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Were they a python engineer? I interview folks all the time in languages I don’t understand, and I ask dumb questions throughout the interview. I’ve been a professional (non-python) programmer for over a decade now and I don’t really know what :-1 means, I can guess it’s something like slicing until the last character but idk for sure.

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yes, they were (theoretically) a python developer, should have mentioned this was an ML role (your guess is right, slice just before the last char)

Just to be clear: the main problem is not that they did not know what `:-1` was - there are many weird syntax additions with every version - understandable.

IMHO the problem is that there's usually a single interviewer that decides go/no go.

We all have biases, so leaving such an important decision (like hiring an EM) to one person is, (again IMHO) ...stupid .

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