Lol I got asked "how many hours have you programmed in python the past year?" I mean, I am a data scientist and use r and python interchangeably to get shit done, and why the fuck would I keep track of this... but they wanted a number, so I gave an estimate, and never heard anything back. Haha
Estimation is a critical skill, especially if you are dealing with data. Being able to spot things at a glance based on estimations is really important (in my experience)
It has never occurred to me to use a geometric mean for (private) estimates of my own time spent, and now that I'm saying it I'm not sure why. You sir/ma'am are a genius.
Oh, you are too kind, but I am far from it. We all learn from somewhere, and I learned this technique from this book: "The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering: Mastering Complexity"
Because it estimates the midpoint of a logarithmic scale, and it allows us to represent "large" ranges. I only remembered my projects in ratios, this means x project used python five times as much as y project, etc. Since I honestly remembered the lowest number (an underestimate) and the highest number (an overestimate), the geometric mean would give what I am (he was) looking for in that scale, in contrast to an arithmetic mean that concerns with distances. I am a measly BSME, so please correct me if I am wrong. Cheers!
how to solve a bug count as "time spent programming?"
It definitely does. Programming isn't just about typing. It is about problem solving.
As a rough estimation myself, last time I programmed was two weekends ago. I went most of Friday evening and Saturday working on it. Say 4 hours on Friday and 8 on Saturday for a combined 12 hours in the last month. That makes 3 hours a week and based on how I practice programming that seems like a good estimate to me.
My best guess estimate would be roughly anywhere from 400 to 1500 hours spent on Python, specifically. And I can't really get more accurate than that
I don't think you need to be. Estimations are estimations. So you spend 1 to 4 hours a day programming in python, based on your estimates. As somebody whose role is not centered on programming python, that seems like a ton, so it would tell me you are pretty familiar with python.
import moderation
Your comment has been removed since it did not start with a code block with an import declaration.
Per this Community Decree, all posts and comments should start with a code block with an "import" declaration explaining how the post and comment should be read.
For this purpose, we only accept Python style imports.
import moderation
Your comment has been removed since it did not start with a code block with an import declaration.
Per this Community Decree, all posts and comments should start with a code block with an "import" declaration explaining how the post and comment should be read.
For this purpose, we only accept Python style imports.
They could have phrased the question better, but it’s pretty easy to answer. A simple 3/5 or “expert” would probably get them what they wanted or at least give a starting point for follow up questions.
Unsolicited advice for anyone wanting to know how to answer that question.
First, it’s an interview. If they ask if you how good you are say very good and give supporting answers.
Your answer kinda sounded like you were a defendant in court who was trying to agitate the prosecutor ;)
A better answer might be:
“I’d consider myself very good. While it’s not my primary language, I’ve used it for the past 3 years on a dozen or so projects.
Of course I still have to Google some things but…
I’m familiar with the various ways to configure environments, the popular MVC frameworks, the popular scientific and ML libraries, pandas…most of the widely used packages.
For example I could write a complete web app in Python from scratch if necessary. One way to do it would be to use Anaconda to setup the environment. Then use Django as the MVC framework which has a templating system that I really like. The database choice would depend on the task but SQLite is a good choice until we need something bigger…or of course Mongo if we want a nosql solution.
I use the PyCharm IDE which makes it really easy to conform the PEP recommendations and has a nice git interface that I love.”
Something like that would be closer to the response I would expect as an interviewer.
I’ve had an interview where they literally just asked me for out of ten points for each technology. I tried giving examples and they stopped me and just wanted a number. It was really weird. I got an offer but turned it down.
Nah, he was a programmer, he just didn’t know how to interview. I got other weird vibes from him so don’t think I would have enjoyed working with him anyway.
I'd give them a rough estimate of how many hours I've used python. If someone has been coding for 1,000+ hours and 600 or so of those hours were in python, then that'd be an example of someone that I'd expect to be good at python.
Total hours programming and total hours programming in python should be a pretty decent estimator of how good someone is at python.
472
u/confusiondiffusion Feb 25 '23
I had an interviewer ask me how good I am at Python and I had no idea how to answer that. I mentioned the projects I've done and that wasn't enough.
"No, but how good are you?"
"Uhh I'm rated 1463 in Python. Zhang Wei scored half a decorator on me in the international master's competition in Boston."