Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by BurningFrog on Monday June 22, 2015 @12:38PM (#9759482)

> Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability

I had one interview where the interviewer simply showed me a printed page of code, and asked me to talk about it.

I spotted a few problems and debatable constructs, and we had a good 3 minutes discussion.

Since at least I spend more time reading code than writing it, that felt like a truer test of my abilities than many of the coding tasks.

PS. Yes, I got the job.

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by wpietri on Monday June 22, 2015 @01:57PM (#9760023)

I had an interview recently where we did something similar and it was awesome. They had picked an especially good example: the code was small enough that it didn't take long, but it has a variety of sorts of badness, from coding errors to bad names to bad method grouping to logical errors.

I'm definitely stealing this trick.

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by azundo on Monday June 22, 2015 @09:59PM (#9762254)

I wrote one of these for my work as well. Definitely our go-to for getting a sense of how well people can understand others' code and how they think about data modeling/complexity. A very small initial page of code can go a long way.

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by mattLummus on Monday June 22, 2015 @05:37PM (#9761383)

This is great. Reading (and maintaining, refactoring, improving, etc.) obtuse code is often much more difficult than a fresh slate. Its also a major real world requirement. Where is that statistic on number of engineers doing maintenance vs greenfield development?

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by fezz on Monday June 22, 2015 @05:19PM (#9761278)

Agreed, being able to read and reconstruct models from OPC (other peoples code) is such a big piece of coding but hardly ever a part of the interview process.

(OPC also refers to one's own code that when you can't remember wtf you did and the comments aren't useful)

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by baddox on Monday June 22, 2015 @08:08PM (#9761947)

I think that's a good way to not get false positives, but it seems like something that could yield a lot of false negatives.

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by HaloZero on Monday June 22, 2015 @03:32PM (#9760655)

I'm curious, how complex was the code. I would love to try this out at some point. Did it fit all in one page?

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Re:Organizing complexity is the most important skill in soft... by BurningFrog on Monday June 22, 2015 @03:54PM (#9760784)

I think it was a class of 30-50 lines of Java code.

The problems were those you see daily in production code. Misleading names. Duplicated constants. Overly complex constructs. Off by one errors. Maybe a resource leak when exceptions are thrown. Etc.

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