[tagyro]

somewhat off-topic: I had an interview for an Engineering Manager position with the Head of Engineering.

They had some leet code problem prepared and I tried solving it and failed.

During the challenge, I used some python string operand (:-1) (and maybe some other stuff) that they didn't knew.

In the end, I failed the challenge as I didn't do it in the O(n) way...

These kind of stupid challenges exemplify what's wrong with hiring these days: one interviewer, usually some "vp"/"head of" decides what is the "correct" way to write some code, when they (sometimes) themselves couldn't write a line of code (since they've been "managers" for a millennia)

ps. they actually did not know what `:-1` means ...I rest my case

[jjj123]

Were they a python engineer? I interview folks all the time in languages I don’t understand, and I ask dumb questions throughout the interview. I’ve been a professional (non-python) programmer for over a decade now and I don’t really know what :-1 means, I can guess it’s something like slicing until the last character but idk for sure.

[tagyro]

yes, they were (theoretically) a python developer, should have mentioned this was an ML role (your guess is right, slice just before the last char)

Just to be clear: the main problem is not that they did not know what `:-1` was - there are many weird syntax additions with every version - understandable.

IMHO the problem is that there's usually a single interviewer that decides go/no go.

We all have biases, so leaving such an important decision (like hiring an EM) to one person is, (again IMHO) ...stupid .