Employers may concern this if you have a PhD degree but are applying for a entry-level programmer job. But if they thought that being overqualified was a significant problem, they probably would not have invited you in for an interview. If you really want this job, don’t just admit that you are overqualified even if you know you are. (more…)
This question is often asked when you interview for positions with certain supervisory or management duties. It is a good opportunity to show your problem-solving abilities. Your answer should explain how you have used communication skills, coaching skills, and established procedures to help problematic employees. Tell successful stories, demonstrate you can turned troublesome employee around.
An Example Answer:
”I had one employee who was always late for work. I met with him and explained that his being late was putting an unfair burden on others in our team. He said she understood and promised he would change, but was still late and gave a different excuse each time. I gave him two verbal warnings, telling her that being chronically late was unacceptable and he needed to change his behavior or risk disciplinary action. When he was late again, I contacted HR to deduct his salary for the hours. Then I met him again to inform this action, at the same time I explained that I wanted to help him. I offered to change her work schedule, and also suggested that he would find another job if the alternate schedule is not acceptable. He took it seriously this time. Since then he is been working on his schedule on time.”
If you’ve never experienced this type of situation before, say that, but then tell them how you would handle it.
Look at the business facts:
Database is the heart of today’s enterprise.
The whole IT business works around databases.
Oracle is the leading enterprise database server.
That makes an Oracle Database Administrator (DBA) so special. As you can see, Oracle DBAs play critical roles in IT, no doubt that experienced DBAs are in high demand and get paid well. (more…)
1. The Outsourcing Trends
2. How to Fit in
In general, outsourcing is not really scary. All about outsourcing is to shift some of IT functions from in-house to external IT service providers. Your strategy to deal with outsourcing is to make yourself fit in the trend. There is another kind of outsourcing – offshore outsourcing, that could cause real threat to us. We’ll talk about offshore outsourcing in the next chapter. (more…)
This is a technical interview question to getting your insight of detailed skill sets as an Oracle DBA or developer. Your answer could tell what level of experience in database server and SQL query performance tuning. Your answer could be: (more…)
This is a common interview question for project managers, team leaders, or supervisors. This is a very good opportunity for you to insure the interviews that you have skills and experience to handling difficult management situations. The best way to answer is to give an example from your previous experience for how you have dealt with under-performed employees. However, your example must provide a positive outcome, that means you’d better no say you fired the employee. You should rather explain how you helped the team member achieve better performance and reached the team’s project goal. A recommended answer would like this one:
“As the team leader I am interested in the success of every team member. I don’t want anyone from my team left behind therefore I always do my best to get my team work together to achieve our project goal. As for under performing, there could be many reasons behind it, such as insufficient skill, lack of training, motivation issues, personal problems, team communications, etc. In most cases, I am able to manage the case and work with the individual employee to help him or her catch up. In a previous project of 12 team members, I noticed a poor performing team member after couple of weeks of the project start-up. The first thing I did was to determine the reason he was not performing. I had a private conversion with him and let him be aware of expectations. I also ensure him that I was there to help him achieve the expectations. From this conversion I learned that he didn’t have enough hands-on skills to perform the tasks, and also he was afraid of communicating with other team members because he didn’t want to be looked ‘stupid’. Actually he was worried about his job and didn’t know what to do. In this case, I needed to give him a lot of encouragement, I provided personal mentor to help him speed up on skills. I also met with a few core techies from the team and asked them to provide necessary support to help the problematic individual do him job. It happened that he was a quicker learner, once he got the basic skills, he gained the confidence and communicate well with the rest of the team. Finally he became a significant contributor to our project success.”
This question is asked to network administrators and security officers in order to test insight of the candidates’ overall knowledge of the various attacks that may affect the organization. You’d better have some real life network security experience to giving a perfect answer. However, if you never dealt with denial-of-service attack and recovery, you can still make yourself familiar with the concept and describe the general process. An example answer could be like:
“Our network could get denial-of-service attack because someone wanted to crash our system or make it perform so poorly and become unusable. Hackers may also want to install Trojan or a root kit through the attack. When a denial-of-service attack is identified, the first thing I would do is to reboot the system. In general I would also need to reprogram the switches and routers in order to drop the offending traffic. I would implement certain security features provided by the vendors to within the system to protect the network from this type of attack. With a Windows server system for example, I can invoke IPSec policies that allow me to limit or forbid traffic from certain hosts.”
When interviews want to find out if you do have hands-on experience, they usually ask tools related questions. If you can explain what tools you have used to do what tasks, they assume you have the skills supported by the tools.
As for database design tools, there are many. The most popular ones are: (more…)
Not just give a list of shells you have used, try to describe some of the key features of the shells, showing you have the real experience on them.
“I got used to the Bourne shell for early versions of Unix. Then I become accustomed to the Korne shell and happen to like it very much. It has more functions than that in vi or Emac. The interactive command line editor is so wonderful. It has built-in environment variables which allow for a customized environment.”
Then, a follow-up question might be, what’s your experience in shell programming? A good answer is to give a few examples about what scripts you have written to accomplish what tasks.
“Having a number of years’ experience using the shell, I have become very accustomed to shell programming. Script writing is almost second nature and I could apply the technique to all phases of systems administration. I have written scripts that perform automatic system backup during low CPU utilization hour. I have written interactive scripts which help to restore files to the system, scripts which can add or remove a user from the system, and xripts for new system installation.”
1. The Offshore Trend
2. What Makes Offshoring Possible
3. Offshore Impact to Homeland Techies
4. How to Beat Offshore Trend
US-based companies are sending more and more tech jobs to overseas. Hiring overseas technical talent to do the job is so called offshoring. In recent years, rush to offshore outsourcing has become a significantly growing trend in IT industry – significant enough to draw us to pay serious attentions. (more…)