Sorry, but do you have any data that shows 'great' candidates run tests and use your approach of finding / fixing bugs? Read the book 'Coders at Work' which describes some of the best developers of all time - most of them use print statements to find bugs / debug. Btw, I've solved bugs in 2-5 minutes which some developers spent hours or days working on (to their amazement) -- I've done this countless times in the past without using code or any debugging / testing tools -- all it took was reading the code and figuring out in my head what was going on and which data elements could introduce problems -- so I suppose I belong in your list as well? Sorry I just want to see the thought process here, to me it makes 0 sense and all the HN commenters commending the parent article are also making me absolutely scratch my head since the suggested process makes many many assumptions without having any data to back them up.