

Technical interview question: “What do you think of this tutorial?" - raganwald
http://www.functionx.com/cpp/examples/returnpointer.htm

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zaptheimpaler
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.

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raganwald
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.

