How to freaking hire great developers by having them read code

Re:How to freaking hire great developers by having them read... by wizofaus on Friday July 29, 2022 @03:10AM (#32273960)

I like the idea, might not bother with the whole "actually execute it to see if it produces the expected result" thing, but otherwise it slots into the "so obviously a good idea I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before". I can't say I've ever been asked in an interview to review a piece of code and predict what bugs it might have etc., but it's definitely a skill I use on the job all the time.

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Re:How to freaking hire great developers by having them read... by fjdbeb76 on Friday July 29, 2022 @02:19PM (#32280171)

I did this when I looked after interviews.

I'd print off a piece of legacy code that was particularly ugly and ask them to review it.

I'd tell them I wasn't looking for silly stuff like parser errors and instead was just looking for their opinion on the code. How they thought it worked and how they would improve or do it differently.

It was mostly just an interview prompt with a consistent starting point that lead to interesting insights about the interviewee but generally had repeated talking points across candidates.

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