You might be overestimating the grade of people who make it through coding interviews. I'd rather hire-- as a coder-- someone that could read code but would fa

You might be overestimating the grade of people who make it through coding interviews. I'd rather hire-- as a coder-- someone that could read code but would fail an interview where they coded, than someone who could pass some trivial coding interview but couldn't read code. Obviously, people need to do both, but the reading seems less likely to get a false positive/negative in an interview. Heck, given two candidates one who cannot currently code but reads code fluently vs one who can code (and not just pass a coding interview) but cannot read code-- I'd still prefer the reader. It's the more important skill. Average industrial programmer is going to write 8 lines of code per day. If you can correctly read a codebase, you can probably manage to write 8 working lines of code per day for it on average. Maybe you wouldn't be #1 one the team overnight, but a fluent reader is at least on track to be average even if they hardly write at all now.