&gt; &quot;Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.&quot;<p>The sizable problem with this statement is that it is using a solution to pigeonhole a person. It takes a bit of audacious hubris, something Torvalds (an extraordinary engineer no doubt) is known for, to paint an entire person and their capacity and skill into a singular and simple quote.<p>Here&#x27;s a novel idea: sometimes a person is a good programmer and sometimes they&#x27;re a bad programmer. There&#x27;s definitely a skill level that people fall into, but these aren&#x27;t neat lines delineated with tired generalisms about &quot;worrying about code&quot; versus worrying about &quot;data structures&quot;. Put your question into an interview and get different people to ask it and sure pick the people who were able to get a better solution. Hopefully you&#x27;re asking more than one question. That&#x27;s totally OK, but please don&#x27;t attribute someone&#x27;s performance at one question or assume that you&#x27;ve mastered everything it takes to know to paint someone as a &quot;bad programmer&quot; from one interview loop[0] or performance with their performance for that one question.<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s obvious someone has no idea what they&#x27;re doing and you can tell that from a question, but even in that case they could become better. There might be a weakness in a fundamental area they need to learn and sure you don&#x27;t want to hire them until they do, but that doesn&#x27;t make them a &quot;bad programmer&quot;. All it is is a specific problem that the candidate should recognize and improve on to up their skill. They shouldn&#x27;t walk away from your massive ego rethinking their career as you puff your chess out and write a haughty blog post about what you think about people and their skills.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;03&#x2F;truth-about-interviewing.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;steve-yegge.blogspot.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;03&#x2F;truth-about-intervie...</a>