A Coding Interview That Turned Into Laughter
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As the new year kicked off, I had my first interview encounter with a candidate who seemed to follow his own set of rules. Midway through the interview, we all couldn’t help but laugh.
The candidate was a gentleman with over seven years of experience working in a well-known big tech company. His background seemed quite relevant to the role. We decided to present him with a medium-difficulty original LeetCode problem. He expressed a preference for Python, citing its simple syntax and faster coding speed, which he believed would increase his chances of passing the interview. (I wonder where he got such a one-sided view…)
He outlined his approach using recursion. It seemed fine, so we proceeded to coding.
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However, from the very first line of code, he began to struggle. Despite having practiced dozens of LeetCode problems, he admitted he wasn’t very familiar with Python and asked for my patience. Then, the interview took a turn — he started interviewing me! He inquired about function definitions in Python, whether functions are passed by value or by reference, how to deep copy an array, and why there’s no ‘push’ function in Python arrays 😂.
I suggested switching to Java, knowing that candidates from Amazon are generally more comfortable with it. He insisted on continuing with Python, saying he was almost there.
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Twenty minutes later, with my assistance, he managed to write a rough version of the solution. Yet, when we tried running it, it was riddled with errors — incorrect boundary values, forgotten return statements in functions…
Eventually, everyone… just laughed awkwardly. And with those embarrassed smiles, the interview came to an end 😅…
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I hope he opts for Java in his future interviews. Choosing an unfamiliar language for an interview is a big no-no. Looking up syntax during an exam is definitely a negative. 🍀
