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I could nail those with the Django ORM, but I'd struggle to write syntactically correct SQL, not having done it in a while. But it says that your test machine has MS-SQL; with the machine in front of me, I could probably puzzle it out the join quirks with a couple minutes of trial and error.
How would you solve the first one using Django ORM?
Employee.objects.filter(boss__salary__lte=F('salary')).values_list('names', flat=True)I could nail those with the Django ORM, but I'd struggle to write syntactically correct SQL, not having done it in a while. But it says that your test machine has MS-SQL; with the machine in front of me, I could probably puzzle it out the join quirks with a couple minutes of trial and error.
How would you solve the first one using Django ORM?
Find me employee objects which have a boss salary less than or equal to the salary.
It was ridiculously easy and I got all 40 right without much thinking, as many people here would also, I imagine.
Then I asked, "Why bother with this after reading my resume?"
They answered, "We have to do this. We've interviewed 52 programmers with resumes similar to yours and no one else got them all right. In fact, the highest score before you was 32."
Wow. Is this the state of our industry now?
My first weed out question is asking them to describe a Left Outer Join. They don't have to get it exactly right, I just want to see if they ever did anything more than a two table inner join. For a Web Developer the first weed out question is to tell me the difference between a GET and an POST. Here all I really want then to know is that a GET is what generally see in the URL and a POST is commonly what you see in H…
Careful using that terminology. You'll get false negatives on people who still think in terms of *= syntax, and will tell you that the words "left", "outer", and "join" are all redundant and probably don't belong in SQL in the first place. I used to be one of those guys, but I'm much less grumpy about it these days so I'd still pass your test. I have a sad suspicion that I'm on the progressive end of the spectrum whe…
Now I work on different project and we use join syntax, but I could easily imagine people that do joins all day, and not know JOIN .. ON .. syntax.
I could nail those with the Django ORM, but I'd struggle to write syntactically correct SQL, not having done it in a while. But it says that your test machine has MS-SQL; with the machine in front of me, I could probably puzzle it out the join quirks with a couple minutes of trial and error.
I find it kind of interesting that the first comment on the article says they wouldn't be able to answer the questions by they use an ORM. I'm not really a fan of ORMs, personally, because I don't think it's useful to try and "map" a relational model onto an object-oriented one.
SQLAlchemy is a great example of this, I always get precisely the SQL query I would've written myself, except it's syntactically correct, easy to compose and has a chance of being portable.
I took a similar test, on-line while being watched. 4 sets of 10 multiple choice questions: SQL, unix commands, vi, & HTML. Make your 10 choices, click submit, get your score. It was kinda silly, but what the heck... It was ridiculously easy and I got all 40 right without much thinking, as many people here would also, I imagine. Then I asked, "Why bother with this after reading my resume?" They answered, "We have to…
I'm not a SQL Developer, but anytime I get questions for which Google has answers to be found in 5 minutes or less, I'm quite hesitant to work there. I respect interviews that go along the lines of: "What would you do if..." after giving a detailed description of their environment. But then again I'm a tools/OSes admin, so maybe it makes more sense for my job description. But anytime guys are too focused on third opt…
What that line is can be fuzzy.
Consider C, what is the difference between the stack and the heap? yes you can look this up but if a candidate doesn't know this cold then they just can't write C code properly.
Simiarly for sql if a candidate can't write a simple join then it's pretty obvious that they haven't really used sql before.
The sql questions asked here are somewhere around the fizzbuzz level of skill. Any sql user should be able to answer them given a properly setup dev environment.
I could nail those with the Django ORM, but I'd struggle to write syntactically correct SQL, not having done it in a while. But it says that your test machine has MS-SQL; with the machine in front of me, I could probably puzzle it out the join quirks with a couple minutes of trial and error.
How would you solve the first one using Django ORM?
I'm not a SQL Developer, but anytime I get questions for which Google has answers to be found in 5 minutes or less, I'm quite hesitant to work there. I respect interviews that go along the lines of: "What would you do if..." after giving a detailed description of their environment. But then again I'm a tools/OSes admin, so maybe it makes more sense for my job description. But anytime guys are too focused on third opt…
In terms of "what would you do if" type questions - they're often no less prone to book answers. What you really want is "give me a specific example of when this happened to you and how did you behave" as they're more likely to test real experience. Sure people can lie but when you start digging into it few people are good enough to continually make up exact details on the spot without getting suspiciously vague (or having behaved in a suspiciously perfect manner).