The Code Review Interview: I Hand Candidates a Broken PR
The candidate had thirty minutes and a 180-line pull request. Sixty seconds in, they said: "Line 43, this variable should be camelCase." I wrote it down. Not because they were wrong. Because it was the only thing they said for the next nine minutes. That is the code review interview : no blank editor, no "invert this tree," just a real-looking PR with real problems buried in it. I switched to it…
The code review interview is a method where a candidate is given a 30-minute, 180-line pull request to review as if they were a coworker. The interviewer asks you to read, narrate, ask questions, and determine what blocks the merge. The PR typically contains a route handler, a small service class, one migration, and two tests that pass.
Six issues are intentionally seeded in the PR, ordered by their potential impact in production, which is the opposite of how candidates usually identify them. The interview scores severity ranking, the ability to ask about the PR's purpose, how the comment is written, and what is omitted. Unlike LeetCode questions, the code review interview tests the actual job requirements, such as reading code under time pressure, risk judgment, and delivering bad news to a peer.
Practicing for the interview involves reviewing unfamiliar PRs out loud with a timer and comparing your findings to the original maintainer's list.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
