Can you give me a couple of examples? I'd like to see where I stand with my knowledge.
The amount of insane answers I've seen to that one alone...
Then if they pass, I test proficiency by having them loop over the dict and update each value in-place.
So, I wouldn’t pass these kind of interviews. In over a decade I’m never being asked these kind of questions though (I have done take home assignments and leetcode, but always with google opened)
I have used Python to solve average business problems, yet I cannot produce non trivial code without looking at the documentation. Same for the other dozen programming languages I have used in the past.
hello = {1:1, 2:2, 3:3}
That can usually be solved by a quick read of the reference documentation (2-5 mn?).
For my part, I've written enough python that I doubt the literal syntax will ever be far from my fingers.
I needed a small perl script recently (perl 5’s feature set & stability plus availability in the environment made it the right fit) and realized after 15+ years of no perl much of the specific syntax was fuzzy to outright gone from my head even though I’d contributed to large perl projects for years.
Python work is much more recent, but I’d bet I would accidentally mix in some JS or even PHP syntax doing the dictionary assignment, at least w/o a cursory lookup. I’d like to think it’d come through that I know what a dict is and what it means to set one up and operate over it, but who knows, I might be interviewing with someone who is evaluating skill on the basis of immediacy of syntactic recall.
So, the equivalent of creating a dictionary, yeah, sure. But there's loads and loads of stuff that I only use maybe once a week (and someone else maybe uses daily) and that I'd have to awkwardly Google (I use Kagi btw) even during an interview.
Your interviewer is probably also questioning if it's (a, e) or (e, a), but you passed the fraud filter.
If you have just started your career and are full invested in 1 or 2 programming languages, sure this may sound alien to you.
If your interviewer finds that problematic, well, that's on them.
In interviews I've done, we only looked for culture fit because the technical part was a coding assignment they had already done. Honestly too big an assignment since it's uncompensated (not my decision), but to my surprise nobody turned it down -- and everyone got it wrong. Only n=3 or n=4 iirc but those applying for a coding position could not loop through a JSON-lines file too big to fit in RAM (each line was a ~1kb JSON object, but there's lots of lines) and sum some column from each JSON object into a total value. The solutions all worked to some degree, but they all chopped up the file, loaded the first chunk into RAM, and gave an answer for that partial dataset only.