Laughable SQL round administered by a “senior” data engineer with no hands on experience with Spark or open table formats. Nitpicky questions during a “pair programming” exercise where the assumption is that you know nothing (I’m a long tenured FAANG employee). Read on if you’re curious, but generally just stay away.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
SQL questions involving simple aggregations and joins, but my interviewer got caught up on the intricacies of date formatting (that wasn’t part of the question). Since I code primarily in SparkSQL and PySpark he got bent out of shape about how my answer wasn’t correct. Huge waste of my time. There was also a question about calculating rolling averages where the “solution” was a cross join (an antipattern that almost certainly wouldn’t work in a prod environment) so this gives you a sense of what we’re dealing with. The whole thing felt like it was something dreamed up by someone with 2-3 years of data engineering experience who is fully on the Dunning Kruger curve and thinks they’re a lot smarter than they actually are.
Me postulé a través de un reclutador. Acudí a una entrevista en Shopify (Toronto, ON) en oct 2023
Entrevista
Initial conversation with recruiter to assess fit
SQL coding interview with coder pad
Data model design based on business processes
Project overview where you choose to highlight something you have worked on recently
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Expectation was to be super fast while solving the problems. Difficult to finish if you get stuck for too long. You are allowed to ask help from Google/AI regarding syntax
Brief talk with a recruiter and then Pair Programming. The interviewer for the pair programming didn't explain the question correctly and confirmed my incorrect understanding of the problem. I'm not sure she understood the problem either. At one point during the interview, the interviewer accidently let the TV show she was watching on her other browser play and pretended to act confused. Not the best interview experience; felt lazy and unprofessional. Failed the pair programming but after that experience I'm good with that.
