I'm curious too. Tracking your own website makes sense but there're definitely better ways if that's your own website. Why do people want to track other website regularly?
The only upside is I only need to spend ~2 hours per day on work. So called work life balance. Pay is decent with regarding to the workload. I won't elaborate on downsides, there's a lot.
It's fair to forget OSI models since most of programmers don't need to deal with layers below IP, but the fact that there are 3 more hidden layers shouldn't surprise you. As for someone who writes SQL queries for work, I expect some level of understanding of how your underlying system work. Not in great detail, but at least a general picture. I usually consider the desire of understanding an blackbox as an indicator of whether the person will become a great programmer.
I got slightly shocked while I do appreciate his curiosity of the db engine and made it to an informative article.
To me, data analytics jobs will be more exposed to non-CS people so SQL will be much more written by non experts. The autonomous database might be the right product towards this future.
I'm a bit of surprised by how shallow people's understanding of database is. Especially for someone have literally wrote thousands of sql queries. The query engine implementation is/should be covered by some extent in any of the database courses, thus I assume anyone with a CS degree shouldn't be surprised that a queries doesn't execute from SELECT(how's that even possible). Perhaps nowadays the major users of SQL don't really have a CS background.