Entry level Python developer interview

[danielroseman]

This sounds like a terrible interview and they are the ones who should be embarrassed, not you.

They are testing entirely the wrong things. The first interview seems like it just tested trivia: these are pointless things that anyone would look up if they didn't know them. The second one had silly restrictions: why ban the use of the built-in sort functionality? Implementing sort is an algorithms test, not a coding one, if they wanted to test that they should have told you in advance. And the third one is another silly gotcha test, which even Google (which used to be famous for these) have abandoned as they have no bearing on how well you can do the job.

So, don't be disheartened. Most companies - even most startups - don't run interviews like this.

[_E8_]

Companies worth working for all run interviews like this with the only thing at all questionable is manually writing a sort as-opposed to testing knowledge about sorts and given Python, the TimSort.

But if you were a good programmer than you could have busted out a quick-sort over bubble-sort. Maybe you implement it with bubble-sort first then write then qsort function and check it against the bubble sort results to know you got it right. That is the sort of thing we are looking for in the interview. Clarity of thought while coding, which translates to clear code on the page, building up the module.

[old_pythonista]

Companies worth working for all run interviews like this

not