How to Prepare for a Python Interview: A Complete Guide

this is the most in-depth python interview guide that you're going to find on YouTube I've been writing python code for over 10 years I've passed many interviews failed a few and even given interviews to other people I know exactly what a python interview is like and how you can prepare for it so that you succeed in this video I'm going to give away literally everything I know about acing the python interview in a very structured guide and you can see all of the timestamps from the link below now what I need you to understand is that a python interview is a little bit vague we could have a knowledge-based interview where you're just articulating your thoughts answering questions or you could have a Hands-On coding interview which is a little bit more intense so I'm going to break this video into two main parts first focusing on the knowledge based components and then second focused on the coding components so with that in mind let's get into it and let's understand how to pass a python coding interview now if you're watching this video and you're struggling to get interviews then you may be interested in my python developer road maps which I can give you completely for free if you sign up for my newsletter so I'll leave a link to that below but I want to begin by covering the four most common mistakes that python developers make in these interviews and then we can touch on those as we go through the various sections now mistake number one is just not being fluent in writing the language mistake number two is not understanding the low-level implementation or Consequences of the highlevel features they use mistake number three is the inability to communicate your thought process and mistake number four is really just lacking a core python understanding so with those mistakes in mind now let's get into the two main areas that you need to prepare for knowledge-based questions and Hands-On coding so like I mentioned there'll likely be two main components of any python interview that youd need to prepare for first being knowledge based questions something like what is the global interpreter lock in python or Hands-On coding where they give you some type of problem usually a leak code style problem you would then need to solve usually on a whiteboard or potentially using a computer or a shared IDE now you may just get one of these you may get both of these in an interview and in my experience it's pretty typical to get both of these types of interviews or kind of styles of questions so you need to be prepped for both of course you may also get behavioral style questions but that's a topic for another video so with that in mind let's talk about how you can prepare for knowledge-based questions so we'll get into that in one second but I do want to share with you another fantastic free resource that I put together in collaboration with HubSpot and this is a free guide called how to land a developer role in the world of AI now this guide draws on my over decade of experience and covers the top programming languages to learn and the most effective ways to master them it includes best practices for preparing your resume along with recommendations for YouTube channels and other guides that you can check out to enhance your skills now I've left a link to this in the description where you can check it out completely for free now personally my favorite part of this guide is the long list of resources like YouTube channels and websites that can help you level up as a developer and of course the best part is they're completely free now this guide really does focus on how you can set yourself apart as a programmer in this AI era offering essential insights and strategies to help you remain competitive in this developer industry I've left a link to it in the description where you can check it out for free and a massive thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video and providing these great resources to all of you with that said let's get into it and continue talking about that knowledge-based preparation okay so within the knowledge-based interview there's a few categories of questions that you're likely going to get asked so I'm going to give you a quick fire list of things that you should be instantly familiar with that you can start preparing answers for or at least brushing up on so that you're confident in the interview now keep in mind one of the most important parts here is that you answer confidently a lot of times people do know the answer but they're very unsure or uncertain of themselves and when you speak like that even if the answer is perfect it just doesn't give the best impression so I would say always be upfront and honest if you don't know what the answer is that's okay you can say that truthfully but if you do know what the answer is then answer like you know it okay don't be kind of scared or nervous because that's just really going to detract from the knowledge that you have so with that in mind I'm just going to read my screen here because I have some notes and I'm going to go through kind of the long list of categories you might get asked now the first thing is just core python Concepts things like if statements loops W Loops functions okay all of those syntaxial pieces you should know and very likely you should have memorized and you will anyways if you write a lot of python code beyond that things like data types so when to use a tuple versus when to use a list when to use something like a set or a dictionary or maybe like a named tupple or you know a default dictionary there's a lot of different data types in Python and they are pretty specific to the Python language and they may not exist in other languages they may be called something else so you definitely want to know the exact names and when you use these various data types and the different properties of them beyond that things like objectoriented programming how do you create a class what are things like Dunder methods this is really fundamental to the Python language and you need to understand this really deeply next things like file handling how do you open files how do you work with Json files all of those kinds of things things like error handling you know we don't have a try catch right we have a try accept Block in Python things like the finally statement do you understand kind of how that works and how to handle specific exceptions next things like memory management this can get a little bit lower level it's not as common to get asked about but definitely something to brush up on after that we have the language Paradigm itself now if someone were to ask you what type of language is python you should be able to answer that question and that answer should start with python is a general purpose object-oriented programming language you should know what that means and the Paradigm or the style of writing code in Python compared to writing in something like go go or rust or Java like what is different about