Hey everyone. I posted a thread a few days ago about being nervous about my first DS interview. The thread was taken down by mods due to it being more appropriate for the stickied thread. So I want to make this thread less about questions, but more of an informative post to show you some of the questions I was asked. Hopefully it’s helpful for newbies and veterans alike!
SQL:
• What is a view?
• Is a table dynamic or static?
• Difference between a primary key and foreign key
• Inner Join vs. Left Join scenario (pretty sure it was from w3schools. ez pz)
• WHERE vs. HAVING
• When would you use a subquery? Provide an example
• How would you improve the performance of a slow query?
• EDIT: Some aggregation and GROUP by questions (MAX, AVG, COUNT, etc.) that I just remembered.
Python
• Explanation of libraries I use (Pandas mainly)
• How would you get the maximum result from a list?
• Can you explain the concept of functions
• Difference between FOR and WHILE loops?
• Give some examples of how you would clean dirty data.
Tableau:
• What is a calculated field? Provide some examples in your work
• What is the difference between a live view and extract? When would you use each?
• More information given on the data I work with
Statistics:
• Explain what a p-value is to someone who has no idea what that is.
• Explanation on linear/logistic regression modeling.
• What is standard deviation? Examples?
• Difference between STDEV and Variance?
• What statistics do you currently work with? (Descriptive mainly… mean, median, mode, stdev, confidence intervals)
I advanced to round 3 immediately, which is pretty much a shoe-in according to the hiring manager. I am very excited because it seems like a great opportunity. Even if I don’t get it, I still felt like I interviewed very well and did my best. I am very proud of myself.
120k a year w/ benefits, bonuses, and training courses a week to help me learn more advanced DS concepts, Python, or whatever I want. I am so excited.
Interviewing is a skill. The more you do it and become comfortable the better chance you'll have.