[cageface]

The vast majority of what a programmer does, forming good abstractions and avoiding complexity, is almost completely untouched by computer science curriculums.

It's also almost completely ignored in the typical programming job interview. Which is why when I interview people now I'm most interested in looking at code they've already written, and asking them to break down an application description into a set of data & interface abstractions.

[dmoy]

How do you look at code written if it's all confidential and owned by their previous employer?

[cageface]

If the candidate can't produce any code samples at all then I give them an example app spec to decompose into abstractions.