I do a very similar thing at my job, but instead of showing the results I ask for a report such as "we want to get X,Y and Z for the Ws where P holds true".

Can they look stuff up on the internet? A lot of queries require some ridiculous syntax like windowing in Postgres.

Yes, the full power of the internet is at your disposal. The catch is that you're limited to an hour to get it done.

I'd be curious to see that test.

Ditto!

I'd love something like [0]You can't javascript under pressure, but You can't Query under pressure for SQL. :-)

[0]http://games.usvsth3m.com/javascript-under-pressure/

It's a shame they don't have a leader board on that site; I completed the challenge in 4:21, but I have no idea whether that's good, bad, or indifferent among everyone who's done so. A Twitter search on 'I completed "You Can't JavaScript Under Pressure"' suggests that score is merely on the good side of indifferent, but given the relatively competitive idea behind the whole endeavor, it seems like formally ranking completion times would be a useful thing to do.

(The "you won" screen is also godawful, not least because of the potential risk of triggering seizures in the epileptic, but also very much because it's incredibly ugly. I mean, I know that tasteless is the new tasteful, but really.)

Think you might be interested in applying? :-)

We're hiring...

No thanks; I'm happy with the job I've got right now. But I appreciate you asking!

More seriously, shouldn't it be possible to post a version thoroughly enough sanitized to avoid giving the game away to your potential applicants, without losing the sense of the original? You don't identify your organization in your HN profile, so it doesn't seem terribly likely anyone who's looking for hints on your hiring process will find it. And, hey, it's entirely possible you'll get feedback which helps improve the question you're actually using in your interviews!

Jumping onto this chain, I'd also like to take a stab at a sanitized version of your test. We often have to reverse engineer our Client's existing reports when creating new BI reports for them in Cognos, and I'm curious to see how challenging your 3rd and 4th problem sets are.

If you're doing BI reports, I'd guess you would probably do well.

I might see if I can come up with something approximating the test... The tricky part about making it so that people online could take it is that I'd need to give you an avenue to play around in a query editor and run queries on a database I've created. Short of making a publicly available database on my own domain (which uses a different database platform than what we use at work), is there a good way to accomplish this?

Looking at it from another angle, I'm considering the same question, because I'd like to build the "You Can't SQL Under Pressure" somebody else mentioned in this thread. But I'm not all that happy about the idea of letting random users run arbitrary queries against a database I'm hosting, because it seems like protecting that against SQL injection and similar vulnerabilities would be extremely difficult if not entirely impossible.

I'd use the Web SQL Database stuff that W3C was working on, except that they stopped doing that in 2010, which guarantees the corpse is dead and rotting; unfortunately, the only emulation libraries I've been able to find implement various key-value stores on top of WebSQL, which is the precise inverse of what I'd need.

I suppose it'd be theoretically feasible, albeit hideously ugly, to create and populate a fresh database and account per user on a MySQL engine; with careful grants and a bit of scripting to kill slow queries before they can multiply and throttle the server, that might be workable on the small to medium scale, although I don't doubt a "Show HN" post would kill it in short order.

Thinking about it, I suspect I've more or less recapitulated why there is currently no "You Can't SQL Under Pressure"; it's a more subtle problem than it seems at first blush. If you come up with any clever ideas on the subject, I'd love to hear about them!

You might be overthinking it; for my purposes, at least, a set of example schemas and required outputs would suffice -- the rest I can probably do on a MySQL instance of my own.

I'm always interested in applying :-)

Send me your resume and I'll make sure it gets into the right hands. For the purposes of this comment thread, my email address is [email protected]

(I catch anything sent to viewthesource.org, so I like to customize it when giving my email to people)

It should be noted that we're in Bentonville, AR. That could potentially be a limiting factor for some people.

No kidding? I know at least one extremely large company which has its headquarters in that city, and I have recently been hearing good things about the modernity of their IT infrastructure.

Yep, I worked at the company you're probably speaking about for 9 years (I say probably, because there are two...Walmart and JB Hunt). I just left Walmart 3 months ago, largely because I was ready for something new, and the place I work now is just a lot more cool. Big change for me, going from giant IT building to a company that has 25 people total. They had less than 20 when I applied and 9 people a year ago.

Well, I've never heard anything about JB Hunt's IT, for good or ill, so...

That must be a weird change, yeah, but it sounds good on the whole. It's a shame the timing didn't work out on this; if I still lived in Memphis, I'd have jumped at the opportunity. (I didn't like living in Memphis very well -- Bentonville seems like it'd be much more congenial.)

I personally like Bentonville pretty well. People from larger cities often complain "there's not enough to do" but I'm a bit of a home-body myself, so that doesn't bother me. One nice thing about this area is you can get a house with 5 acres of land for between $100k and $200k that would be comparable to houses easily twice or three times as much in someplace like Seattle.

I know a little bit about JB Hunt's IT. They use COBOL and Java. They might have some other stuff, but they seem big on those two from what I've heard.

Depends on telecommute options :P

We have a guy who works from home.