hey all just had a technical debugging interview for a mid level ish role and wanted to get some honest opinions

so the format was the interviewer walks you through a small python codebase maybe 100 lines, explains the object model, then hands it off to you to find and fix the bug. hour long interview, about 7 min behavioral up front then like 40 min debugging and the rest was q&a

the codebase was a google docs style comment threading system. threads were being duplicated showing 8 threads when there should have been 3. the bug ended up being an off by one in an index check where it was doing > 0 but should have been >= 0 since index 0 is a valid position for an existing thread

i narrated the whole time, used print statements to trace things, and i found the right function and the exact block where the bug was pretty early on. i fixed it and verified the output. i also suggested an enhancement where instead of tracking by index you just match by thread id directly which removes the possibility of this type of bug entirely

the bad part is i took way too long to actually make the change. i was reading and rereading the code for like 10 to 15 min kind of circling the answer before i committed to changing it. the interviewer had to nudge me twice, once asking what does the zero mean and once saying we’re falling into the else too many times. after that i locked in and fixed it pretty quick

also first time ever using coderpad so i was slow navigating and first time doing this interview format at all. the role is more customer facing forward deployed eng not pure backend if that matters

so would you pass me? do the hints automatically put me in no hire territory or does finding it and suggesting the enhancement count for something? be honest lol