u/Big-Pangolin4050

Hi.

I'm a cook by trade. For the last four or five years I've been thinking about moving into IT, and data analytics is where I landed — I genuinely like building things, making tables, putting documents in order, digging through data, setting up systems.

But I ran into the problem that has followed me my whole life: I cannot learn something that doesn't interest me and that I don't need right now. It just goes dull and my head starts refusing new information. What I can do is play games — strategy and simulators mostly. So I figured I'd learn SQL through a game.

The trouble was that none of the games I found show what the job actually looks like. So I built one, using Claude and a lot of YouTube videos of working analysts talking about their day.

Here's my problem: I'm not an analyst and I have never worked as one. I can't judge whether any of this resembles the real job, or whether it actually teaches anything useful. The whole thing might be plausible-looking nonsense and I'd have no way of knowing.

So if you do this for a living, I'd be really grateful if you took a look and told me what you think.

What it is: you're hired as a junior analyst at a fictional company. Colleagues message you on chat and email with requests, and you answer them — sometimes by writing SQL, sometimes by asking the right clarifying question first, sometimes by reading finished numbers and saying what does and doesn't follow from them. Roughly half the tasks need no SQL at all, because from the videos it looked like that's the half people actually get wrong.

Free, no signup, runs in the browser. No telemetry — one HTML file that works offline. English and Russian.

What I'd really like to know:

1. Do the requests read like something a colleague would actually send you?
2. Where does the difficulty break — too easy, or a jump that makes no sense?
3. Which part of your real job has no equivalent here at all?
4. Some tasks are built so exactly one answer is defensible (A/B tests, "what follows from this data"). If you disagree with any of them, that's the most useful thing you could tell me — it would mean I taught myself something wrong.

Link: https://solad-in.github.io/nexos-analyst-sim/
Source: https://github.com/Solad-in/nexos-analyst-sim

Thanks.

Hi Reddit.

I'm a cook by trade. For the last four or five years I've been thinking about moving into IT, and data analytics is where I landed — I genuinely like building things, making tables, putting documents in order, digging through data, setting up systems.

But I ran into the problem that has followed me my whole life: I cannot learn something that doesn't interest me and that I don't need right now. It just goes dull and my head starts refusing new information. What I can do is play games — strategy and simulators mostly. So I figured I'd learn SQL through a game.

The trouble was that none of the games I found show what the job actually looks like. So I built one, using Claude and a lot of YouTube videos of working analysts talking about their day.

Here's my problem: I'm not an analyst and I have never worked as one. I can't judge whether any of this resembles the real job, or whether it actually teaches anything useful. The whole thing might be plausible-looking nonsense and I'd have no way of knowing.

So if you do this for a living, I'd be really grateful if you took a look and told me what you think.

What it is: you're hired as a junior analyst at a fictional company. Colleagues message you on chat and email with requests, and you answer them — sometimes by writing SQL, sometimes by asking the right clarifying question first, sometimes by reading finished numbers and saying what does and doesn't follow from them. Roughly half the tasks need no SQL at all, because from the videos it looked like that's the half people actually get wrong.

Free, no signup, runs in the browser. No telemetry — one HTML file that works offline. English and Russian.

What I'd really like to know:

1. Do the requests read like something a colleague would actually send you?
2. Where does the difficulty break — too easy, or a jump that makes no sense?
3. Which part of your real job has no equivalent here at all?
4. Some tasks are built so exactly one answer is defensible (A/B tests, "what follows from this data"). If you disagree with any of them, that's the most useful thing you could tell me — it would mean I taught myself something wrong.

Link: https://solad-in.github.io/nexos-analyst-sim/
Source: https://github.com/Solad-in/nexos-analyst-sim

Thanks.