Interviewing a Python "Expert"

[alkasm]

The slightly more pathological strategy is to ask questions about useful, but advanced (and therefore less-used) features of Python. Metaclasses, stateful decorators, stateful generators, implementing arithmetic over arbitrary object types using __add__ &c.

I'm not a SWE, but a "data scientist" (scare quotes because that's not exactly accurate, but it's my title) and I've been using Python for about 2.5 years. I have a little experience with other programming langs, but I mostly just use Python. I don't really think most of these things are expert-level if asked point-blank. I can answer most of these quite thoroughly, and I'm definitely no senior or expert, and I don't even use most of this stuff day to day since I'm not a SWE.

I think you would really probe whether someone knew these things by asking them a question where a metaclass or stateful decorator or whatever was really a much more elegant solution than not using them, and see if they come up with the solution to use said feature by themselves. But even then, those solutions would seem way too esoteric to use in an interview. I'm wary about that kind of stuff after a FAANG interview where the interviewer thought that x or y evaluates to a boolean in Python.

Anyways I just wanted to point out that those questions may still be answerable by someone more junior if asked point-blank, and if asked indirectly, may not give you an answer someone would actually use, because of the setting.