> People used to say “Software Engineering is not an entry level role”.
Something that I ran into myself and have seen other data-people struggle with is that it is hard to get good experience working with data when you don't have access to data.
Online SQL tutorials and classes typically have pretty clean/small toy datasets that are only really useful for teaching you the correct syntax. Going from these simple queries that are all ~10 lines to a production system with queries that are 100s of lines is jarring.
And dealing with database sizes that have millions/hundreds of millions of rows.
Moving to a system where your indexes are larger than main memory and some really expensive queries may need to spill to temp tables if you don't keep your data sizes under control is also jarring. Big transactions getting deadlocks, and how to read said deadlock graphs and learn how to deal with said locking when you write your SQL starts to become a full time job.
Something that I ran into myself and have seen other data-people struggle with is that it is hard to get good experience working with data when you don't have access to data.
Online SQL tutorials and classes typically have pretty clean/small toy datasets that are only really useful for teaching you the correct syntax. Going from these simple queries that are all ~10 lines to a production system with queries that are 100s of lines is jarring.