I'm 38 and have had numerous jobs, changing oil, car inspector, welded Mig and Tig, ran manual lathe and drill press, plastic fabrication with CNC machining, hard labor warehouse including forklift and shipping and receiving, street sweeper, medical courier, Cheesecake Factory cook, and currently a substitute teacher and havnt made more than 11 an hour by Dallas. Sorry for the long spill, I have taken 53 college classes, recently finished my BS in Business Administration and Marketing from WGU , I hold the Google Analytics Individual Qualification for web analytics and almost finished with the Google Data Analytics Professional Certification, and have my resume on all the job web sites . I have been getting calls from head hunters for jobs from 25 to 45 an hour contract and they keep falling through when I tell them I'm interested. A rep /head hunter at Fortitude systems hit me up telling me they needed a data analyst for visualizations on my voicemail for a medical industry position. I called them, they retracted that offer in the first few sentences. The person who hit me up originally wasn't available so I talked with another head hunter there and they told me about a data analyst role for the prior company that they had mentioned for 50k that's not far from me. I tell them I'm interested. They say I'm a good fit for the job and then hand me over the phone to their boss to size me up and I tell them I have been learning Advanced Excel Functions, SQL, Big Query, Google Analytics, MySql, Pivot Tables, how to make visualizations in Excel, Tableau, and with Ggplot2 in Rstudio, functions packages in Rstudio from CRAN such tidyverse, atomic vectors, and how to create data frames and output them with options like tibbles. He proceeds to ask me how many lines of SQL have I worked with and I told them under 10 and have been mainly using Select, Where, From, and Group by for queries. He then tells me that he expects a person to write a hundred lines in SQL for the 50k position and that I'm not qualified after wasting over an hour on the phone. I know I know only so much like a wise man only knows he so much and that's why I'm trying to ask the hard hitters above or beside me. I read hundreds of not thousands of job posts and their descriptions and requirements. I contemplate even being a compensation analyst. Is writing a hundred lines of SQL not a data scientist or engineer's job instead of a data analyst. Even if you could write a hundred lines of flawless functional SQL syntax, would you even consider 50k? I see some companies trying to pay financial analysts under 20 an hour which is absurd to me when cashiers at Target are making 15 starting out and they are still expecting the financial analyst to have a quantitative bachelor's degree and 3-5 years related experience when most financial analysts make 80k to 6 figures+. I'm trying to get my foot into any data analyst entry level job and understand beggars can't be choosers but it's crazy what I'm encountering and like most of y'all I'm just trying to survive and would like your 2 cents.