nah ai killed stupid tech interviews. you can easily get an idea of someones competence by literally just talking to them instead of making them do silly homework exercises and testing their rote memorisation abilities.
AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
81–90 of 651 posts
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be a nice interview for candidates who have open source contributions, but many who have day jobs do not. Or their open source code is 5 years old and not representative of their current skill set.
There is no shame in taking time off after leaving a job to develop or contribute to an open source project or two. The world would be a better place for it.
I don’t think shame is the obstacle; it’s that for many, a break like this is financially straining or outright impossible.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#83The problem isn't AI, the problem is companies don't know how to properly select between candidates, and they don't apply even the basics of Psychometrics. Do they do item analysis of their custom coding tests? Do they analyse the new hires' performances and relate them to their interview scores? I seriously doubt it. Also, the best (albeit the most expensive) selection process is simply letting the new person to do…
> Also, the best (albeit the most expensive) selection process is simply letting the new person to do the actual work for a few weeks. What kind of desperate candidate would agree to that? Also, what do you expect to see from the person in a few weeks? Usual onboarding (company + project) will take like 2-3 months before a person is efficient.
Candidate would be compensated, obviously. That's why it's expensive.
You don't need him to become efficient. Also I don't think it is always necessary to have such long onboarding. I'll never understand why a new hire (at least in senior position) can't start contributing after a week.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#84Code reviews. Teams are really sleeping on code reviews as an assessment tool. As in having the candidate review code. A junior, mid, senior, staff are going to see very different things in the same codebase. Not only that, as AI generated code becomes more common, teams might want to actively select for devs that can efficiently review code for quality and correctness. I went through one interview with a YC company…
Is there a site where one could review some code and see what many others say about it and their experience level?
I guess it would degrade to stackoverflow-like poems eventually, but still interesting.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who are these "most people"? School was over 10 years ago for me when schoolwork was not posted on GitHub nor is it relevant to my current job anymore, and I don't do hobby coding since I have other hobbies and responsibilities. WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a…
> WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby? I think programming has more commonality with other creative, 'soft' jobs like graphic design (which itself can involve programming), architecture, media, market…
>architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye.
I disagree. Programing is more engineering than art. Art doesn't have source code. You can show the final painting and I can show the final product I worked on but not the source code I wrote as that belongs to my employer. Also, most art like paintings are not done by large teams, so you can show what you did in that painting but in a large SW projects, I can't show what exactly form the final product I did and what else was done by my team.
Most of my valuable work in programing is engineering, especially fixing bugs, not creating portfolios to show off. I have nothing publicly to show off, mostly because firstly, it's private to my former employers, and secondly because code gets outdated and replaced fast, most of what I worte in the past probably doesn't run today anymore, but have made my employers happy and wealthy.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>we ask him to show us some code he has written How do you expect them to get access to the property internal Git repo codebase and approval from their employer's lawyers to show it to third parties during the interview? Sounds like you're only selecting Foss devs and nothing more.
Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
> Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show.
First: they might have private code, but not necessarily code to show (I, for example, am rather not willing to show quite some of the code that I wrote privately).
Second: the kind of "code" that I tend to write privately (and into which I invest quite a lot of time) is really different from what I do at work, and what is actually considered "code" by many. It's more like (very incomplete) drawings and TeX notes about observations and proofs of properties and symmetries between some algorithms. Once finished, they will be very easy to systematically transform into a program in a computer language.
This is about very novel stuff, which to explain would take quite a lot of time.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
>we ask him to show us some code he has written How do you expect them to get access to the property internal Git repo codebase and approval from their employer's lawyers to show it to third parties during the interview? Sounds like you're only selecting Foss devs and nothing more.
Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
I’ve been working professionally for almost 30 years. I have never written a single line of code “for fun”. I write code for money. I then take that money to fund my hobbies. The absolutely last thing I want to do when I get off work is stare at a computer.
If I already have a job, unless you are paying top of market, why would I spend my weekend writing code?
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#88The problem isn't AI, the problem is companies don't know how to properly select between candidates, and they don't apply even the basics of Psychometrics. Do they do item analysis of their custom coding tests? Do they analyse the new hires' performances and relate them to their interview scores? I seriously doubt it. Also, the best (albeit the most expensive) selection process is simply letting the new person to do…
> Also, the best (albeit the most expensive) selection process is simply letting the new person to do the actual work for a few weeks. What kind of desperate candidate would agree to that? Also, what do you expect to see from the person in a few weeks? Usual onboarding (company + project) will take like 2-3 months before a person is efficient.
If you work with Boring Technology, your onboarding process has no reason to be longer than a week, unless you're trying to make the non-tech parts of the role too interesting.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#89I just ask to share a text editor and write down my questions. Its critical anyway because often then not its not always clear for tech questions what exactly i asked (linux command for example).
This blocks their screen too.
and yes we do know very soon if you look somewere else, take time or rephrase the question to get more time.
If you able to fake it, at that point you should just get th ejob anyway :P
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discriminate against... a personality that will negatively impact the team dynamics? It's not that easy, to be honest, as every team has its own requirements.
would you be able to document this negative fit in an impartial way when rejecting a protected class?
> would you be able to document this negative fit in an impartial way when rejecting a protected class?
Likely. But haters gonna hate, and lawyers gonna sue.