No, that approach is completely fine even if pedantic because you get the candidate to reason about their choices and their approach which tells you so much more about them than rote memorization. Being pedantic is the whole point of it.
That’s likely not what I mean by pedantic. If your code example has syntactic errors or calls functions with not enough or too many parameters and you expect them to notice, you want them to do, what a compiler does or to know technical documentation by heart. Which is completely academic and pointless.
Concentrating on “algorithmic” solution at hand is fine, though. Unless you again expect them to recognize stuff like “hey this is almost Dijkstra’s algorithm but wrong”, because the interview should not be a university computer science test.
No, that approach is completely fine even if pedantic because you get the candidate to reason about their choices and their approach which tells you so much more about them than rote memorization. Being pedantic is the whole point of it.
That’s likely not what I mean by pedantic. If your code example has syntactic errors or calls functions with not enough or too many parameters and you expect them to notice, you want them to do, what a compiler does or to know technical documentation by heart. Which is completely academic and pointless.
Concentrating on “algorithmic” solution at hand is fine, though. Unless you again expect them to recognize stuff like “hey this is almost Dijkstra’s algorithm but wrong”, because the interview should not be a university computer science test.