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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#111

Post by gcrout »

wruza wrote: post #84
CharlieDigital wrote: post #73

Code 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.

This could be like rap genius for code!

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#112

Post by ttyprintk »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #62
micheles wrote: post #61

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

>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.

Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#113

Post by alsobrsp »

I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.

I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history.

I do have one technical question that started out as fun and quirky but has actually shown more value than expected. I call it the desert island cli.

What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?

Having a hardware background, today, mine are: vi, lsof, netcat, glances, and I am blanking on a fifth. We have been doing a lot of terraform lately

I have had several interesting responses

Manager level candidate with 15+ years hands on experience. He thought it was a dumb question because it would never happen. He became the teams manager a few months after hiring. He was a great manager and we are friends.

Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job.

Senior level SRE hire with a software background. He only needed two emacs and a compiler, he could write anything else he needed.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#114

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

Clubber wrote: post #101
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea either. I can easily look it up though. You can often tell an inexperienced interviewer from the extremely domain specific question they ask which _they_ are familiar with.

>You can often tell an inexperienced interviewer from the extremely domain specific question they ask which _they_ are familiar with. Lol a bit touchy aren't we? Like I said, it's not really relevant in today's languages. It was for a Delphi/Pascal position. If you do any type of database code (like T-SQL), you would also know it. If your experience is mainly in C type languages, everything is a function so it doesn'…

>Lol a bit touchy aren't we?

No. I just looked up other responses to your post. It's obvious you got exposed as being inexperienced (or an idiot), while posing to know the definitive with your "gotcha". Being inexperienced (or ignorant) is not a problem, but being cocky is.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#115

Post by ttyprintk »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #95
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

I said neither 'art' nor 'paintings' which you have fixated on for some reason. I mentioned creative endeavours that are generally team-based but all generate some sort of portfolio. Whether that portfolio is from work or done in one's personal time, it is still a portfolio of past work. Plus, software engineering is absolutely a creative endeavour. And I daresay normal 'engineering' (civil, mechanical, aero, etc) is…

The proof part is interesting. Civil is easy to prove because of its artifacts. Someone from Netflix or Meta layoffs, what proof do any of them have? Do some people defensively maintain background proof other than paycheck stubs?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#116

Post by ttyprintk »

brainwipe wrote: post #70

I've accidentally been using an AI-proof hiring technique for about 20 years: ask a junior developer to bring code with them and ask them to explain it verbally. You can then talk about what they would change, how they would change it, what they would do differently, if they've used patterns (on purpose or by accident) what the benefits/drawbacks are etc. If they're a senior dev, we give them - on the day - a small b…

This is a fine way. I’ll say that the difference between a senior and a principal is that the senior might snicker but the principal knows that there’s a chance the code was written by a founder.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#117

Post by gedy »

Rhapso wrote: post #96
brainwipe wrote: post #71

I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. That discussion went on for a good few minutes and by the end of it I was teetering on leaving because the fit wasn't go…

Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer. Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem. It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language di…

> So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem.

Everybody says that, but reality is they don't imho. If you don't pass the pet question quiz "they don't know how to program" or are a "faker", etc.

I've seen this over and over and if you want to test a real conversation you can ask about their experience. (I realize the challenge with that is young interviewers aren't able to do that very well with more experienced people.)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#118

Post by aleph_minus_one »

alsobrsp wrote: post #113

I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history. I do have one technical question that st…

> I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.

My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly

- being a little on the spectrum,

- "living a little bit in their own world",

- having opinions on topics that are politically "inappropriate" (not in the sense of "being on the 'wrong' side of a political fence", but rather in the sense of "an opinion that is quite different than what you have ever heard in your own bubble", and is thus not "socially accepted")

- being a little bit "obnoxious" (not in bad sense, but in a sense that might annoy a particular kind of people))

What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters" (or possibly "smooth talker"). "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#119

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ttyprintk wrote: post #112
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #62

Earlier 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.

Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.

>Maybe

The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#120

Post by gedy »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #66
ramon156 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

I can empathize with your position if you are also against expecting candidates "prepare for the interview" by leet code grinding or "brush up on CS concepts".

Hobby coding is million times better than that crap.

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