Learning

Looking for a dream job? Job interview questions

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I have found somewhere these questions, so it is a good opportunity to put this live…

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

  • What skills do you possess that will help make you successful in this job?
  • Why should we hire you?
  • Have you ever worked in a similar position with another organization, and what did you enjoy most about and least about it?
  • Please discuss some of your past jobs and what you accomplished in them?
  • What prior work experiences have you had?
  • What were your accomplishments in these prior work experiences?
  • Please tell me about the duties/requirements of your last job.
  • Elaborate on one of the work experiences listed on your resume.
  • What did you enjoy most about your previous job experiences? Least?
  • In addition to your educational and professional experiences, what else would you like us to know about you in order to make an appropriate decision?
  • What skills will you bring to the job that will enhance our team or company?

LEADERSHIP

  • What are your major strengths and weaknesses?
  • What did you see as your major strengths and/or weaknesses on this job?
  • What would your last two employers say about you, good and bad?
  • How would you describe your supervisory/leadership style?
  • Who or what had the greatest influence on your life?
  • Describe the difference between motivation and inspiration, and how these apply to you in the work environment.

COMMUNICATION

  • How would you describe your style of communication?
  • Tell me about a time you had to sell an idea to someone else.
  • What do you enjoy doing most?
  • Tell me about a time you had to present information to a large group of people. How did you feel and how successful were you?

WORKING EFFECTIVELY WITH OTHERS

  • How well do you work with others?
  • What are some of the pros and cons of working on a team project?
  • When have you led a team to achieve a specific goal, what were the results?
  • What have you admired in people who have previously supervised your work? What haven’t you admired in these individuals?
  • How would you resolve conflict in a group situation?

DECISION-MAKING

  • Please tell me about a conflict and how you resolved it.
  • Tell me a time you had to make an important decision with limited facts.
  • Tell me a time you had to make an unpopular decision.
  • Tell me about a bad decision you made and what you would do differently?

DELEGATION AND ORGANIZATION

  • How do you organize your day?
  • Tell me about a time you delegated a project effectively.
  • Describe to me a time when a supervisor delegated a task to you when you had a full workload. How did you handle the situation?
  • Describe what your closets and garage look like today.

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

  • What changes would you make in your school’s academic program?
  • Tell me about a time you found a new and better way of doing something.
  • What was the largest, most creative project you’ve been involved in to date?
  • Tell me the most creative solution you have come up with to solve a problem.
  • Tell me a time when you had to bring out the creativity in others.

ABILITY TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY, THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING

  • What are your personal goals, and have you achieved them? If not, why?
  • Who was the most difficult person you’ve dealt with? How did you respond?
  • Describe a frustrating experience from work. How did you deal with it?
  • What are some of the greatest personal challenges you have faced?
  • How do you handle rejection?
  • What aspects of your past jobs were most frustrating?
  • What life experiences have given you the greatest reward?
  • Can you tell me about the toughest job you’ve ever had?
  • What was the most difficult aspect of obtaining a college degree?

CAREER GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

  • What are your career interests?
  • What are your standards of success/goals for a job?
  • What are your goals and aspirations for the next three years?
  • What are your long-range goals and how are you preparing to achieve them?
  • If you could create the perfect job for yourself, what would you do?
  • Please tell me about your plans for the future.
  • What work would you like to do that really interests you?
  • What is your timetable for achievement of your current career goals?

INITIATIVE AND FOLLOW-THROUGH

  • What are your greatest achievements at this point in your life?
  • Tell me about your accomplishments during college that make you proudest.
  • If friends/colleagues were to describe you to a stranger what would they say?
  • What do you consider most important when evaluating yourself?
  • What were your most significant achievements?

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SALES

  • What personal qualities do you bring to this firm?
  • Tell me about when you dealt with an irate customer.
  • What does the term “the customer is always right” mean to you?
  • What’s the best example of awesome customer service you’ve provided?

GENERAL

  • What starting salary do you expect as an employee?
  • When comparing one company offer to another, what factors will be important to you besides starting salary?
  • Please tell me about yourself. How would you describe yourself?
  • Name three people who have inspired you and why.
  • What personal qualities do you bring to this firm?
  • What do you know about our company?
  • Why are you interviewing with us?
  • Why do you want to work in the position you are seeking?
  • What are your expectations of us?
  • Why did you select us?
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Databases

How to create Linked MS SQL Server in Management Studio?

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Creating MS SQL Linked Server means that you can access your remote MS SQL database (on other server) like it is local.

