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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#171

Post by voidr »

No it didn't, you just need to stop asking questions an LLM can easily solve, most of those were probably terrible questions to begin with.

I can create a simple project with 20 files, where you would need to check almost all of them to understand the problem you need to solve, good luck feeding that into an LLM.

Maybe you have some sneaky script or IDE integration that does this for you, fine, I'll just generate a class with 200 useless fields to exhaust your LLM's context length.

Or I can just share my screen and ask you to help me debug an issue.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#172

Post by TransAtlToonz »

I had no idea people took hackerrank as a serious signal rather than as a tool for recent graduates to track interview prep progress. Surely it has all the same issues AI does: you have no way of verifying that the person who takes the interview actually is responsible for that signal.

I don't see AI as a serious threat to the interview process unless your interview process looks a lot like hackerrank.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#173

Post by ilc »

ttyprintk wrote: post #116
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.

And if the Principal is good, they should stand up and say exactly why the code is bad. If there's a reason to laugh because it is cliche bad, they should say so.

If someone gave me code with

if (x = 7) { ... } as part of a C eval.

Yeah, you'll get a sarcastic response back because I know it is testing code.

What I think people ignore is that personality matters. Especially at the higher levels. If you are a Principal SWE you have to be able to stand up to a CEO and say "No, sir. I think you are wrong. This is why." In a diplomatic way. Or sometimes. Less than diplomatic, depending on the CEO.

One manager that hired me was trying to figure me out. So he said (and I think he was honest at the time). "You got the job as long an you aren't an axe murderer."

To which I replied deadpan: "I hope I hid the axe well." (To be clear to all reading, I have never killed someone, nevermind with an axe! Hi FBI, NSA, CIA and pals!)

Got the job, and we got along great, I operated as his right hand.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#174

Post by mr_toad »

ramon156 wrote: post #64
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.

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 written code for hobby projects. It’s mostly HTML, JavaScript and Bash.

I’m a data engineer, so at work I mostly use SQL, Python and Bash. There’s not much overlap.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#175

Post by askonomm »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #83
michpoch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And so that self-selects for people who already are unemployed then, right? Most developers I know (including myself) look for a new job while still having a job, as to not create a financial hole in-between. I'd be curious if that doesn't then end up with lower quality candidates who ended up unemployed to begin with?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#176

Post by ghaff »

tempodox wrote: post #167
ghaff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hiring has been shifted to HR Well, unless you know sufficiently senior people. But I suspect that is a deeply unsatisfactory answer to many people in this forum. My long term last, only technically-adjacent, job came through a combination of knowing execs, having gone to the same school as my ultimate manager, and knowing various other people involved. (And having a portfolio of public work.)

Personal networks only disadvantage those who have none.

I suspect many people who don't have strong networks for whatever reason resent that. To which you could probably tack on not having gone to the "right" schools or having a public portfolio.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#177

Post by ainewsinterest »

nrb wrote: post #82
OutOfHere wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is a fair point.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#178

Post by placardloop »

nottorp wrote: post #143
perlgeek wrote: post #132

Company A wants to hire an engineer, an AI could solve all their tech interview questions, so why not hire that AI instead? There's very likely a real answer to that question, and that answer should shape the way that engineer should be assessed and hired. For example, it could be that the company wants the engineer to do some kind of assessment whether a feature should be implemented at all, and if yes, in what way.…

Problem is, company A doesn't need an engineer to solve those interview questions but real problems.

“Real problems” aren’t something that can be effectively discussed in the time span of an interview, so companies concoct unreal problems that are meant to be good indicators.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#179

Post by mattkrause »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #166

The death of shitty interviews has been greatly exaggerated. AI might make e.g. your leetcode interview less predictive than it previously would have been. But was it predictive in the first place? I don't think most interviews are written by people thinking in those terms at all. If your method of interviewing never depended on data suggesting it actually, you know, worked in the first place, why would it matter if…

> A lot of these people … just suck.

Another possibility is that their job subtly drifted.

I wrote a lot of code as a grad student but my first interviews afterward were disasters. Why? Because I’d spent the last few months writing my thesis and the few months before that writing a very specific kinds of code (signal processing, visualization) that were miles away from generic interview questions like “Make the longest palindrome.”

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#180

Post by dahart »

LunicLynx wrote: post #158

It’s simple don’t have a tech interview that does not relate to the job. Show code, ask questions about it that requires opinion.

This oft repeated talking point lacks perspective on what companies want and how interviews work. It also doesn’t address the AI problem.

Interviews are screening for multiple things, not just the ability to do one specific technical job. More often than not, technical coding ability is not even at the top of the priority list. Interviews are looking for well-rounded candidates who can do more than 1 job. Companies want to know if you can change jobs easily, they want to know if you’re average, better than the average programmer, or exceptional. They want to know if you’ll make a good manager after a few years, how good you are with people, how well you prioritize and communicate.

I had a professor in college that graded tests with the median skewed low, centered on a D. He complained that the usual practice of putting it on C or B made it so he could clearly see the difference between F-, F, and D- students, while the A students were all clumped together. He wanted to identify the hard workers and superstars in the class, see who was A vs A+ vs A++. It freaked everyone out when grades came out much lower than expected, but he renormalized at the end and people with test scores in the Cs and Ds got As and Bs in the class.

Be careful what you wish for. It’s competitive right now and interviews that limit screening to ability to do basic job-level coding and don’t screen for knowledge and soft skills and exceptionalism will make it harder for people who are good to demonstrate they’re better than people who are mediocre or use AI. Is that what you want?

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