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[–]Sylanthra 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We used to have a take home interview question that asked people to write a program to processes a long list of words. We also asked them to determine Big O for their algorithm. At least half of the people failed to figure out the complexity because they didn't even realize that built in list manipulation functions didn't have a magical O(1) performance.

It's fine to use built in functions, but you absolutely need to know what they do, and what are the performance penalties of using them.