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Written by Bruno Rodrigues :rstats: :tux: on 2024-12-31 at 16:48

sometimes I'm asked by colleagues from other public administrations what they should ask candidates they want to recruit for data science roles... my go to practical interview question is a link to this data:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/fb7169d9-11d5-47de-9335-fa64107e66ea?lang=en

and asking to reproduce the graph in the picture using the tools they prefer, but the data is not immediately in a format they can use for plotting, and a surprising amount of candidates struggle quite a lot!

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Written by Koen Hufkens, PhD on 2024-12-31 at 16:57

@brodriguesco The thing has an API and spits out a nice zipped CSV. Rather surprised that this would trip up people.

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Written by Bruno Rodrigues :rstats: :tux: on 2024-12-31 at 17:08

@koen_hufkens candidates would get a laptop with both python and R and the usual plotting packaging, and the data already downloaded as a csv. But as I said, the data in the csv is not quite plotting ready, so it requires some preparing. Many people actually never have to deal with messy data it seems!

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Written by Koen Hufkens, PhD on 2024-12-31 at 17:11

@brodriguesco Selecting the route? Damn, we're at the comprehensive reading level then.

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Written by Bruno Rodrigues :rstats: :tux: on 2024-12-31 at 17:17

@koen_hufkens there's that, and also not forgetting to replace the ":" characters that are used as NA, but the step that people really don't get is that they should get the data into a long format. The downloaded data is wide, with each month-year, quarter-year and year, a separate column. Only selecting month-years and pivoting the data is a major hurdle!

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Written by Koen Hufkens, PhD on 2024-12-31 at 17:34

@brodriguesco I would consider those really entry level issues, something I would really expect people not to trip over if applying for a data science role though.

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Written by Bruno Rodrigues :rstats: :tux: on 2024-12-31 at 17:44

@koen_hufkens totally! suffice to say we have issues finding people 🤣

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Written by Ken Butler on 2025-01-03 at 01:08

@brodriguesco @koen_hufkens the wideness was my first observation. I hope my students would know to do a pivot-longer first and then figure out what else needs to be done.

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Written by Jordi Rosell on 2024-12-31 at 17:04

@brodriguesco I would prefer access to the raw data or some "scratch" like app with dplyr verbs than those web forms 😅

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Written by Bruno Rodrigues :rstats: :tux: on 2024-12-31 at 17:07

@jrosell you would get a laptopt with both python and R and all usual packages for plotting and the data would already be downloaded as a csv on that laptop.

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Written by Jordi Rosell on 2024-12-31 at 17:16

@brodriguesco I would hate to reproduce those x-axis labels, though 😂👌

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