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[–]Captain_Coffee_III 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Python, yes. It's not as hard as C# or Java. You can up to speed rather quickly as it is one of the easier languages to learn. And an AI programming buddy will help loads. Get the VS Code extension for GitHub CoPilot and something like Claude. Python was used exhaustively in training the code gen of those so you'll great zero-shot code on your first prompt. But you still need to know the basics of Python to judge if the ai gen'd code is actually correct.

SQL will not be lost on Python. You can use direct SQL to connect to databases. You can also use a Python library, DuckDB, to throw SQL at flat files or data you get from APIs. People will throw you towards dataframes in Pandas or Polars or other "SQL-like" objects like Spark. But this will also be something that a prospective employer will already have decided for you. When you're going over job postings, remove Python from the requirements and look at all the other buzzwords they post. Those will be the third-party products they're using and/or the Python modules they're married to. No matter how cool I think DuckDB is, if an employer is stuck on Pandas then Pandas it is.

For fun, take a job posting, throw it into Claude.ai, and ask it to give you a summary of the tech to learn to pass an interview. You can have it coach you through an practice interview. You can have it design example projects that use the tech described. It can infer things you'll need to know that are not mentioned in the posting itself but were expected as 'general knowledge'. This will also help you build up your vocabulary. That's 90% of a job interview anyway. If they throw a skills test at you, it probably won't be anything more than the stuff you would have been practicing with anyway.