The Virtuoso Who Couldn’t Play a Note
The silence in the room has a texture. It’s thick, and it’s sticking to the back of my throat. His name is Mark, or maybe Michael, and his resume described him as a ‘Python Virtuoso.’ It’s a good phrase. It sings. It’s the kind of phrase that sails past the automated screeners and lands a document in a folder marked ‘promising.’ On paper, he’s a masterpiece. A neatly formatted, two-column PDF that promises clean code and scalable solutions. He used the right verbs. ‘Architected,’ ‘Deployed,’ ‘Optimized.’
I asked him to explain, in simple terms, the difference between a list and a tuple. It’s not a trick question. It’s Python 101, the kind of thing you learn in the first 3 hours. The silence stretches. I can see a single bead of sweat tracing a path from his hairline down his temple. He opens his mouth, a fish gasping for air, and what comes out is a jumble of words that mean nothing. The virtuoso can’t play a single note.



















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