Three great Python Developer interview questions
Modern software engineering interviews are not only about technical skills
Software development is nowadays social activity. We are working in teams and have to able to communicate and share knowledge. It became just as important as technical skills, especially in senior positions. We have conducted a number of interviews for Python Developers in different positions and found some of the questions extremely helpful in assigning candidates’ skills and attitudes. Here are three of them with a short description of how to use them and underlying motivation. In each one candidate is instructed to describe what they are doing and intend to do as thoroughly as possible. This helps understand their mental process and reasoning.
1. Tree
There are two approaches to get started with this one. We can provide a candidate with a computer or use a whiteboard. In the latter case, we are describing the following situation: “you are working with a nested data structure. Each node can contain multiple new nodes or none. Ones with no more nested nodes are called leafs. Please write an algorithm that will count the number of the leafs in any given dataset“. The candidate has to then model given description directly into code and work out how to create the algorithm.
