Sounds like Jacob Kaplan-Moss isn’t the only hiring manager who’s keen on the reverse code review:

When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly train a person to have knowledge in some domain, but I’ve never seen raw coding ability come from anything other than personal commitment to extensive and deep practice. Because of this, I have found that some methods work better than others to discover talent.

… instead of writing code, consider instead having the candidate read existing code and talk about what it does and how it works. This offers some powerful advantages:

The advantages in brief:

1. Reading probes the most fundamental skills
2. Reading code is way more efficient than writing.
3. Reading puts candidates at ease compared to writing code.

Click through for the details and how to put this in to practice.