Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded along with how well people communicate. That line stuck

Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded along with how well people communicate. That line stuck out for me. Writing is window into the minds of the people you might hire as well as the company doing the hiring though. I was thinking the other day about the tests companies give prospective employees to do pre-interview. One idea I came up with in addition to giving them the usual fizzbuzz programming problems was to test their writing ability by: (1) Giving them a page of simple code with comments removed and asking them to add comment headers to each function, and (2) Asking them to write a description in plain english of how a moderately complex function works (make it a function that implements an algorithm rather than something that processes data). I'm not in a position to do any hiring and try this myself but I think it would add a lot of value for the employer in filtering applicants. If I were looking for a job seeing an employer doing this would give me a lot more confidence in them also.