A question to ask (Score 1)

A question which can separate the wise from the inexperienced is: "given a situation (interviewer can make up), what do you think is the best approach: 1) to use the existing code or 2) dump existing and write it all from scratch?" Regardless of the 'the situation', many newbies, especially from hot shot engineering schools often will answer #2 and give a coding estimate that is unreasonably short. Unreasonable for 2 reasons, one, they can't hit their estimate in the first place and second, to get the bugs out to make it a useful application often takes way longer than anticipated. I know this is a generalization, but its like Eisenhower said, "all generalizations are wrong including this one" - Lou