I received a phone call from the interviewer, which lasted for 45 minutes. The interviewer covered my experience, after which I was asked technical questions about Python, data structures, and algorithms.

During the call, I then had a coding round on CodeCollab, which lasted under 15 minutes. Just when I was close to finishing the exercise, I was told that I was out of time. I found this to be an arbitrary and unreasonable time constraint for the problem at hand.

To my knowledge, this firm does not pay a bonus for the first year. If you receive an offer, be sure to receive it in writing that you will receive a bonus for the first year as well, failing which you probably won’t. For subsequent years, I expect the bonus to be only half of what they originally promise.

In Python, what is the difference between a list and a tuple?

What is the technical issue with having a function argument with a default value of an empty list?

What is a decorator?

What are descriptors?

How can a Singleton pattern be implemented?

What is a heap (priority queue) data structure, and how does it work?

How does quicksort work?

Write a Python function to implement the partition logic of quicksort. The signature of the function is partition(seq: list[int]) → int. Use a fixed pivot, which is the number 4. For simplicity, the pivot will always be the first number in the sequence. The function must partially sort the sequence in-place around the pivot. The function must not create a new list.