Greg Linch greglinch

Analyst Interview Questions

A collection of questions we typically ask job applicants during analyst interviews.

Scenario

The date is January 4. You are well rested after a festive holiday season. 🎉

We're gearing up to launch a new product, and we need your help.

Let's begin.

Prerequisites

Run all of the OS updates that are available
Install Homebrew and tap the casks we'll need (brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts, brew tap homebrew/cask-versions)

Shell setup

install ZSH - brew install zsh
set ZSH as the default shell by 1) adding the output of which zsh to /etc/shells and 2) changing the default shell with chsh -s $(which zsh)
add autocompletion to ZSH brew install zsh-autosuggestions (be sure to follow the instructions output by brew to update your ~/.zshrc)
later, after installing Node install a cool command prompt like spaceship (more here) - npm install -g spaceship-prompt

The Philadelphia Media Network is seeking engineers to join a new development team within its Systems division. As an early engineering hire on this team, you will have a large role in shaping its culture, values, and workflow.

Engineer

Interested? Email us.

The technical stuff:

Rails experience would be great, but at least you should be willing to learn. We will be maintaining and enhancing a Rails CMS built to manage our new mobile app. Don’t worry though, you will be inheriting a stable, well-documented, and test-driven project.
“Fullstack” projects should be comfortable to you. We want engineers who are interested in the entire product development process – understanding needs, vetting technical approaches, planning work to be done, and engineering in an agile manner. Learning and problem solving are two of your favorite things to do.
Git, unit tests, and coding standards are all familiar to you, and you understand why we practice

Assuming I'm starting on a Mac of some kind. Here are things to install:

XCode Command Line Tools (this may be pre-installed on OSX)
Sublime Text 2
homebrew
QGIS
Postgres.app
Node.js or io.js
boot2docker
VirtualBox

	import csv, time
	from selenium import webdriver
	from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
	from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

	applicant_name = # your name
	applicant_email = # your email
	applicant_address = # your physical address
	occupation = # your occupation

	#!/bin/bash
	# file: ttfb.sh
	# curl command to check the time to first byte
	# usage
	# 1. ./ttfb.sh "https://google.com"
	# 2. seq 10 \| xargs -Iz ./ttfb.sh "https://google.com"

	curl -o /dev/null \
	-H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' \
	-s \

	# Thanks to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9884353/xls-to-csv-convertor
	import os, csv, xlrd

	excel_file = '/path/to/file.xls'
	#we're specifying a directory here because we'll have several files
	#be sure to include end slash
	csv_filepath = 'path/to/csv/directory/'

	def csv_from_excel(excel_file):
	workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(excel_file)

	import simplejson as json
	import requests

	#your spreadsheet key here. I'm using an example from the Victorian election campaign

	key = "1THJ6MgfEk-1egiPFeDuvs4qEi02xTpz4fq9RtO7GijQ"

	#google api request urls - I'm doing the first one just to get nice key values (there's probably a better way to do this)

	url1 = "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/cells/" + key + "/od6/public/values?alt=json"

	function apDate(date) {
	var months = ['Jan.', 'Feb.', 'March', 'April', 'May', 'June', 'July', 'Aug.', 'Sept.', 'Oct.', 'Nov.', 'Dec.'];
	return months[date.getMonth()] + ' ' + date.getDate() + ', ' + date.getFullYear();
	}