Senior Software Engineer Mock Interview
Practice 47 Senior Software Engineer interview questions covering system design, architecture decisions, and technical leadership.
Question 10 of 47
How do you structure data tables if you create a program to manage a point of sale operation?
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William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
Creating and managing data tables within a software application is a critical skill senior software engineers need. When interviewing for this job with a specific organization, it should be straightforward to determine the organization's type of data and organize the tables within the applications to facilitate their operations. This question asks specifically about point of sale operations, common to retail or online transactions.
William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
"I always structure the data tables for an application to support the operational requirements of the organization I am working with. When creating data tables for a point of sale operation, I determine the elements the operation will need to manage. For example, I would first set up a table for each inventory item for a big-box retailer. I would then set up tables specific for each department within the store. The next set of tables would be for each vendor and would be independent of the vendors' types of products. Finally, I would set up a data table for the customers to track their transaction history so the marketing department could create specific offerings to incent them to come back to the store."
William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
Make sure you structure your answers to address the organization's specific needs. You can learn about these through your research of the organization's operations, corporate goals, and the specific requirements of the job you're interviewing for. The more closely your answer matches these criteria, the better you will be perceived as the appropriate candidate for this position.
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I just so happen to have been a part of a software company that has created its own Point of Sale operations. Depending on the client's needs, the database tables should be broken down into the following primary categories: Employees, Sales, Inventory, and Labor. Each of those categories can be broken down into further sub-categories which will correspond to either an individual table or a group of tables. The sub-categories would also be driven based on customer needs, so if a customer wants a POS to track and manage inventory management, you would have tables for inventory vendors, units of measurement, inventory usage, recipes, etc. The Sales category would be broken down into granular and summary data. Granular data tables are for tracking insert level data that is tied to an employee logged on to a register and summary-level data condenses the granular data for higher-level revenue reporting. Employee and Labor categories would be broken down into tables that track the list of employees, employee access level within the POS, and labor schedules including any tables that would power automated labor scheduling software.
Amanda's Feedback
You definitely understand how to structure data tables for POS programming. If you played a key role in structuring tables or POS development projects, use this question as an opportunity to briefly share an example of the work you've done developing POS programming. This illustrates that you have both the knowledge and experience needed to excel in a POS project setting.
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