I think you could definitely read and bugfix code without ever learning to "write" code. Code intentionally reads kind of like a language, it's possible that this guy was just doing very simple tasks and the most he would have to change are variable names and values. Maybe he knows how to fix errors reported by the code and knows how to look for variables.

It's a fine line between that and knowing how to code, but that's kinda the joke of this post I guess.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 7 months ago

I believe so. I have some roles in my team I'm hiring for, that have reading code and fixing small bugs as one of the requirements, but not developing code from scratch. (It's a sort-of field engineering role).

We do test for both things (treating the "developing code from scratch" as bonus points rather than a strict pass/fail) and some people can find and fix bugs in a couple minutes, but are incapable of writing some basic python to iterate through prime numbers and store them in an array.