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Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#691

Post by sbarre »

roenxi wrote: post #677
redsaz wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should you conduct the interview, then, if: ... Classic interviewing techniques of "explain how X algo works" or "write code to solve Y" will unfairly bias against interviewees that don't test well under pressure, but would otherwise be a good coworker. ... "Teach me something interesting to you" or "tell me stories about past experiences" will unfairly bias against interviewees that are shy, soft spoken, or are…

I don't see what useful signals are supposed to come out of an interview. If referrals and recruiters aren't an option I'd probably try to skip the interview altogether and go with a long probation period (3-6 months). Or possibly have a short 20 minute free-form interview talking about their last day job and expectations of the new one with a very short list of major red flags ("doesn't want the job", "unable to for…

The long probation approach completely ignores the very real costs of onboarding someone new.

It takes time, money and people to bring someone in, and hiring is actually quite a risk for many companies (unless they're huge and/or in a hiring frenzy).

If a candidate doesn't work out, that's a lot of time and money down the drain, and potentially lost work, and disruption to teams and timelines, etc..

Most people don't get this part, and I think that's why they don't understand why interview processes are structured the way they are.

You really want to do the best possible evaluation, on all fronts, at the start. The longer a bad candidate stays in your pipeline or company, the more expensive and disruptive it gets.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#692

Post by ddingus »

apercu wrote: post #674
ddingus wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. Secondly, share that place by example. Radiating non fear can do wonders for the people around us, as can honest and frank conversation. When all members of a team, or even small companies come to understand not all environments are about blame and shame, magic happens!

People who are poor managers or in positions of power, but not emotionally regulated or unwilling to get therapy, find blaming others easier than self awareness and doing the work of bettering themselves. Couple that with financial success and why should they when all our society values is how big your bank account balance is.

Truth!

Don't have anything else to add, but that I agree with you.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#693

Post by tash9 »

roenxi wrote: post #677
redsaz wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should you conduct the interview, then, if: ... Classic interviewing techniques of "explain how X algo works" or "write code to solve Y" will unfairly bias against interviewees that don't test well under pressure, but would otherwise be a good coworker. ... "Teach me something interesting to you" or "tell me stories about past experiences" will unfairly bias against interviewees that are shy, soft spoken, or are…

I don't see what useful signals are supposed to come out of an interview. If referrals and recruiters aren't an option I'd probably try to skip the interview altogether and go with a long probation period (3-6 months). Or possibly have a short 20 minute free-form interview talking about their last day job and expectations of the new one with a very short list of major red flags ("doesn't want the job", "unable to for…

- How do they take a business problem and model it into code - How do they debug their own code - Is their code easy to read - Do they name their variables/fields/methods/classes in easy to understand and consistent ways or are the names confusing or inaccurate - How do they take constructive criticism - How collaborative are they - Do they think about the problem first or do they just start hacking away - When asked to add a feature to existing code, do they start hacking or do they write out a test describing the new functionality first - When confronted with vague requirements, how well do they ask questions to get the information they need - How much experience do they have with algorithms, database design, systems design, building things so they scale well

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#694

Post by ciwchris »

This question came up on Soft Skills Engineering[1]. To cut through the noise it's more important to have a blog or a project you contribute to which you can point to. And then yes, whiteboard type of questions which unfortunately are not reflective of day to day work.

[1]: https://softskills.audio/2025/02/03/episode-446-wading-throu...

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#695

Post by giantg2 »

fhd2 wrote: post #416

The last time I've used a leet code style interview was in 2012, and it resulted in a bad hire (who just happened to have trained on the questions we used). I've hired something like 150 developers so far, and what I ended up with after a few years of trial and error: 1. Use recruiters and network: Wading through the sheer volume of applications was even nasty before COVID, I don't even want to imagine what it's like…

"Use recruiters and network: "

Recruiters have been notoriously bad in my experience. Relying on network has the potential to create bias and avoid good candidates that simply don't have an "in".

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#696

Post by feoren »

maxwellg wrote: post #354
feoren wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%. The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "under…

You've never had to debug code that someone else wrote?

It's pretty uncommon. Most of my teammates' code is close to my standard -- I am referred to as the "technical lead" even though it's not an official title, but teammates do generally try to code to my standard, so it's pretty good code. If I'm doing a one-off bug fix or trying to understand what the code does, usually reading it is sufficient. If I'm taking some level of shared ownership of the code, I'm hopefully talking a lot with the person who wrote it. I'm very choosy about open-source libraries so it's rare that I need to dig into that code at all. I don't use any ecosystems like React that tempt you to just pull in random half-baked components for everything.

