First off, I had to spend about 30-40 hours completing a homework assignment around building a project that solved the following questions:
Review unstructured JSON data and diagram a new structured relational data model
* Generate a query that answers a predetermined business question
* Generate a query to capture data quality issues against the new structured relational data model
* Write a short email or Slack message to the business stakeholder
Nowhere in the interview did this work get reviewed or acknowledged. Odd, but whatever. Next, I talked with a couple different recruiters and the hiring managers.
Once I passed their sniff test, I had an interview with some business analysts to write some psudocode based on whatever data problems they threw at me. I was then invited do an all-day interview that was broken up into a meet-and-greet, one-hour leetcode type question, one hour SQL test, one hour data architect review and question/answer.
I spent a week brushing up on DSA questions. The question I was asked to solve was "build a LRU cache". Whelp, as a data analytics person, I have never done that, but gave it hell. I got 70% or so of it, but withouth Google, I couldn't complete it.
Next was a series of SQL questions. I got to the very last question (everything above that question was a breeze), and was mostly done, running low on time and my interviewer said, "that's good enough".
Finally, I was interviewed by their data architect who asked me to design a data warehousing model from prod -> data mart. With some deeper questions on storing data in s3, partitioning the data, and how to do advanced aggregations. The S3 stuff was something I have only read about, so I bombed all that.
The last stage was to circle up with the hiring manager, who told me I failed all three segments and that they weren't going to move forward. I feel that the process was a colossal waste of time considering the breadth of questions. I feel like I was able to showcase my strengths, ask good questions, and do all the things you're supposed to do. Instead, this whole thing was a pass/fail exam style interview.