Tim Roberts wrote: > "PyPK" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>What possible tricky areas/questions could be asked in Python based >>Technical Interviews? > > What's the point of asking "tricky" questions? Aren't you really more > interested in what applications they have worked on and whether they were > successful? > > I don't know. I'm not sure I need a job with a company that insists on > playing "Programming Jeopardy" during the interview.
That's okay. Those companies don't need you either. ;-) Seriously though, the point of asking such questions is that with minimal effort they _can_ (not "definitely will") quickly qualify a candidate's level of expertise in a language. Novices, and those who while they might have programmed in a language for several years still don't really understand it deeply enough to be considered entirely safe on their own, will generally trip up on all or most such questions (where "trip up" means anything from giving wrong answers to giving you the "deer in the headlights" look). _Anyone_ could trip up on one or two of them, especially given the pressure of an interview situation. (And even seeing an expert trip up under pressure tells you something useful about the candidate.) In short, a true senior programmer will provide good correct answers to most such questions, while those less senior generally will not. Asking such questions in isolation, without also delving deeply into other background such as what applications you've worked on, is just as dangerous as asking _only_ about such applications. I've made the mistake of hiring people who had lengthy involvement -- apparently at a senior level -- in significant projects, only to discover that they clearly didn't understand some basic concepts of the languages supposedly used. My conclusion was that they were in that class of people who manage to interview well yet contribute little, but have lucked out repeatedly by working for companies who were incompetent at terminating for cause (and there are _many_ such companies). (We didn't make the same mistake and fired them reasonably quickly.) -Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
