It's kind of like learning a subject from the final exam.
If you can pick up on the patterns of an unfamiliar language and/or codebase and make your code look like it fits in, you're probably good at both reading and writing code, and working with a team.
I can't speak for the parent commenter, but by "patterns" I am referring to multiple layers:
Detail -- Indentation, spacing, line length, naming convention, placement of braces and parentheses.
Flow -- pacing, grouping of blocks of code, levels of nesting, when and where to break up functions into spaced blocks or helper methods.
Architecture -- class boundaries, interfaces, cross-file organization.
There are higher layers but I haven't named them yet in mind and they aren't as well tested by this kind of interview.
Fair enough, if that is meant then I imagine any competent programmer should be able to do that. I kind of figured that indentation and nesting levels were what they considered to be "superficial things [like] naming conventions". Cross-file organisation might be too large to adequately demonstrate in an interview, presuming it's not a whole-afternoon type of thing that seems popular in the USA (or at least I haven't seen them in Europe, I'm sure they must exist if only I post a comment saying they're not popular here).
If you can pick up on the patterns of an unfamiliar language and/or codebase and make your code look like it fits in, you're probably good at both reading and writing code, and working with a team.
I can't speak for the parent commenter, but by "patterns" I am referring to multiple layers:
Detail -- Indentation, spacing, line length, naming convention, placement of braces and parentheses.
Flow -- pacing, grouping of blocks of code, levels of nesting, when and where to break up functions into spaced blocks or helper methods.
Architecture -- class boundaries, interfaces, cross-file organization.
There are higher layers but I haven't named them yet in mind and they aren't as well tested by this kind of interview.