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I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing w

I don't know how much I judge this candidate you're talking about. Somebody who can give you the right answer after 20 seconds despite apparently not knowing what he was talking about before seems like a pretty useful employee to me.

newaccount74 4y ago
Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV. If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes. Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.
- Beltiras 4y ago
  I'm a 10 year Python veteran and I've never had to think about garbage collection. Back in the day I did find out that del didn't actually free up memory (memory footprint could only ever increase for a process, only way to "free" memory would be to restart it). Don't know if it's still the case. If asked today my very terse but immediate answer would be: "Rather poorly when I last checked. Haven't had to check for roughly 8 years." Would that qualify as a "knowledgeable individual" in your books? (just curious)
  - SkipperCat 4y ago
    I think that would meet the definition of a "knowledgeable individual". Python does GC under the hood and most folks who use it extensively never see it at all. The wrong answer would be "what is garbage collection" or "its excellent, better that C++"
Lio 4y ago
I think this is more a test of honesty. It’s one thing to openly use web search as a tool and another to pretend you know something when you don’t. It’s usually fine to say “I don’t know, I’d have to look that up”. That’s what you’d actually want on the job, honesty and professionalism. People make mistakes all the time. What you want is a culture where they can admit those mistakes so that the team can engineer them away from happening again. If a candidate is willing to lie over something so small as looking up an algorithm then that would be a big red flag to me.

newaccount74 4y ago

Many interview questions aren't about the right answer -- they are just questions that are designed to show how much the applicant knows about whatever is on the CV. If you have Python on your CV, and I ask you how the garbage collector works, I don't want you to read some stack overflow summary to me. I want to hear your own description, so I can make a judgement how deep your knowledge of Python internals goes. Anybody can type specific questions into Google. But if it comes to producing performant code, you need to have that knowledge in the back of your mind, because nobody is going to tell you to google that.

Beltiras 4y ago
I'm a 10 year Python veteran and I've never had to think about garbage collection. Back in the day I did find out that del didn't actually free up memory (memory footprint could only ever increase for a process, only way to "free" memory would be to restart it). Don't know if it's still the case. If asked today my very terse but immediate answer would be: "Rather poorly when I last checked. Haven't had to check for roughly 8 years." Would that qualify as a "knowledgeable individual" in your books? (just curious)
- SkipperCat 4y ago
  I think that would meet the definition of a "knowledgeable individual". Python does GC under the hood and most folks who use it extensively never see it at all. The wrong answer would be "what is garbage collection" or "its excellent, better that C++"

Lio 4y ago

I think this is more a test of honesty. It’s one thing to openly use web search as a tool and another to pretend you know something when you don’t. It’s usually fine to say “I don’t know, I’d have to look that up”. That’s what you’d actually want on the job, honesty and professionalism. People make mistakes all the time. What you want is a culture where they can admit those mistakes so that the team can engineer them away from happening again. If a candidate is willing to lie over something so small as looking up an algorithm then that would be a big red flag to me.