The Scale Question — What Every DE Interviewer Is Waiting For

Here's the number one thing that separates a 'hire' from a 'strong hire' in a DE sorting interview: asking about data scale before writing code. Software engineers rarely ask this. Data engineers always should. The moment you say 'how big is this dataset?' you've signaled that you think about the full engineering picture, not just the algorithm. The Right Questions to Ask Before Coding In-Memory vs External Sort — Know the Boundary