Python and what is the Paradigm of that language next we have concurrency and paralis now this is a big one what is threading what is multiprocessing what is asynchronous programming in Python you should know those Concepts well next I have Niche features so more specific features to python are at leasts that aren't as common in other languages things like decorators generators context managers list comprehensions you want to know what makes python specific and unique and those different features that again pop up a lot in Python but you may not see in other languages lastly of course there's knowledge of libraries and Frameworks if you're going for a d Jango interview then you're probably going to get asked a lot of questions related to the D Jango web framework this will depend on the type of role that you're applying for but a lot of times you will get kind of mixtures of questions in specific libraries or Frameworks so that's the kind of general guide of the types of questions you could get asked and the main categories you should focus on and now I want to talk about how you can effectively answer these questions and prepare well so really these types of interviews do just require that you have this knowledge and that you know your stuff that's why they give these types of questions but let's assume that you've learned everything here and you do actually know the content how would you answer these questions properly now I would suggest that when you're preparing for your interview that you actually practice like you play that means answer questions out loud if you go and you use AI for example to generate a bunch of python questions for you which I would highly recommend you do practice answering each of them out loud record yourself even video yourself watch it back see your mannerism see if you're stuttering see if you're using um or a a lot do you sound confident the more that you practice speaking out loud like I do every single day speaking to a camera the better you're going to be at communicating and the more concise your answers are going to be a lot of times like I said people know these answers but they really Ramble On they haven't practiced actually explaining them they haven't really dialed their thought process in and if listening to you the only thing that I'm getting is the words that you're saying I can't you know read your mind and see if you actually know the topic so if you don't explain it clearly and concisely to me I'm not going to be confident that you do actually know what you're talking about now in terms of resources here honestly I think the best one is AI so just asking something like Chad gbt hey I'm going to an interview you know here's copy and paste description of the role give me a bunch of questions I could potentially get asked and then answer them all out loud record yourself and watch it back also there's sites like real python really good site that has some quizzes on there where you can kind of practice your skills and of course you can watch my YouTube videos where most of them are focused on python with that in mind that wraps up the knowledge based section now let's move on to the Hands-On coding interview which can be a little bit more stressful so now we move on to everybody's favorite topic the technical coding interview now I'm going to be answering this specifically to Python and that's actually good because python is probably the best language you can use for a technical interview but keep in mind that if you're doing a technical interview in something like Rost or C++ some of the tips I give might be slightly different now what I need you to understand about the technical interview is that it's much more about the way that you communicate and that you talk with your interviewer than it is necessarily about you getting the correct answer if you were just to go into a technical interview where they ask you some kind of leap code data structures algorithm type problem and you didn't say a word and you just solve the problem in 5 minutes you probably wouldn't get the job the reason for that is that companies give these technical interviews to get an inside look at the way that you think and you break down problems so even if you know the answer immediately the last thing you want to do is just go ahead and solve it especially if you're solving it silently it's almost like an act like a rehearsal where you're really trying to go through a set of steps to demonstrate to the interviewer that you're the best candidate and that not only do you know the answer and you can come up with it but that you can think through problems critically I know it's a little bit weird to think about but even if you already know the answer you would want to pretend like you don't know the answer and think through it and show them that you're problem solving in real time to come up with the solution this is exactly what I did in many of my interviews and I'm going to go into a lot more depth here as we go through how this works so what I want to do is I want to explain to you the exact way to solve these types of problems and then I'll give you some resources and some preparation now if you're unfamiliar with this what's going to happen is an interviewer is going to come in and after after they ask you probably you know some warm-up behavioral type questions they're going to say okay are you ready for a technical coding interview now if you're doing this remotely it's likely that you'll be able to actually use your computer and you'll work in some kind of shared online code editor if you're interviewing for Google you may do this in something like Google Docs yes believe it or not and you'll kind of be writing some code live in front of an interviewer so they'll ask you hey you know reverse a linked list right famous kind of interview style question and then they'll expect you to solve that problem now if you're in an inperson environment which is much more common now you'll usually be asked to do this on a whiteboard something like I have behind me so it depends on which situation you're in and you should be comfortable doing it in both if you're doing it on a whiteboard you don't necessarily have to have perfect syntax but you should be able to write out code without needing to use like an AI coding assistant or an autocomplete or even being able to necessarily test your code in an editor okay so just something to keep in mind you should be familiar in both of these environments most of us know how to code on the computer but coding on the Whiteboard can be a little bit foreign all right so how do you solve these types of problems again your interviewer is going to give you a question and what you want to do before you do anything else is you want to make sure you fully understand the question that you're being asked now you do this by reading over the question again if it's something that's visual drawing out an example so for example if it's a graph type problem you would want to actually draw out the graph and really