Technical interview question: “What do you think of this tutorial?"

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1 pointraganwald2 comments

I suppose you want the candidate to point out that returning pointers to local variables of a function is a bad idea? (and tell you to either declare the variable in a bigger scope or allocate it on the heap). Seems like a really easy question, so I guess it could be a good question to quickly weed out bad candidates.

I wasn’t particularly serious about actually using it in an interview. If I did, I’d be sure to soften the question:

“Hey, I have something here, it’s more of a conversation starter than a hard question. This is a C++ tutorial taken off the Internet. We all know that programming examples aren’t best practices, but let’s discuss these code examples as if they were serious proposals."

"It’s not necessary that you try to guess all of the things I might dislike about this code, I’m just looking to have a conversation about whatever you feel like discussing.”

I think the second sentence is important. I find “spot all the errors” to be very stressful, so when I do ask questions like that I try to make sure the candidate knows that I’m not grading the question by how many WTFs he or she finds.

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