I had a first round of interview with some basic questions from a non-technical recruiter, which involved predefined answers. I passed it.

Then, they sent me a time-consuming home task. I rejected doing it and accepted an offer from another company.

After a while, they contacted me again, and I decided to give the home task another try. The task wasn't related to the area of responsibility. I solved all the problems correctly but received a reply that some things could have been done in a different way, even though my solution was correct.

I could have solved it during three days, but I only had half a day. Now I know that I will never do home tasks for any company. They are time-consuming and don't pay off because someone will inevitably prefer a different solution.

For example, I used a cursor loop because it came to mind first, while the interviewer preferred using a common table query because it's more readable. Additionally, the API returned 5xx error codes instead of 4xx. These were tasks for a Data Scientist position.

What are the differences between strings in Python 2.x and Python 3.x?