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Python coding interview challenges

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Re: Python coding interview challenges

#5

The advent of all of these coding challenge excercises makes not being able to do one in an interview a real show stopper. Glad there's all this material to learn from.

Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate.

It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution.

I'd much rather have someone who can describe the edge cases and the complexity of a problem but get the final solution slightly wrong (but hey, the know the edge cases so can write tests for it, right?), than someone who can regurgitate code they've written before without really understanding it.

Re: Python coding interview challenges

#6
I'm a C+/B- developer. I've been doing this stuff for touching two decades, and these questions gave me a prickly sweat down my back. There is a part of me that feels very lucky to have plopped onto the Earth right when I did, before there was an organized process to weed me out. I'm entrenched enough that interviews are generally just culture fit interviews. I think I'd need ulcer medicine to get a job with no reputation.

Re: Python coding interview challenges

#10

The advent of all of these coding challenge excercises makes not being able to do one in an interview a real show stopper. Glad there's all this material to learn from.

Not really. If anything it just makes coding challenges useless for distinguishing between people who can think, and people who can regurgitate. It's one thing to "know" how to balance a binary tree because you've read up on and practiced the most common challenges - it's something else entirely to actually think through and understand a problem, then come up with a solution. I'd much rather have someone who can desc…

Sure I agree as well. That there are so many resources and tools available to answer these coding challenges that if for whatever reason such a challenge was presented the minimum is to be able to answer thr challenge. Going beyond would be to know when to use such a data structure or its inherent strengths and weaknesses etc.
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