> Furthermore, no matter what, poor technical ability seems highly correlated with poor communication ability – regardless of language, it’s relatively rare for candidates to perform well technically but not effectively communicate what they’re doing (or vice versa), largely (and fortunately) debunking the myth of the incoherent, fast-talking, awkward engineer.<p>My interpretation of this is that interviewees who can communicate clearly about code (whether they wrote it or not) correlate with high technical ability. Does this suggest that rather than having the interviewee write code on the spot, one could give them some new code they've never seen before and ask them to reason about it aloud for 30 minutes, then gauge their technical ability based on their ability to communicate clearly about the code?<p>In other words, could you replace live-coding with "here's some code, tell me about it"?