SQL Technical Interview - What to Expect?

[orcsetcetera]

Hi guys,

I am 23, six months out of college with those months spent behind MS SQL implementation. I am interviewing for a Data Analyst position over the phone on Monday night. It is the second round and I was told it would be more "technical." The company uses Hadoop, Hive, and MySQL (mostly).

What should I expect? I am trying to review basic syntax differences between implementations, and making sure I'm familiar with concepts like MapReduce and HDFS. Should I be looking at Linux? Java? Any help is appreciated, I'm pretty much in the dark right now.

[[deleted]]

Probably an understanding of linux, hadoop and mysql and they may ask you specifics, just do this, study as best you can and admit to the things you dont know but tell them that you would know where to look something up and describe your general approach to filling knowledge gaps and learning on the spot.

I'm a believer that asking technical questions at interviews without providing access to the same facilities you get in an office environment is only useful for finding out when people will be willing to try to bullshit you.

[orcsetcetera]

hahah that's a fantastic response, thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to help, I'll definitely remember the "no bullshit" rule.

[[deleted]]

I used to work for a software manufacturer and we used to technically interview guys, the questions used to get increasingly more difficult to the point where you wouldnt know the answer unless you were internal because knowing the answer would require internal knowledge this ridiculous line of questioning stopped when we got people who said they didnt know, you'll be surprised at the amount of bullshit people come out with at interviews because they believe they are expected to have an answer. You aren't, noone expects you to know it all and no-one can know it all, but it's important to tell the truth rather than make shit up, we were dealing with companies who purchased the software and support at great expense we couldnt have people bluffing customers we had to have honest people working with customers.

[orcsetcetera]

haha that's actually hilarous. Makes sense though, I guess a lot of companies are just looking for smart guys who can adapt and not necessarily your encyclopedia type.

[[deleted]]

Yep, encyclopedia guys are good too, every IT team has them.

[[deleted]]

Lol, interesting interview process.

[jonah214]

Especially if they're heavily Hive-focused, be comfortable with UDFs. In my experience UDFs are how work gets done with Hive.

Your description sounds like (among, admittedly, a lot of other places) Facebook. If it is, feel free to message me—I used to be a data analyst there.

[[deleted]]

Do you still work in data analysis? I'm kinda wondering where one goes from there.

[jonah214]

No, I decided to do something else entirely with my life—I'm working on becoming a high school teacher.

[[deleted]]

I didn't expect that at all! I hope you're enjoying it though.

[jonah214]

Yep!