[savorypiano]

Just to clarify, do these 50% regularly develop using python, and did they understand the question?

It seems unavoidable to know how to run a script if you've done it within say a month. Now not remembering the if __name__ == __main__ thing is more forgivable.

[apwheele]

These are 100% people who claim to be senior ICs with years of developer experience in python. The resume thing that list being expert in dozens of libraries, etc.

It is even less tricky than you are thinking. I literally just want them to know you need to put in a `hw.py` file `print("hello world")`, and then run from the command line `python hw.py`.

The reasons for failure are myriad (I suppose you could say it is they do not understand, but I legit try, regularly spend 10-20 minutes on just this for the ones who have problems, I am not being tricky). A few are people who do not know file systems (save their `.py` file in a wrong location), a few I think just do work in environments like served jupyter notebooks so don't have any relevant software dev experience (don't know how to execute python directly or write code in a .py file), some I am pretty sure are just liars on their expertise (have a few that just leave interview when asked this question).

[savorypiano]

Not aimed at your comment per se, but I'm having trouble reconciling these stories where a vast majority of applicants fail a simple test (or other Fizzbuzz type tests) with stories of how difficult interviews are these days with Leetcode hards, etc. Maybe the populations are not mixing.