Many years ago, I was given a piece of code and asked to explain what the code did. I got the job because I starting asking questions about what the code was ex

Many years ago, I was given a piece of code and asked to explain what the code did. I got the job because I starting asking questions about what the code was expected to do and what sort of evnironment the code was running in. Even though it was only three or four lines, without first understanding the contextual questions, the code itself could have been doing a variety of tasks. Since I did become the maintainer of the code base, it did turn out that there were quite a few non-obvious effects occuring in that piece of code. There are plenty of programmers who would have jumped right in and explained what the code was doing (surface appearance) and missed the simple fact that there was nowhere enough information present to actually know what that code was actually doing. So even with you two questions, which are a start, getting them to indicate they understand the context/environmental problems can be a more challenging process.