A friend of mine called me the other day out of the blue in a state of frustration.

Let’s call him Don.

Don was ranting about his latest data science interview he had thirty minutes ago. His interviewer had asked him an interview question over the phone that was given two example tables, could he write a query that would involve joining both tables to return a value. 

Here at Interview Query, we focus a lot on questions and take-homes that are asked of you during the data science interview process at top technology companies, but today we’re going to focus on questions you should ask.

Remember when the term data scientist first came out in early 2010? Harvard Business Review coined it as the The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century and prompted everyone who ever worked in statistics or analytics to immediately back-change their positions and titles for recruiters on Linkedin madly searching for these so-called unicorn data scientists.

I’ve interviewed a lot of data scientist candidates and have found there are a a lot of SQL interview questions for data science that eventually boil down to three generalized types of conceptual understandings.