Write SQL for click-through rate by ad in October, then monthly average star ratings per Marketplace product.
The two reported Snowflake SQL-screen warmups. Both look trivial; both have a silent-failure trap, integer division and divide-by-zero in one, the EXTRACT(MONTH) year-collision in the other.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The two reported Snowflake SQL-screen warmups. Both look trivial; both have a silent-failure trap, integer division and divide-by-zero in one, the EXTRACT(MONTH) year-collision in the other.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
