Or if they find something in which they excel, does that make them happier? I think it’s a case of people having some level of passion about their work, that the work is important to them, and that makes them more willing to do the work and excel at it.
I recently read Drive, by Dan Pink, and it was a book that really made me rethink the world and how I view it. The book talks about motivation and the ways that we humans are motivated to work at something. The book challenges the assumptions that most companies have used to drive workers over the last few decades: monetary rewards for high performance and punishments for a lack of effort.
It’s a hard concept to understand, much less buy into, but there is this idea that humans like to work, that we need a task, and more importantly, we need a purpose in our lives. There is some truth to that, and I think that many experiments have shown that the majority of people will get work done, and people do want to work. You can count on people to actually do their jobs, especially in technology where we seem to enjoy solving problems and making things run efficiently.
Not everyone is self motivated or self directed, but I think many people can be trusted to get work done, especially once they understand why it’s necessary.
If you want and interesting book about business, give Drive a try, or check out this cool animation of Mr. Pink’s talk on the subject.
Steve Jones
Voice of the DBA 