Thanks.
I have to quickly explain something about the coding test. As I noted earlier, I got a bare-bones description of what it would be: part one would be writing a stored SQL procedure that would take several parameters and use them to retrieve a selection of records. The second part would be to write a webpage that would accept values for those parameters, run the stored query, and return the results.
So to teach myself the parts I didn't know, I dummied up a table of "customer records" -- name, customer number, date of first order, date of most recent order, like that. Just to make things interesting, I wrote the stored procedure to take a start date and an end date and to filter the customer based on date of first order, sorted by customer number. And the webpage of course let you enter dates.
As the "brain picking" thread elsewhere shows, I had a little trouble getting it to work, but it wasn't because of coding, per se, but because I did something funky while installing SQL Server. But I worked it out and had it going perfectly.
Anyway... I get to the interview this afternoon, and when the fellow hands me the specifications for the coding test, I had to suppress outright laughter. It was almost the same thing I had used to teach myself, with a little extra. At its core, accept a date range and filter records on a main table based on it. A third param chose which of four other tables you had to do an inner join on to get a few extra fields, but that was the only difference between his test and my arbitrarily-chosen training setup. Except for some trouble finding the right way to branch on that third param -- and I'm sure that there has to be a more elegant way to do it than the IF-ELSE-IF-ELSE cascade I ended up using -- I could have done it in my sleep. And he told me I did it all in a reasonable time, and my code and webpage were as good as anything else he'd seen so far. I also gleaned from his comments that I have at least three competitors for the position, one of whom has yet to take the test, and another of whom is no threat at all (very bad performance on it).
I'm hoping this is a good omen. Well, that, and the tour of the facilities afterward, with the concomitant half-hour of informal chat about the company culture and policies and whatnot.
They'll be taking a week to make their decision, which means I'll be going into New York for the other second-round interview on Wednesday.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
I have to quickly explain something about the coding test. As I noted earlier, I got a bare-bones description of what it would be: part one would be writing a stored SQL procedure that would take several parameters and use them to retrieve a selection of records. The second part would be to write a webpage that would accept values for those parameters, run the stored query, and return the results.
So to teach myself the parts I didn't know, I dummied up a table of "customer records" -- name, customer number, date of first order, date of most recent order, like that. Just to make things interesting, I wrote the stored procedure to take a start date and an end date and to filter the customer based on date of first order, sorted by customer number. And the webpage of course let you enter dates.
As the "brain picking" thread elsewhere shows, I had a little trouble getting it to work, but it wasn't because of coding, per se, but because I did something funky while installing SQL Server. But I worked it out and had it going perfectly.
Anyway... I get to the interview this afternoon, and when the fellow hands me the specifications for the coding test, I had to suppress outright laughter. It was almost the same thing I had used to teach myself, with a little extra. At its core, accept a date range and filter records on a main table based on it. A third param chose which of four other tables you had to do an inner join on to get a few extra fields, but that was the only difference between his test and my arbitrarily-chosen training setup. Except for some trouble finding the right way to branch on that third param -- and I'm sure that there has to be a more elegant way to do it than the IF-ELSE-IF-ELSE cascade I ended up using -- I could have done it in my sleep. And he told me I did it all in a reasonable time, and my code and webpage were as good as anything else he'd seen so far. I also gleaned from his comments that I have at least three competitors for the position, one of whom has yet to take the test, and another of whom is no threat at all (very bad performance on it).
I'm hoping this is a good omen. Well, that, and the tour of the facilities afterward, with the concomitant half-hour of informal chat about the company culture and policies and whatnot.
They'll be taking a week to make their decision, which means I'll be going into New York for the other second-round interview on Wednesday.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.