The conflux of events requiring me to debug someone else's code would be someone who wrote bad code without much oversight, then left the company, and there's no budget to fix their work properly. Not very common. Since I usually know what the code is supposed to be doing, such code can likely be rewritten properly in a small fraction of the original time.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#697

Post by dahart »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #680
dahart wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not reality. Not all companies have 1000 candidates. Not all companies have even 30 candidates.

This is the reality nowadays. There's an abundance of candidates thanks to bootcamps.

Got any evidence to share? It’s simply not true that “all” companies get a thousand applicants, whether you mean per job or total. Startups aren’t inundated with applicants. Neither are schools or hospitals or most web design shops or hundreds of other non-tech places that employ programmers. Some of the biggest tech names do get a lot of applicants, sometimes, for certain jobs, but I suspect you’re probably ignoring the majority of non-FAANG type businesses. Kids are definitely disproportionately aiming for the jobs that they’ve heard stories about paying really well, like AI and Apple, Facebook, Nvidia, etc. Those jobs can be super competitive, and they generally just don’t hire from bootcamps. Spamming entry level bootcamp resumes at big tech companies isn’t going to improve anyone’s odds much or at all, but whatever you don’t have to take my word for it.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#698

Post by Stratoscope »

ashdnazg wrote: post #562
cshimmin wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: lower pitch, I'd hazard a guess that you're basically reducing the restoring force, so the resonant frequency goes down. Think of the attachment point as a bunch of springs in parallel; you snip a few of them and the overall spring constant is reduced. Or another way to think of it: Imagine you had a reed of a given width and then added mass to the end by making it wider at the non-attached end. You'd expect the…

I'm sometimes tuning accordions, which is rather similar, but if you want to lower the tone by a lot, you can plop some solder close to the tip of the reed. It's pretty clear why that's the opposite of filing off material close to the tip, so obviously the tone goes lower. In my mental image, filing close to the base of the reed gives the reed a similar shape as putting extra material next to the tip (thinner at the…

Aha! You taught me something today. ;-)

The solder on the tips reminds me of a doctor visit years ago. I thought I may have broken a finger, and when I got to the doctor's office I mentioned to the receptionist that I had a high-deductible (HSA-compatible) insurance plan.

The physician's assistant said, "We could send you over for an X-ray, but since you're paying out of pocket, we can start with a simple test." He pulled a contraption out of his desk drawer and asked, "Do you know what this is?"

I said, "Yeah, a tuning fork. And based on the size and those heavy weights on the tips, it must be tuned to a rather low frequency."

It looked like this one:

https://www.stethoscope.com/adc-tuning-fork-128hz-500128/

He said, "Yep. So we get it vibrating and then touch the base to your finger. If you have a fracture, it will hurt because of the broken bone ends jiggling against each other. Then we will go for the X-ray to get more details. If it doesn't hurt, you are good to go. Is that OK?"

"Sounds good to me!"

It didn't hurt at all, and I just had to pay for a simple office visit instead of an expensive X-ray.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#699

Post by roenxi »

tash9 wrote: post #693
roenxi wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what useful signals are supposed to come out of an interview. If referrals and recruiters aren't an option I'd probably try to skip the interview altogether and go with a long probation period (3-6 months). Or possibly have a short 20 minute free-form interview talking about their last day job and expectations of the new one with a very short list of major red flags ("doesn't want the job", "unable to for…

- How do they take a business problem and model it into code - How do they debug their own code - Is their code easy to read - Do they name their variables/fields/methods/classes in easy to understand and consistent ways or are the names confusing or inaccurate - How do they take constructive criticism - How collaborative are they - Do they think about the problem first or do they just start hacking away - When asked…

If it were possible to work all that out in the interview then there wouldn't be any bad hires.

As a wishlist I like it, I just don't see how you're going to assess all that in an interview. You'll notice that the technique of the day ("teach me something") doesn't address any of the dot points and that holds for ... pretty much any technique. Interviews are a weak process for assessing anything.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#700

Post by scarface_74 »

adastra22 wrote: post #436
fhd2 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add: I can very well imagine this process isn't suitable for FAANG, so I can understand their university exam style approach to a degree. It's easy to arm chair criticise, but I don't know if I could come up with something better at their scale. These days, I'm mostly engaged by startups to help them build an initial team, I acknowledge that's different from what a lot of other folks hire for.

Why not? Plenty of large organizations hire this way. My first employer is bigger than any FAANG company by head count, and they hired this way. Why is big tech different?

Was it in the US? Unless it’s Walmart, there is no company in the US that is larger than the largest FAANG by headcount.
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