I wrote some basic homomorphic encryption code for a hackathon like 8 years ago. When I interviewed for a BigTechCo [1] about a year later, the topic came up, and when I tried explaining what homomorphic encryption was to one of the interviewers, he told me that I misunderstood, because it was "impossible" to update encrypted data without decrypting it. I politely tried saying "actually no, that's what makes homomorp…
I had the same experience with Python's walrus operator [0] in a BigTechCo interview. After few times of the interviewer insisting I had no idea what I was talking about, I wrote it a different way. I can't imagine trying explaining something actually complicated in that environment.
It didn't hold me back from the job either. I like to believe the interviewer looked it up later, but I never poked into my hiring packet.
[0] It was useful at the time to have a prefix sum primitive. Ignoring annotations, something like this:
def scan(f, items, x):
return [x := f(x, item) for item in items]