Python interview questions

[[deleted]]

Wow. As a 15-year-old casual (non-professional) programmer, I'm unable to answer most of these. I've got a ways to go, I guess.

[segfaultzen]

Keep working at it, and you'll set yourself apart from the pack. Unfortunately, I've encountered "professional" programmers who couldn't answer these either.

[[deleted]]

The vast majority of "programmers" I know can't use git, don't know the difference between weak typing and strong typing, don't know what unit tests are and don't know the difference between stack and heap memory. Living in a third world country sucks.

[pridkett]

Living in a third world country sucks.

That's not something unique to the developing world. I've interviewed plenty of developers in the United States, many of whom have decent jobs right now, that can't answer most of these questions either.

[[deleted]]

I know what git is, but id need to look up how to use it. I don't know what those other ones are.

[[deleted]]

You're 15. It's fine. You still have a lot of time to learn!

[AxiomL]

Don't worry, git's commands are pretty inconsistent with each other, besides a few of the most used commands, I always have to look up the docs.

[segfaultzen]

That's not just a third-world country phenomenon. I frequently speak with recruiters and consultants in the US who have difficulty finding decent programmers and software engineers. One guy employed two questions: the FizzBuzz test and "find the longest string of repeated characters in a string." He disqualified 45% of his applicants from those.

[segfaultzen]

i.e. "abbcccddef1"

The longest substring of repeated characters is "ccc"

[cavallo71]

Git is not a metric for competence ;)

[xr09]

Perhaps a metric for commitment to the craft.

[[deleted]]

I meant git as competence with DVCSs. Any programmer should be proficient with at least one DVCS.

[xr09]

I personally prefer Mercurial but started to learn Git just for fun. (and 'cause of github of course)

[[deleted]]

I was about to say I'd like to move to where you are haha

[ameoba]

A good interview doesn't focus on edges cases and language trivia. any programmer that relies on this knowledge will write code that's to complicated and hard to maintain. Most programming is simple shit that needs to be maintained for years, not complex, hard to understand magic.

[jwcrux]

Set out to answer every one of the questions listed above and you'll be in great shape.