"Jumping into a non-familiar codebase and being useful" is literally what someone is considering paying you for. Years ago, I got tired of some owners of a com

"Jumping into a non-familiar codebase and being useful" is literally what someone is considering paying you for. Years ago, I got tired of some owners of a company I worked for hiring bench techs (small business IT support and such) who'd clearly never opened a computer before (I don't know why, but as the closest person I couldn't focus on any of the work I was supposed to do when constantly being interrupted by bench techs), so I "broke" a scrap computer as an interview problem, rather extensively. RAM wasn't seated, a PCI card wasn't fully seated, I think the power switch was halfway pulled off (enough that it didn't work but was visibly wrong), and I did some terrible things to the partition tables as well. The goal, which it succeeded quite well at from my point of view, was to see where a possible bench tech's skills ended, then help them through. If you'd worked on computers a bunch, and one wasn't powering on, "reseating stuff" was a useful enough response, which would either clear the corrosion on some pins or ensure everything was actually planted in place, which would render this machine booting (after you pushed the power button connector back in), and let me observe what you did with some weird boot errors. There were Windows and Linux environment boot DVDs laying around, so, pick what you know. The result of this was that our next bench tech hire had the skills to do stuff himself, and generally left me alone to do the stuff I was trying to get done.