understands and has done it

the two separate questions dwij asks about every requirement: can the person reason about the concept, and have they applied it in real work. a single score would blend them and hide the difference.

someone can understand distributed locks thoroughly and never have debugged one; someone else can have shipped the fix without being able to name the pattern. both facts matter, for different reasons.

keeping the two apart per requirement tells a founder exactly where a candidate’s experience ends.

related terms

• evidence card: what a founder receives for each candidate: every requirement of the role, marked on whether the candidate understands it and has done it, with the source behind every mark.
• evidence-led hiring: a way of hiring engineers where every claim about a candidate is backed by something checkable, and each requirement of the role is judged on two questions: does the person understand it, and have they done it.