What are some FizzBuzz-type questions for web or SQL developers?

Question

After a while, we are hiring again, and I'm reviewing tests for programmers; some of them are a bit out of date. What are some of the FizzBuzz-type questions for web developers and SQL? That is, not too trivial, but still solvable in five to ten minutes with pen and paper and without Google?

I typically eliminate about two thirds or more of the candidates based on CV, and then all but a few really good candidates in a one-hour interview (which can be over the phone). At this point the candidate is writing a personality test and has a chance to write a bit of FizzBuzz-like code. So, I'm not trying to eliminate a bunch of candidates, but I am trying to validate my initial assessment that candidate is hireable and able to code.

Answer 1

I see FizzBuzz as a test to see if people actually know what they claim to know on their Resume. I wouldn't use it as anything other than a question to weed out candidates that don't know what they're talking about.

A suitable SQL replacement would be to just ask the candidate to write a SQL statement such as selecting the Name fields of two joined table that begin with A. It's simple and demonstrates that the candidate actually does have some knowledge of SQL.

SELECT Table1.Name, Table2.Name
FROM Table1 
INNER JOIN Table2 ON Table1.Id = Table2.Id
WHERE Table1.Name LIKE 'A%' OR Table2.Name LIKE 'A%'

For a web developer I would just ask them FizzBuzz. Just because you're programming for the web doesn't mean you should lack the ability to do basic programming logic

If you're looking for actual interview questions, there are plenty of good ones online that you can find with a quick search. I found more than I care to list by taking 10 seconds with Google.

Answer 2

Here is an answer I gave to a very similar (possibly duplicate) question that was closed on this site.

Extremely Easy Level: Given an employees table with the columns EmpID, FirstName, Lastname, HireDate, and TerminationDate: Write a query to return all employees still working for the company with last names starting with "Smith" sorted by last name then first name.

Easy Level Given the Employee table above, plus a new table "AnnualReviews" with the columns EmpID, and ReviewDate: Write a query to return all employees who have never had a review sorted by HireDate.

Medium Level
Given the employee table above, write a query to calculate the difference (in days) between the most and least tenured employee still working for the company?

Hard Level Given the employee table above, write a query to calculate the longest period (in days) that the company has gone without a hiring or firing anyone.

Harder Level
Again using the same tables, write a query that returns each employee and for each row/employee include the greatest number of employees that worked for the company at any time during their tenure and the first date that maximum was reached. Extra points for not using cursors.

Answer 3

How about fizzbuzz itself? Here's an Oracle version:

select case when mod(level,35) = 0 then 'fizzbuzz'
            when mod(level,7) = 0 then 'buzz'
            when mod(level,5) = 0 then 'fizz'
            else to_char(level) end fizzbuzz
from dual connect by level <= 100

Answer 4

I find that people tend to have a lot of trouble working with time for some reason, so that may be a good place to put a small test.

Something like this:

Part 1: Create a function that will calculate the Nth or last weekday in a given month - ie; the first, third, last Tuesday in next month.

Part 2 (if desired): Design table(s) to hold temporal expressions for recurring schedules. The schedules could be any of "the Nth weekday of one or more months" or "the Nth day of one or more months" or "every N days from date".

Example, the 15 of every month, the last Wednesday of every March, the last day of every month, every 17 days from December 2nd, 2008, etc.