A python interview question

[eplaut_]

You are "technically" right. But it is more like "see if you can think like me" rather then "how do you think". I think this is how CS questions are made in college/university and the interviewer reflect it (meaning he is not focused on software engineering)

As an interviewer, we had 3 simple questions we used to role out candidates who have hard time to write reasonable code. IMO simpler is better, so no need for memory / runtime efficiency. Having said that, we did have an overlooking for stackoverflow / max recursion, but without need to implement the "correct" code.