IT Job Interview

Senior IT Specialist Interview Questions

An organization used the following question list to interview candidates for a Senior IT Specialist position. This organization was hiring staff for developing and managing in-house enterprise application systems running on Siebel Call Center environment with Oracle database on Windows platform.

First Interview

1. Tell us about your experience?

2. Please your Oracle DBA experience.

3. Did you install Oracle RDBMS? in what platform?

4. What’s you CRM/Siebel experience?

5. Do you want to learn Siebel?

6. How do you work with a team?

7. How quick you learn new technologies?

8. What’s your Perl experience?

9.What’s your JavaScript experience?

10. What’s your PL/SQL experience.

11. How do you handle multiple projects?

12. What’s your experience of documentation?

13. What’s your experience of creating state government standards?

14. What’s your experience of government budgeting and finance?

15. Do you have questions for us?

16. Can you give us references?

Second Interview

1. Rate your interpersonal skills.

2. Rate your PL/SQL skills.

3. Rate your writing skills.

4. What kind of proposal did you write?

5. Rate your DBA skills.

6. What’s your experience in database performance tuning?

7. What’s your experience in data integration?

8. How confident you can learn and do Siebel?

9. What do you do after you finished a task but still have time?

10. Describe how you work in a team.

11. What’s your experience in Oracle replication?

12. Do you have questions?

Interview Questions for Associate Programmer Analyst

The following questions were asked in an interview for Associate Programmer Analyst position:

1. Use the last project as an example, describe how you perform software development work?

2. What kind of testing tools have you used?

3. Tell us how you have worked in projects with a team.

4. If you went to vacation, and one of co-workers covered your job, what do you do when you come back?

5. If your project is already behind schedule but you get al lot of interruptions on work, and have to spend a lot time on customer support when clients call in for problems, how do you handle this situation?

6. When you and your co-worker have conflicts and disagreements, what should you do?

7. If you think you could not finish a task by deadline, what should you do?

8. How do you deal with errors in programming?

9. What’s your experience on version control tools?

10. Do you have experience for dealing with customers, such as when customers have problems and call in for support?

12. Have you worked in a production environment?

13. When an issue occurred in a software system in production environment, what could be the problem?

14. Do you have PL/SQL experience?

15. Rank your skills from 1 to 10 for Java, JSP, VB, PowerBuilder, and Oracle.

How do you resolve conflicts and issues when there is a disagreement among different parties involved in the project?

“Depending on the specific situation, I may use different approaches to resolve different conflicts.  First I would try to understand the situation, know what’s going on and analyze the issues.  I would work as a mediator to bring all parties together and talk it out.  I would listen carefully to all of them and help them analyze the pros and cons of their points.  If possible, I would use existing documents and standard to help make decisions.  In many case I would be able to find compromise acceptable by all parties.  Only if when necessary I would bring in upper management to solve the issue.  In general, to avoid possible conflicts, I would encourage effective communication among all team members and enforce documentations.”

How do you lead the effort to plan and jump-start a new IT project?

That’s a typical question for project manager or project lead.  It does not ask you the experience, so you can talk the talk.  All you need to understand is the project lifecycle.

“First I would get to know all parties involved in the projects, - learn who is the stakeholder?  who is the customer? who is the executive sponsor?  and  who is the key player?  Then I would do a lot of interview with these key players to find out what do they want from this project and what are their expectations. The next step would be to work with users to collect business rules and create requirement documentations.  I would also analyze the scope of the project available resources.  Based on the requirement analysis I would start to create architecture and high level design.  Following that would be detailed design and development, and go on through the development lifecycle.  Basically that’s how I would start a new project.”

What is your approach to learn a new software or system?

“I feel the most effective approach to learn new software is to actually do it.  Whenever possible I would install the software on my own test environment and play with it.  This way I could learn the tool’s functionalities and build hands-on skill fast.  That’s how I learned Visual Studio.NET.  I setup the evaluation software on my PC and started to code a few simple applications in C# and Visual Base.NET.  After a few weeks I became expert in Visual Studio and started to work on C# programming for our company’s projects.  When learning a new tools, I would also read the user manual and find online help.  I am a quick learner and really enjoy learning new technologies in IT.”

This position has a lot of responsibility and several tasks often come at you at once with all of them having high priorities. How do you deal with this type of a situation and what tools have you used to help you manage your tasks to ensure nothing gets left out?

It is actually 2 questions, - how to handle priorities, and how to manage tasks.

“It’s important to communicate with managers and users to solve conflicts.  Although all tasks are in high priorities, some must be higher than others.  I would look into each task in detail and talk to my manger to analyze the priority.  In general tasks required from higher authorities such as executive directors come with higher priority.  I would also look at the expected time span to complete a task.  If a task takes short time to finish, I may do it first.  Another thing to look is the chain effects.  If a task is dependent on the result of another task, I would do the master task first.  As for manage daily tasks, I used Microsoft Project for task scheduling and analysis.  I also used Microsoft Outlook to maintain a daily task list.”

Please describe how you have worked with a team to accomplish a project?

“I can perform my job independently, I also enjoy work in a team environment.  In the past I’ve worked as a team member and team leader as well.  In my last project I was the team leader with a development team of 8 developers for a Java web application development.  As the team lead I was responsible for design the system, assigning tasks to team members, and provide support to my team during the development.  The advantage of team environment for me was to create the synergy among the team and the opportunity to learn from each other.  I really enjoyed working with people in different technical background and personalities.  It’s a lot of fun.  I learned a lot from other term members and I also enjoyed helping others who work with me.”

Please describe your experience preparing written documents? Who was your audience?

Give all documentations you made or you may have created.

“I’ve created tons of documentations in my past jobs, such as…”

Here’s list of documentations common for IT:

Requirement Analysis document
Functional Specification
Technical Specification
User’s Manual
Technical Guide
Operational Procedures Guide
Coding Convention Doc
Project Proposal
RFP - Requirement for Proposal
RFO - Request for Offer
FSR - Feasibility Study Report
BCP - Budget Change Proposal

Do you have any experience in data acquisition, data migration, and/or data mapping using either ETL (extract, transform, load) tools or customized data conversion solutions?

If you have used any ETL tools, explain it; otherwise say you developed customized scripting process by yourself.

“In most of data migration projects I developed customized scripting processes.  I’ve developed BCP scripts along with Windows’ batch scripting to migrate data from flat files into Sybase database.  I used Oracle’s SQL Loader a lot to load ASCII data into Oracle server.  I also had a chance to user Siebel’s Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM) to convert data from external source into Siebel core database structure.”

What are your considerations on business and technical aspects if you are asked to analyze a data consolidation project which brings enterprise data from multiple business functions and platforms to a centralized RDBMS?

If you cannot catch up all the information like this one, you may ask for repeating the question.  Try to grab the keywords when listening.  A long question may sound complicated, but if you can catch the key aspects, it shouldn’t be too hard.  The key to answer this question is to explain the purpose of data consolidation.

“Data consolidation in general is to improve data accuracy and data availability.  From the business point of view, I would start to analyze the purpose of the data consolidation project, why we need to consolidate the data, what users expect for this project.  I would consider the requirements and expectation of users from all parties and work with them and analyze the data functions, draw data mapping, and design the data structure.  On the technical side, I would consider the approaches and technologies to implement the data consolidation projects.  I would evaluate and select the right software tools to run the project.  In many times I might have decide between implementing commercial tools or evaluating customized process in house. “

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