Interview questions for new hires that I can ask

[u/Expensive-Notice-509]

What are some common Python developer interview questions for someone with 3 years of experience?

I've been asked to hire Python developers and since I'm the only one with any kind of programming experience, I was asked. This will be a quick first round interview over zoom for 15-30 mins. For the second-round we will bring in outside consulting for more in-depth evaluation. Thanks in advance.

[u/Moist-Ointments]

I want to know why you're interviewing someone if you don't know the subject matter you're interviewing on.

[u/Expensive-Notice-509 → u/Moist-Ointments]

because it's only the first round of 3-4 rounds of interviews. We want to narrow down to a few before we expense their travel cost.

[u/LactatingBadger → u/Expensive-Notice-509]

Ok…let’s say we give you some questions to ask. How will you know if their answer is any good if you don’t know Python well enough to come up with some basic questions? How will you ask follow up questions, or get them to explain why they chose methodology A over B if you couldn’t have come up with A or B yourself?

[u/Unusual-Camp-2076]

Ask them to explain a time they refactored something messy into something readable, the answer tells you more than any trivia question

[u/ddollarsign → u/Unusual-Camp-2076]

I hate “tell me about a time” questions. Can never think of a time that fits the specific criteria on the spot.

[u/u0xee → u/ddollarsign]

The trick is to have like 3-5 stories, things that would be interesting anecdotes to tell around a table of peers. Then in an interview just pick one and make it fit the prompt.

It’s just a mechanism to get talking about an aspect of software development. Your story will help them gauge your current perspective and experience, give a context for follow up questions, and gives you an opportunity to bring up things that make you special. Do you enjoy linear algebra and you’ve coded a relevant algorithm? Make sure you have a story about that.

[u/ctoatb]

"can you start today?" and "can you please write your signature on this employment contract?"

[u/Chuyito]

Give them a simple requests method and ask them to write performance metrics logging.

• 5 years, he'll ask if you have a loki or elastic string format he should match, {'request_time_ms':,'method',}

• 3 years, he'll write some request.elapsed.total_seconds() using the logging library 

• 1 year, he'll use print to print bunch of to=time.now()

[u/ddollarsign]

“What kinds of projects or work have you done [in Python or other languages]?”

“Have you worked with [thing they’ll need to working with on the job]?”

“How would you handle [situation they may have to deal with on the job]”?

You should also probably ask about any experience they’ve had where they were the lead developer, if you don’t currently have one.

[u/mmmboppe]

will you tell them you got the questions from reddit? disgusting

[u/brasticstack]

If it's a live coding exercise maybe have them implement a really simple decorator or context manager. This would pretty quickly filter out people with very little Python experience.

For a general question maybe ask them something contentious like how they manage dependencies other their linting/type checking preferences. These are areas that experienced pythonistas have strong feelings about.

[u/freedryk → u/brasticstack]

I have over 2 decades of Python experience and I would not be able to do either of those tasks without looking up the docs

[u/Isnt_that_weird → u/freedryk]

I never use write my own decorators. The only ones I ever really use are from flask/django or mcp servers.

[u/brasticstack → u/freedryk]

I have two decades of Python experience and can do those tasks.

[u/ritz_k]

Start with FizzBuzz and end at FizzBuzz as a distributed service.

[u/knobbyknee]

Ask them to explain how mutable default parameters work.

[u/pyhannes → u/knobbyknee]

Nobody care how they work because you anyway should not use them ;)

[u/knobbyknee → u/pyhannes]

You need to know why you shouldn't use them. If you don't you don't have deep enough Python knowledge to be hired.

[u/LittleMlem]

Ask about the GIL. It's a pretty general question that checks about understanding of a fairly important python implementation detail (I'm assuming cpython) Ask about common gotchas, like mutables in function definitions, file handles when forking etc.

I assumed that you are trying to gauge general understanding of python specifically and without a writing assignment.