After resume submission, an immediate email from HR to setup a phone interview. Phone interview scheduled and HR claimed that this interview would be interactive with coding tests (so computer and Internet needed). The phone call was with a lone "young" manager/team lead (with probably others listening silently) who seemed in combination of being nervous/proud from the start. I felt more relaxed than him with database terminology. He wrote basic questions and most likely Googled exact answers for just a Q&A test - there was no live SQL testing at all (as HR claimed). I'm well-versed in the SQL language and it was clear that the manager has weak skills in programming. He claimed 10 years of experience at Bloomberg as an Oracle DBA, MS SQL DBA, etc., but again, he needed to write down a list of basic questions and exact answers for himself. 10 years of experience of repetitive DBA tasks (including replication methods, HA environments, 5-6 petabyte database environments, 35,000 unique databases in clusters) within the various big RDBMSs in a prestigious company, and he needs a piece of paper with basic database questions/answers in front of him - amazing, just ridiculously amazing. As a mostly self-taught RDBMS professional with high credentials in other fields, it was easy to see that he is quite weak.

In reality, he is just a database analyst who was invited to become a database manager due to politics (he told me at his proudest moment). His interviewing skills were definitely amateur at best (too friendly, too nitpicking). To be fair, I didn't prepare for Linux programming questions, so those questions I couldn't answer swiftly. SQL answers were easy and spot on.

What is a JOIN?