I asked someone a similar question in an interview once. They weren't doing well and I wanted to end on a positive at least. I asked them to make a dict in python and for extra credit, turn it into a string using whatever library or method they want.

This was not for a junior position.

5 minutes of for loop insanity later they disconnected crying. I always felt bad for that guy.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

when i last did interviews we didn't do live coding, but chatted to applicants about things they liked about their preferred language (this was a consultancy position). people who actually like to program tend to have loads of opinions. juniors moreso. the less engaged people were with those questions, the worse the solution the their take-home task tended to be.

a friend of mine interviewed a candidate who apparently visibly froze after every question, like it was a quiz. turns out they were being fed answers from people off-screen and those people hadn't expected casual conversation. they were found out when they forgot to mute.

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I once had a candidate give the join link to the meeting out to several people (there were 3 unknown people in the call in addition to me and him). I immediately explained we can't do the interview with all these other people on the call and he proceeded to try and gaslight me that there were no other people in the call, like he honestly thought he had jedi mind truck powers.

I called over several coworkers to witness the clusterfuck, many lols were had.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 7 points 1 day ago

man, what i wouldn't give for mind truck powers.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sounds like someone bullshitted their way through school to get a technical degree, not realizing that their bullshitting depended on the person they were bullshitting not being good or confident with technology, which gets rarer when you go into a technical career.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

which gets rarer when you go into a technical career

Sorry, what?

I have found it hard to find a place with a non-bulshitting trend.
And it has become harder, the further I go.

Maybe I'm just unlucky.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Haha I have also done an interview where the person had a friend in the room feeding them answers, though this one must have assumed his mic was worse than it was and didn't mute at all, so we could hear the mumbling of answers. To make it even funnier, though, their friend wouldn't have gotten hired either because none of their answers were good.

I kinda wanted to tell them they should find a smarter friend to help them cheat at interviews but instead just thanked them for their time and ended the interview.

Though tbh, I wasn't really impressed by any of the new grads from the schools we were looking at. Some of them made me wonder if they learned anything at all about software development during their time at school.

[–] heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

cat = dict(name=‘Garfield’, color=‘orange’)
str(cat)

Can I have that job?

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would have accepted this answer.

I was hoping for json.dumps, but that'll work.

[–] mat@jlai.lu 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think json.dumps would not work if there is a datetime in the dict, right?

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah there's other edge cases too, like Decimal, but as long as you have those things imported when you send it through dumps it should work.

[–] mat@jlai.lu 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Just tried it in an ipython shell

import datetime
import json

json.dumps({"a": datetime.datetime(1970,1,1)})

And I got the TypeError: datetime not JSON serializable though.

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

If you don't care you can pass in default=str (I think) but if you do care you can define a function for what the string representation should look like and pass that in, but that's a happy path case to be honest. I usually only run into this problem when something is logging unknown data (otherwise I prefer to model data like this so the IDE is happy) so I pass in the default=str just to get it functional.

Duck typing usually works but, datetime man, datetime is the warp from Warhammer 40K, it will drive you mad.

[–] lobut@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 day ago

When imposter syndrome meets an actual imposter!

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Subtle hint that this is not for them.

[–] Sprocketfree@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Is casting it to str allowed?