[patientzero]

It seems to me like you've just described hiring a mathematician on arithmetic skill. If you hire this way of course many will use code practice tools to pretend they are juniors or incapable of delegating since most of their time should be occupied with less low level ways of doing things or assigning things.

I can go a long time without writing for loops, the better I know the surrounding tools in an ecosystem, the less I accidentally reinvent something with details that low.

I don't remember all that much about pandas, but enough to try to use it to do a matrix operation instead of writing the for loop if I were assigned a ML task for some reason.