make sure you kind of understand what's going on and you want to run through a sample test case and a sample solution and make sure you understand how you get that okay now if you have any questions you want to ask the interviewer so if you're unsure about the type of input if you don't really understand kind of how the answer is derived it's totally fine ask for clarification and a lot of times interviewers will really make it unnecessarily complicated and you need to dig a little bit to kind of get that Clarity that you're looking for in fact this is something a lot of interviewers are looking for they want to see how you kind of clarify the problem and gather their requirements and they may actually intentionally make the question vague to see if you start digging for more information so first thing really make sure you understand everything before you go forward and come up with some questions to ask the interviewer to narrow down the problem and make it more clear some good questions are things like could I expect an empty input here is the input always going to have at least one row is this only going to be capital letters lowercase letters just make sure you really narrow it down and think about the various kind of edge cases or situations that could occur okay now once you've done that and you fully understand the problem you're being asked the next thing you want to do is come up with a plan you don't want to start writing any code at this stage you want to just understand how you go about tackling the problem this is kind of an experimental stage where you're just showing the interviewer your thought process so everything you do here you should be speaking out loud you can actually watch me do this in many clips on YouTube I have many videos where I kind of break down how to do this but you want to plan it out break down the problem and come up with an algorithm or the steps that you're going to use to solve it you would write this in plain English you could draw a messy diagrams doesn't matter you just want to explain to the interviewer that you don't just jump right into coding you come up with this detailed plan you validate that this plan will actually work for the inputs that you're given and then you can go code so again clarify the problem come up with a plan and now once you have the plan you want to verify that it will actually work once you've come up with this plan now it's time to translate the plan to code you shouldn't be spending a lot of time when you're coding sitting there and thinking about the next thing that you're going to write it should very much be that you do a lot of the difficult thinking in your planning phase and then you simply take the plan and you translate it to code as if you were writing English right but you're just writing it in code so during the coding phase again you want to explain what you're doing line by line walk through I'm writing this line because it does this this is the next step that I need and you want to constantly be talking you want to have your stream of Consciousness being kind of injected into the inner VI's brain and there's various reasons to do that but most of all it's demonstrating that you do actually know what you're doing you're thinking through it step by step and allows them to follow along with what you're doing really well now while you are coding this out and you're articulating your thought process the way you write the code does really matter first of all it needs to be clear that you've written a lot of python Cod code before you can only get this by actually practicing and doing a lot of these types of problems but you should be fluent and you should know the syntax well it's okay if you forget something or if you're missing a colon or some you know something like that if you're writing on the Whiteboard they're usually not that strict but generally speaking you should be very familiar with the python syntax and know when to use what feature you also should write in a pythonic style what that means is that you want to write code following pep 8 standards now pep 8 is the official style for Python and it defines the way in which you write code for example you have things like you want to use snake case rather than using camel case snake case means you use an underscore rather than a capital letter to separate words in a variable or a function you want to have proper indentation levels of course that's very important in Python right you want to have for example a space after you start a comment when you start writing the comment so you would have like the number sign a space and then the comment and you would also have a space between the end of the line and where the comment starts there's a lot of these random things that you should be familiar with to make sure that when you're writing python code it looks pythonic that's the name of it and you write it in the correct style it's difficult to demonstrate this if I'm not on the computer cuz I'm just doing a face tace video here but the point is you want to brush up on that style guide and write you know kind of code in that style you want to use Python specific features things like list comprehensions the max function the Min function the absolute value function you should be familiar with these features and if you are going to use some that's a much more complex python feature maybe for example a Lambda function or you're going to bring in something from the collections module then at that point I would ask permission of the interviewer because a lot of times it can solve the problem uh very quickly and take care of most of the coding that they would be expecting you to do so again don't be afraid to use those python specific features but if it's something that's going to make your entire solution like one line of code then maybe ask the interviewer first so that they don't feel like you're kind of cheating right say hey I know how to do this with this python library but it's going to really kind of reduce the amount of work are you okay if I use that or would you prefer if I write it out from scratch okay sorry for rambling there's just so much stuff to go over I don't want to miss anything in this guide now along those lines when you're using these python features and a lot of them are higher level features meaning they do a lot of work for you you want to make sure you're explaining to the interviewer that you know what these things do so if you use something like the split method right on string you want to explain you know what it's doing and also you'd want to explain the time complexity of those particular features so that's another thing that we'll get to in a second but once you finish writing all of the code out you're going to review the code and you're going to analyze it for its time complexity how long does this take relative to the inputs and if you use a lot of python features you should know what those python features lower level time complexity is so if you use something like find on a string