Actuate Programming Journal

Report design from a guy who thinks he knows what he’s doing; you decide . . . .

Actuate Interviewee Questions

with 5 comments

I claimed to be no expert in the last post (which mysteriously was lost and I have to recreate someday) and I will maintain that lack of expertise in this post as well–only more so. I have not gotten a job based on any of the questions listed below, but they are the ones that I think are worth asking.

At first I had hoped to put them in nice neat categories and discuss the meanings of each, but I think you’ll do fine with the random assortment…

What version of Actuate do you run?

What environment, Windows or UNIX?

How many new reports do you develop in a month, week, day?

How many existing reports do you maintain?

Is there a formal development lifecycle or do developers work directly with report requesters?

How much of my time will you expect me to be heads down building reports?
If not 100% what is the balance of my time spent on: Actuate administration, troubleshooting, or non-Actuate tasks?

Do you use libraries? How extensive are they? Do like like using them?

Do users get to run reports or are reports scheduled in batch?

What database/data sources do you use? How many of each?

What is your preferred method of creating the SQL query? Graphical Query Builder, Textual, override OSS( )?

Describe the condition of your database design. Optimized for reporting or denormalized? How many tables do you typically report from?

Do you use external or internal user validation? LDAP? Who maintains that code?

How do users typically consume a report? Read online, download and print, dump to Excel, work them over in eAnalysis?

Describe the user skill level: clueless, novice, experienced, expert, super expert.

Do you use eQuery, eSpreadsheets, whatever new gimmick Actuate adds to the suite next?

Written by Douglas

20060331 at 17:51 pm

Posted in Actuate, Employment

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5 Responses

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  1. [...] These are questions I ask you when I interview you for an Actuate Report Designer position at the company I work for not questions you should ask as the interviewee. [...]

    Actuate Interviewer Questions « Actuate Programming

    20061110 at 11:21 am

  2. What sort of questions do you think should be asked by Actuate infrastructure administrator interviewees …?

    Phil

    20061218 at 19:45 pm

  3. @Phil…

    That’s a tougher question for me than it used to be. I’ve been languishing in the segregated role of report designer without much direct exposure to administration as I used to have.

    Here’s what comes to mind though.

    Big Stuff:
    -will I be expected to lead a major upgrade; if so from what version to what version?
    -will I be solely responsible for minor/incremental patches?
    -what are your current procedures for backup and recovery? Bare UNIX scripts? 3rd party tool?
    -have you every had to recover from a back up?

    Daily:
    -how many developers think they get to touch my box? (I think it’s OK to sound aggressively possessive about your environment, but make sure you get a read from the interviewer before you go balls to the wall)
    -are you clustering?
    -who updates ROXs on the server? How frequently?
    -describe the volume of daily reporting? What are the big run days and why?
    -Do you use Actuate to manage users or LDAP or other?
    -Do you use complex/nested security roles?

    I’ll see if I can get one of my admins to comment here too.

    Douglas

    20061218 at 20:03 pm

  4. [...] I’m a recruiter that found your articles on Interviewer|Interviewee Questions [...]

    Describe Your Actuate Experience « Actuate Programming Journal

    20090205 at 09:57 am


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