We had a mix of code written by brilliant people who knew how to maximize cache coherence in template metaprogramming hacks... and interns who generated more c

We had a mix of code written by brilliant people who knew how to maximize cache coherence in template metaprogramming hacks... and interns who generated more compiler warnings than anything else. Over the years, I found some truly awful code, in our cash cow application. So I turned those into the smallest representations of what was bad, and showed those to candidates. I was trying to assess, "How much will I need to mentor this person, and how hard will that be?" I may have given bad reviews to people who deserved better, but I honestly think I never once gave a good review to someone who deserved a bad one. A few times, the company went against my suggestions, and each time, the candidate wrote some terrible, buggy code that I later had to untangle and fix.