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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

> 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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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.

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.

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?

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)

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.

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?

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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