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Comment by thomzi12 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, that's a fair criticism. That said, you can build multi-step interview problems with SQL (I tried to convey one or two in this doc) such that interviewers can build up towards needing a more advanced window function instead of starting there.

I've used BETWEEN ROW maybe once or twice in my career in a professional setting. Self-joins more often, but as others have pointed out window functions are more efficient here for writing dashboard ETLs, etc.

Btw, are you minimaxir who wrote gpt-2-simple? I was looking at your tutorial a month ago while putting together a solution for the Kaggle COVID-19 NLP challenge!

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yep! :) Glad you made use of it!

Why would you ask interview questions to quiz on skills that can be learned in a week?

This is only useful if you tell candidates to study a book for a week first.

Otherwise you are filtering for narrowminded memorizers, not smart people who can learn and solve problems

First, from someone with 25 years of SQL development experience, let me say while it may be true these skills could be learned in a week, most are not learned at all even by regular practitioners.

And as with all such questions I'm judging your comfort with the concepts behind the skills - in this case set theory, conditional logic, data modeling, etc.

So it's more how you say it, not what you say it. And yes it's mostly negative signal - most interviews are just to weed out completely hopeless candidates.

> Why would you ask interview questions to quiz on skills that can be learned in a week?

I'm not an SQL expert, but it's very important to understand whether something is a known unknown or unknown unknown to a candidate. So, I imagine, if the candidate would say something along the lines of "oh, this looks like something for a window function - I don't know the syntax and the nitpicks, but I could google it", it'd be completely OK. However, if he wasn't even aware that such a tool existed, it means that he would never go and learn it in a week without outside guidance, and would choose a less-fitting tool to complete a task.

One thing I mention in the doc intro is that SQL questions are one part of the data analyst interview, not all of it. If this doc helps people get through the SQL questions so that they can spend more time being thoughtful with open-ended analytics questions, that's good thing (both for interviews and for work more generally)!

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