> what was the effect of the code they wrote? More importantly, the context surrounding the code. I could read someone's code, and find it absolutely abhorrent

> what was the effect of the code they wrote? More importantly, the context surrounding the code. I could read someone's code, and find it absolutely abhorrent for any number of reasons: aesthetics, functionality, efficiency, and so on. But if what's written is what the customer wanted, needed, or what was appropriate for the problem, the environment, the cost, or any other constraint that fits into "code context", then by all means it's justified, and I'm unfit to judge the person simply by what's on paper. In fact, I think a lot of insight about the potential new-hire can be gleaned from their answer to: "Can you describe a situation where you decided that the best course of action was to write 'ugly' code? What do you consider 'ugly'? What was more important than having 'clean' code?"