> > "How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending - source of data in Python?"
> The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back.
That's funny...I've implemented more than my share of such things in a long career, and my first intuition for an answer to the question, as phrased, was to implement stream sampling. It never even occurred to me that the answer might be a syntactical feature of the language (and yes, I know what generators are).
According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time.
Do you see the problem yet? It isn't theoretical. I've hit this kind of situation with so many interviewers that I'm actually more nervous when I'm sitting across from someone who is clearly on their first or second job out of school. They're asking (unclear) questions in the "python syntax" category, and I'm thinking about the engineering consequences of consuming an endless stream of data...
This is a sign that the interview questions aren't there to actually assess technical ability, but are geared towards excluding anyone who hasn't travelled in the right circles. The employer isn't looking for someone skilled, they are looking for someone who is pre-filtered to think a certain way and know certain things.
Maybe. I tend to think that's a cynical take. Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.
This is a...youthful...industry, and a lot of junior people (with "senior" titles!) are out there doing interviews. It takes experience to become a good interviewer, and if you've never had that experience, you don't know what you don't know.
> According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time.
I don't think so, because you actually know about generators. If you were hiring for people who had a lot of Python experience, but didn't know about generators, that would be a bad sign. You would probably want to ask a some other questions, so you would have a more complete picture of what the candidate knows.
My main point is that the company's interview process is flawed.
> I don't think so, because you actually know about generators.
Sure, but will the OP give me a chance to demonstrate, or simply flip the idiot bit as soon as I don't give the expected response? In the context of a phone interview, I probably wouldn't get anywhere near discussion of python generators in an answer to this question. I'd probably say something like:
"For an infinite stream, my main concern is system resources, which are never infinite...I'd want to use something like stream sampling to calculate the desired metrics, but it's hard to know the right solution without more information about the problem."
Far too many interviewers hear that as weasel-wording, and simply disengage. It's even worse when the interviewer thinks they're asking a clear question about python syntax. It takes a high level of self-awareness to know that you might be the problem when you're the interviewer.
An experienced interviewer might engage with that, but many folks don't have the patience to listen to an unexpected response, nor the respect for the candidate to give them the benefit of the doubt. As I said, this pattern isn't theoretical. I've been on the interviewer end of this kind of pattern many times before.
> My main point is that the company's interview process is flawed.
> The answer to this question is to use a generator. If you don't know this, then both people are going to wish that they had that half hour of their life back.
That's funny...I've implemented more than my share of such things in a long career, and my first intuition for an answer to the question, as phrased, was to implement stream sampling. It never even occurred to me that the answer might be a syntactical feature of the language (and yes, I know what generators are).
According to you, I'd be so wrong that I'm a waste of time.
Do you see the problem yet? It isn't theoretical. I've hit this kind of situation with so many interviewers that I'm actually more nervous when I'm sitting across from someone who is clearly on their first or second job out of school. They're asking (unclear) questions in the "python syntax" category, and I'm thinking about the engineering consequences of consuming an endless stream of data...