All six dimensions
Code reading
Most engineering time is spent reading, not writing. This dimension puts unfamiliar code in front of a candidate and asks what it does, what is wrong with it, and what depends on it.
What a candidate is asked to do
- 01Explain what a snippet does, including the case its author did not consider.
- 02Find the bug in code that looks correct at a glance.
How it is scored
What earns points
- Tracing control flow accurately rather than pattern matching on names
- Noticing the case the code silently mishandles
- Reasoning about callers, not just the function in view
What loses points
- Restating the code in prose without adding understanding
- Confident claims about behaviour the code does not have
Why it predicts the job
An engineer who reads well is safe in a codebase they have never seen. An engineer who does not will rewrite something that already worked.