> Does anyone take the different approach displayed above?
I do. I find getting people to reason about code is a great method of finding who can program. Given we read a lot more code that we write, it's a critical skill. Often people seem to get hung up on the stylistic issues though and don't recognize obvious bugs.
More importantly, it's code _they_ didn't write, so it removes the natural inclination to be defensive about it.
One time an interviewee told me the problem was that the code was in Java. I told them that the majority of the code we write was in Java (as per the job description). They told me that our best option was to rewrite everything in Ruby.
I do. I find getting people to reason about code is a great method of finding who can program. Given we read a lot more code that we write, it's a critical skill. Often people seem to get hung up on the stylistic issues though and don't recognize obvious bugs.
More importantly, it's code _they_ didn't write, so it removes the natural inclination to be defensive about it.
One time an interviewee told me the problem was that the code was in Java. I told them that the majority of the code we write was in Java (as per the job description). They told me that our best option was to rewrite everything in Ruby.