Syntax to access some data is as simple as that:

[linked server name].[database name].dbo.[table name]

Official Microsoft documentation is really sometimes hard to use. A lot of information but none practical example of usage.

microsoft-documentation-linked-server

Google search also didn’t helped much on the first try. After few tries I finally found out how you can add MS SQL Linked server to your existing database server.

So, you need first to add new linked server going to Server Objects > Linked Servers and then right click with mouse and choose New Linked Server… and you will end up with something like this (what to fill here is the real mistery):

addiing-linked-server

I gave up with this and I finally found the SQL command to do this properly:

EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedserver
@server = N'YOURSERVER\SQL2008,1444', --You can include Your server, DB instance, port in not 1433
@srvproduct=N'MSSQL',
@provider=N'SQLNCLI',
@provstr=N'PROVIDER=SQLOLEDB;SERVER=YOURSERVER\SQL2008,1444'

--Now set the name of your linked server and access (we used 'Linked')
EXEC master.dbo.sp_addlinkedsrvlogin @rmtsrvname=N'Linked', @useself=N'False',@locallogin=NULL,@rmtuser=N'sa',@rmtpassword='YourP@@sw0rd'

That’s all folks 🙂

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Technologies

How to transform your standard business to Cloud oriented business?

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First thing that is good to know is that there is enough skilful people outside that can help you to achieve this goal. Among these people is also myself, with more then 10-years experience in SaaS Cloud solutions and IT infrastructure that earn money from monthly/annually subscriptions. Please feel free to contact me regarding this topic, I will be glad to help.

First thing is to take deep thinking what useful value you can provide to your existing customers. If they can do their job done using you current solution, maybe the direction can be to allow them to do this job completely from their smart phones, or from any point of the world that has an Internet connection.

The best will be to start with something small, to expose one or two features from your product. Maybe you can do also the REST API from this and share with the hungry world outside. Test this on your current customers – they will be happy to give you an honest feedback (if they are happy with your existing product). So, test until you come to the point that what you have now gives enough value from your existing and new customers.

Launch the Beta version of your Cloud SaaS service, try to get as many early adopters as possible, gather the stats and analyze the usage of your features. Try to make as clean UX as possible.

When you are building the Cloud SaaS web solution it is always important to choose the technology in which you will work and deploy your solution.

What you will choose always depend on few things

  • What is the best internal knowledge of your team regarding the programming languages?
  • How trendy is chosen technology (long-term looking in next 5 years)? Youngsters are coming every day and they will not learn to create a website in Visual FoxPro…
  • What is the final cost of cloud hosting per month? What additional software licences do you need?
  • How scalable is your solution when it comes to large number of request per second?

There are three main options to choose regarding the technology:

  1. Completely open source solution
    • OS: Linux
    • Webserver: Apache
    • Programming language: PHP / Ruby on Rails / JSP
    • Database: MySQL / Mongo / PostgreSQL / Cassandra
  2. Microsoft oriented platform
    • OS: Windows Server 2008R2 / Windows Server 2012
    • Webserver: IIS (OS built-in)
    • Programming language: ASP.NET MVC (C#, Linq2SQL)
    • Database: MS SQL Server 2008R2 / MS SQL Server 2012
  3. Hybrid platform (Microsoft + open source for database)
    • OS: Windows Server 2008R2 / Windows Server 2012
    • Webserver: IIS (OS built-in)
    • Programming language: ASP.NET MVC (C#, Linq2SQL)
    • Database: MS SQL Server 2008R2 Express Edition / MySQL / Mongo / PostgreSQL / Cassandra

If we look the costs amoung different Cloud providers we see that cost of OS (operating system) is not an issue anymore (it is free for Linux and for Windows: check GoGrid). The cost occur when you choose the database because MS SQL Server can be costly. But even there you have an option to go at the beginning with MS SQL Server 2008R2 Express Edition which is completely free and has followinf limitations:

  • Use of maximum 1 CPU
  • Use of maximum 1GB RAM
  • Maximum database size : 10GB (without transaction log, only data)

So, this is more then enough for beginning (for Startups). Later you can choose to switch to some of NoSQL alternatives or even combine MS SQL 2008R2 Express with Mongo (for big incoming data).

A little bit larger costs can occur for resources CPU and RAM needed for OS itself (Linux need something less then Windows).

On the other hand I personally extremely like C# programming language and lightweight ASP.NET MVC web technology plus I really like how easy is to use LINQ as DB layer for data manipulation. Everything just works super nicet. I don’t need to search something regarding the core functionality on forums and I can be only focused on development of the solution. Almost everything I need can be found on Stackoverflow which, by the way, runs on Windows Server, ASP.NET MVC and MS SQL Server and they have really huge number of page views and they shared their experience on scalability.

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