This comes back to xutopia's comment. Almost every programmer has blind spots. It is often biased to judge the overall capability of a programmer just by lookin

This comes back to xutopia's comment. Almost every programmer has blind spots. It is often biased to judge the overall capability of a programmer just by looking at these minor spots. If a programmer is particularly good at breaking a complex problem down to manageable subtasks but knows little about assert, he/she could still be a 10x programmer. The thing is: it is easy to evaluate the proper use of assert, but it is much harder to evaluate the capability to solve complex real-world problems.