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Comment by mamonster | Hacker News Reader

I only did these types of interviews when applying for internships in uni, but I really don't think you would get away with using an inbuilt binary search (via bisect left) in a question that is basically "binary search with a quirk".

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It's certainly not an "elitist initiation ordeal" to ask a potential crewmate to sketch a library function they've selected, what abstraction or ideas it implicitly contains, and what bearing those have on their overall approach. GP's use of `bisect_left` is instructive here:

  In [2]: Solution().findMin([1, 0, 1, 1])
  Out[2]: 4

However, requesting a bug-free implementation of `bsearch()` (to say nothing of the actual problem being solved) during a timed, in-person interview is less a structured rehearsal of an individual's unique capacities, and more of a jumping-in ritual proving only a willingness to die for their cybergang.

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