> Yet, despite coming up with a distributed archiving system that works in production, I wouldn’t be able to explain from the top of my head what the ACID term means.
You could probably talk about the important properties of interactions with a datastore well enough to please a reasonable interviewer. Why assume they aren't reasonable? I really hate the trope of, "XYZ came up in an interview, and therefore I assume the interviewer is making hiring decisions according to a such-and-such rigid criteria I imagined when I went home afterwards."
(The conversation with "Joe" of course is imaginary, because you wouldn't already be started with interviews if you hadn't talked about how you were going to evaluate candidates. If this conversation happened in real life, the blog post would be about planning for interviews and not going rogue with your interview agenda when you're part of a team process.)
Interviews are designed to figure out where a candidate is with their knowledge, all the way from "they don't know anything about databases" to "they can write a little bit of SQL with help" to "they have 10 years of experience with the database we use for our OLTP, and our expert had a great conversation with them about the technical details of a quirk that bit us in production last week." Depending on the position, these might all be acceptable levels of knowledge for a position, not to mention that companies are often hiring for multiple positions, not all of which have been publicized yet, and are often open to redefining a role for the right candidate.
Every candidate has their own idiosyncratic mixture of strengths and weaknesses. Candidates have a hard time believing it, but a hard or unexpected question is usually probing for strength, not weakness. If interviewers only asked questions that a minimally qualified candidate can answer, they would miss your strengths and undervalue you as a potential hire.
You could probably talk about the important properties of interactions with a datastore well enough to please a reasonable interviewer. Why assume they aren't reasonable? I really hate the trope of, "XYZ came up in an interview, and therefore I assume the interviewer is making hiring decisions according to a such-and-such rigid criteria I imagined when I went home afterwards."
(The conversation with "Joe" of course is imaginary, because you wouldn't already be started with interviews if you hadn't talked about how you were going to evaluate candidates. If this conversation happened in real life, the blog post would be about planning for interviews and not going rogue with your interview agenda when you're part of a team process.)
Interviews are designed to figure out where a candidate is with their knowledge, all the way from "they don't know anything about databases" to "they can write a little bit of SQL with help" to "they have 10 years of experience with the database we use for our OLTP, and our expert had a great conversation with them about the technical details of a quirk that bit us in production last week." Depending on the position, these might all be acceptable levels of knowledge for a position, not to mention that companies are often hiring for multiple positions, not all of which have been publicized yet, and are often open to redefining a role for the right candidate.
Every candidate has their own idiosyncratic mixture of strengths and weaknesses. Candidates have a hard time believing it, but a hard or unexpected question is usually probing for strength, not weakness. If interviewers only asked questions that a minimally qualified candidate can answer, they would miss your strengths and undervalue you as a potential hire.