[arandr0x]

I'm not seeing how your example includes an "obvious improvement" that "only the best engineers would do". I would use arrays over lists but I have a ton of low-level experience so I tend to care about performance, but I wouldn't necessarily expect the "best" engineers to do so unless the prompt says "Please take special care to turn in the fastest solution".

There's a couple obvious tests (written unit tests) that I would expect the candidates to think of for their roman number sorting function, and I usually graded the take homes better when there was 1) evidence of testing 2) evidence of smart, appropriate edge case testing, but not having time to write polished tests in 1h isn't necessarily a red flag.

I'm really struggling to find how simple examples like this can demonstrate anything like GP mentioned.