Common Python Interview Questions you’ll most likely be asked
The fact is that there are far too many developers with allegedly extensive Python programming experience and education on their resumes who are terrible at some of the most primitive Python interview programming skills.These days, for our Python Software Developer positions, we now routinely ask during phone screening the followingTo prepare for our interview please implement the following code:For each integer in the range 1 to 100 (inclusive)
Print a line such that:
If it is evenly divisible by 3 print “Fizz”
If it is evenly divisible by 5 print “Buzz”
If it is evenly divisible by 15 print “FizzBuzz”
Otherwise: print the number itself.
Be prepared to talk about testing methodology, refactoring, code maintenance or design considerations We have done this about a hundred times over the last couple of years. So far no one has gotten a perfect score on it and only one developer has gotten a correct bit of code on the first attempt.Here’s a working solution:for i in range(1,101):
if i % 15 == 0:
print ‘FizzBuzz’
elif i % 5 == 0:
print ‘Buzz’
elif i % 3 == 0:
print ‘Fizz’
else:
print i
That’s by no means perfect. But it exactly implements the specified functionality. Less than one in ten people who have been scheduled for phone screening as developers does this well at this problem.
A couple of weeks ago I did a written homework assignment with some essential Python interview questions. During the phone interview discussion after turning in the project, the lead Python Developer couldn’t find anything to nitpick and even confessed me he thought I was a better Python Developer than him. The conversation went very well and I felt confident I would be invited to in person interview. You may already guess would happened next. I never heard from them again and all of my attempts at communication were ignored. I’d like to say this was an isolated incident, but that would be a complete lie. I just spent last weekend doing another Python homework assignment and I haven’t heard back from them yet.
Not every developer has the luxury of that much free time to focus on puzzle type Python interview questions just to get a foot in the door. All companies want you coding, sometimes over the phone, sometimes on a computer, sometimes on a white board. The companies take that too far and I am 100% positive that the daily job for people who work there does not involve reversing a string in place or writing a function that determines if a word is a palindrome or not, but those interview questions are meant to shrink the pool of potential hires from the thousands to the dozens. Nobody wants to waste time through a normal interview process with thousands of people, better to stump most of them with idiotic, useless quiz questions and interview only a few dozen developers in person. I get it.
