The most useful exercise in our engineering interview is reading code rather than writing it. We hand over a small, real module and ask two things: what would you change first, and what would you deliberately leave alone. The first answer shows judgment. The second shows restraint, and restraint is the rarer skill, because most of the work on a live product is changing something another person wrote without breaking the parts that already work. Candidates who want to rewrite everything and candidates who won't touch anything fail in the same way. If you hire engineers, it's probably worth knowing which one your process actually tests, writing or reading.
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