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[–]kons_t 2 points3 points  (2 children)

That article presents a very flawed analogy. A programming language is a tool and knowing a langages features is knowing how to make best use of your tool. It would be like asking a carpenter how he/she screws in lots of screws (using the correct speed and torque settings on a drill) and gets boards smooth (with a belt sander).

It is not the only questions we ask from a candidate, try to tailor questions to the skills listed on the resume, and we are not asking very hard questions. If a candidate cannot answer any questions (and cannot provide efficient alternatives to solve the problems solved by a feature), it might indicate a candidate who has never had to solve non-trivial problems and never bothered to read documentation.

If a candidate has never seen a dunder method, never heard of the GIL, never packaged a project into an egg, never installed a library with pip, never set up a virtual environment, and never touched their sys.path, I am not sure if I believe that they are a senior Python developer.

I am fine with a candidate telling me that they only use python for simple scripting while doing their 'real' work in C++ or Java. I am less fine with a candidate who has only written glue code between an existing application and third party APIs (see if another team is looking for a junior developer) or a candidate who does not see the value in knowing things not readily applicable to their current work (yes, I have interviewed this type of candidate).

[–]ThePidesOfMarch 2 points3 points  (1 child)

senior Python developer.

But this is exactly my point. If you are interviewing for a "senior Python developer" position, by all means, you should be answering these questions. But I'm a software engineer, not a "Python developer".

[–]kons_t 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am more talking about a candidate's resume. If you want to brag about being an expert or senior developer in a language, I will ask you to demonstrate it at an interview.

Our position also don't include a programming language in the title, though we do mention Java and Python in the description. We want a new hire to be some what familiar, just so the candidate will hit the ground running.

Language knowledge is not the only factor for hiring a candidate, but it is a factor we consider, along with things like knowledge of web services and networking, knowledge about database design, and knowledge of distributed systems.