This was one of the worst technical interview experiences I have ever had. I am a Python developer with years of experience.

I was interviewing with a Go team and using Python as my preferred language. The engineer assured me that they were very familiar with Python, but then they disagreed on some code that I wrote and said it was unrunnable because of a syntax error.

First, they pointed this out in a very rude way. They told me, word for word, “I don’t think you know how Python works.” I remained professional and said that I could run the code for them, but the engineer replied that we couldn’t run any code in this exercise and told me to fix it.

To keep the interview from stalling, I just wrote the code in a different way. By the way, I ran both versions of the code after the interview, and both ran fine. The syntax error that the engineer pointed out is actually a syntax of Python that most junior engineers would know.

At the end, the engineer then told me about how they were being promoted to a lead and how excited they were about it. I try to be unbiased usually, but I couldn’t help feeling after the interview that this engineer was arrogant and unwilling to listen to others’ suggestions—both qualities you would never want in a lead.

But I guess MongoDB is ok with it.

Data Structures and Algorithms

Time Complexity