@jonathan.interviews: Self-joins are one of those SQL concepts that trips people up in interviews because the syntax looks weird — you’re joining a table to itself. The classic example is an employee-manager hierarchy. One table holds both employees and their managers. The trick is referencing that same table twice using aliases: one alias represents the employee, the other represents the manager. Then you join on where the employee’s manager_id matches the manager’s employee_id. The other key decision is LEFT JOIN vs INNER JOIN. If you use INNER JOIN, you lose the CEO — she has no manager, so the join condition fails and she drops out of the result. LEFT JOIN keeps her in with a NULL for manager name. Two things interviewers look for: correct aliases so SQL knows which “copy” of the table you mean, and the right join type based on whether nulls matter for your use case. #sql #datascience #dataanalytics #codinginterview #techinterview
with recursive hierarchy as (
Select from employees
where idmanager is null
full join select * from hierarchy inner join employees where hierarchy.idemployee = employees.idmanager)
select* from hierarchy.
2026-03-31 19:10:06
1
hersh :
imagine doin code challange when u have ai
2026-05-08 21:33:25
3
geometrix :
you lost me at calling a join a “merge” … its a join … use the correct terminology so you don’t confuse new people down the road
2026-03-31 19:24:04
59
Sérgio Duarte :
Just do it properly and create a employee_manager table. Unless this is a really small dataset (in which case you might as well just use a csv or an exel file), you're creating future scaling issues with this schema.
2026-03-31 19:46:25
7
Ivan :
I was waiting for some catch, quite an easy question
2026-03-30 19:57:34
28
evykhan :
Yeah, no catch, it might just sound unusual to do a self join. Now asking them to to show an employee's entire reporting structure all the way to the CEO would be vile in plain SQL. 😂
2026-04-02 03:29:25
1
Weckdog :
Without seeing the data how were you supposed to know that the managers and the employees are the same set of people?
2026-03-30 14:37:14
3
charlie_bone91 :
CTE manager_id with name and then join on manager_id and select what you need
2026-04-22 14:53:26
0
Setti :
What is more common and efficient, an explicit JOIN like in the video or an implicit JOIN? My teacher is against explicit but Gemini says it is better
2026-04-25 16:42:23
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Mam fajnego kotka :
Ye I got something similar at an interview, so those question happens, and after reading comments I highly recommend to start talking about how this is a bad design, and table managers should be introduced to reduce this table growing out of hand when more columns start to appear regardless of if ur applying for software engineering or data engineering position
2026-04-20 00:58:56
0
wowactivities :
OK but what is this Tablet structure. no First Lastname, Name Limited to 50 Ids as integer instead of sth lig bigint? salary also weird...
2026-03-31 18:06:52
2
Evan Sich :
Which of these two minors would you recommend for a data science major? Econ or management? I feel like Econ would help with entry level roles which would then give me a better shot for higher up opportunities overtime, which is ultimately what I’d like
2026-04-03 02:10:33
0
James :
First glance its easy, actually easy. Just left join on itself
2026-04-01 22:48:37
1
a :
the captions could be put on top rather than blocking the words on screen. Love the vid
2026-05-23 10:25:26
1
Nathan D :
I do this all the time working with HR data. Now add the second level manager from the same table.
2026-04-09 18:08:53
1
Andy Nelson :
I've been data engineer for 5 years, never had to do this. I assume it's because I'm in finance and not CRM/HR data
2026-03-31 20:22:50
0
James Wooden :
I always get hung up on self joins. just need to build up an intuition about when they're used and how they are constructed.
2026-03-30 16:44:06
4
Diego :
I am having issues landing a job interview for Data Scientist, can you help with insights?
2026-03-31 14:56:31
0
Trey :
Luv the content 🙏🏽💯🔥
2026-04-25 20:44:40
0
Wallis :
I do these joins literally all day every day.
2026-04-14 11:20:51
0
Past Glasgow :
An incredibly easy exercise, whatever the conditions.
2026-06-04 23:08:01
0
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