for example that's a big O of n time complexity operation if you pop something from the beginning of a list again that's a big oend time complexity operation so you should know what all of the time complexities are of these features that you're using and make sure you don't miss them when you're analyzing the time complexity of your code now of course you analyze and then you can review your code make sure that it's all good fix any bugs you may potentially have and then you can kind of test it if you're doing this on a whiteboard right and you can kind of run through a sample input or output and make sure that you would get the expected result so the overall formula that you should remember is understand the question and clarify make a plan validate the plan is correct translate your plan into code review the code and analyze the time complexity and then make any revisions or changes that's how you can really perform well in this coding interview and those are again just like a lot of kind of highle tips to understand now let's talk about how you prepare for this so that you can actually do all of the things that I just said so really the only way you're going to get good at this is by doing a lot of practice but the important thing like I said before is that you practice like you play if you know that you're going to go into an office someone's going to be sitting in front of you you're going to have a whiteboard and you're going to have to code this out live and explain your thought process that's the way you should be practicing it's awkward it's weird it's not something that most people do but when I prepared for my coding interviews I literally bought a whiteboard like you can see behind me I put it up on my wall and I practice doing coding interviews recording myself with a camera and articulating my entire thought process every single algo expert or Le code style question I did I went and I literally wrote it out on the Whiteboard and then I would take the thing I would write it in my code Eder after and I would test and see if it's working so you want to simulate the environment you're going to be in as closely as possible and practice every single step it's one thing to be able to answer the question in this really fancy online code editor where you're not having to explain your thought process you can just sit there and think silently for 30 40 you know 60 plus minutes it's another thing to do it in the environment that's simulating that type of stress and exactly what you're going to be doing so that's the number one tip I can give you practice like you play now in terms of how do you practice if you're just starting out you want to make sure that you really learn data structures and algorithms this is something you would learn in like a computer science degree but it can be slightly different when you actually have to apply it Hands-On this means you want to really deeply understand stack cue lists arrays right heaps all of these core data structures you need to know what they are you need to know the time complexities of them and you realistically should be able to implement them on your own and know when to use them for different types of problems you also want to be familiar with famous algorithms things like bubble sort uh insertion sort various graph algorithms depth for search breath for search tree traversal algorithms right uh postorder pre-order in order traversals all of these things come up a lot in interviews and if you don't have that core Foundation it's going to be be very difficult for you to even practice because a lot of questions require this prerequisite knowledge now let's assume you have this core knowledge and you're very familiar with data structures and algorithms you really just need to put in the volume now the resources that I personally like using for this is leak code and algo expert now algo expert is something that I was previously affiliated with where I had like an affiliate link and I would get money if you guys bought it but I will tell you transparently if you go and buy algo expert which is personally what I do recommend if you're a complete beginner I don't make anyone at all yes I am an instructor on the platform I have some products there but the way my deal is structured is I was paid to make those I don't have any kind of recurring royalty or something so if you do go buy that I have no incentive to tell you to buy it and I don't make any money I just want to make that 100% clear because I do typically recommend to complete beginners that have never done this type of preparation to use a platform like algo expert because it has very in-depth video explanations some actually done by me that explain to you how to solve these types of problems so you can build that core base very quickly also platforms like neat code are very good as well for kind of giving you that prep and then once you have that kind of core understanding and you just want to put in more volume moving to platforms like leak code where it's less in-depth explanation but just a much higher kind of Bank of problems is a good use of your time for me personally when I prepared for these types of coding interviews I did about 50 or 60 questions on the algo expert platform got very comfortable in the different areas or categories of you know data structures and algorithms types problems and then I went in and did maybe about 30 or 40 questions on leak code so about 100 questions and I made this a habit where I would do one question per day right one or two questions per day depending on the amount of time that I had so rather than cramming and trying to do you know 10 in a single day I did it over a longer period of time so I got very comfortable and familiar and I wasn't stressed trying to cram it all in and you know a single month or something like that so the longer time Horizon you have the better you want to make sure that you just make it a habit and that you do it consistently and you will see that you improve and you get to a point where you can Ace these questions very easily because you've seen all these questions many times before okay so this has been a very long video but I really just wanted to sit down here and give you guys as much value as I possibly can with a relative degree of structure talking about how to prep for these interviews and how to pass them I'm telling you I've been coding in Python for over 10 years I've done many of these types of questions I've helped a lot of people pass them and I know the I'm sharing who is very valuable information that if you follow will allow you to pass these types of interviews you absolutely need the base level knowledge but once you have it it's still difficult to translate that into the interview environment which is why I made this video to hopefully help you do that if you have any questions please let me know in the comments down below and I look forward to seeing you in another video [Music]

2025-04-05 23:34

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