That line stuck out for me. Writing is window into the minds of the people you might hire as well as the company doing the hiring though.

I was thinking the other day about the tests companies give prospective employees to do pre-interview. One idea I came up with in addition to giving them the usual fizzbuzz programming problems was to test their writing ability by:

(1) Giving them a page of simple code with comments removed and asking them to add comment headers to each function, and

(2) Asking them to write a description in plain english of how a moderately complex function works (make it a function that implements an algorithm rather than something that processes data).

I'm not in a position to do any hiring and try this myself but I think it would add a lot of value for the employer in filtering applicants. If I were looking for a job seeing an employer doing this would give me a lot more confidence in them also.