Most beginners fail interviews not because they don't know advanced concepts like Apache Kafka or ETL processing tools, but because they can't explain why a JOIN suddenly tripled their table's row count. SQL and Python are core for data engineering and can get you through roughly 60% of entry-level Data Engineering interviews. I once came across a resume which had around 25 tools (Hadoop, Flume, Sqoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, Spark, Cassandra) but when I questioned the difference