Two interview questions I enjoyed

[terriko]

There's a longer, friends-locked post before this one talking about the interviews I had this week, but it occurs to me that the more general public might get a kick out of the two interview questions that most amused me:

My new favourite interview question:

Given this code...

if ( X ) 
  print("hello")
else 
  print("world")

What do you need to insert in place of X in order to get this code to print "helloworld" ?



And the second one:


If you're in a room with a light bulb that's on, how can you make it be off?


(This was asked shortly after they told me they were asking to see if I had the security mindset, which is a pretty huge clue as to the types of answers they were hoping to hear. I had a lot of fun with this.)


I am leaving my answers out of this post so that you can think about the possibilities yourselves, but of course feel free to discuss in the comments.