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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#201

Post by Clubber »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #109
Clubber wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between…

> We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. The problem is: there is a very negative incentive to give honest answers. If I were to answ…

>The problem is: there is a very negative incentive to give honest answers. If I were to answer these questions honestly, I'd bring up some very interesting theorems (related to some deep algorithmic topics) that I proved in my PhD thesis.

This is unfortunate that you would get that response. FWIW, I would be interested in hearing all this in an interview and I would look at it favorably.

>What I want to point out is that this topic is much more subtle than a "one sentence answer".

Yes, you would definitely get bonus points for nuance. The one sentence answer was minimal. What it filters out are people who don't know anything about Delphi but applying for the job with highly embellished resumes hoping to get lucky. This was for software used in hospitals, so bugs or errant code could have pretty drastic consequences.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#202

Post by esafak »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #40

In my uni days, I respected professors who designed exam in a way where students can utilize whatever they could to complete the assignment, including internet, their notes, calculators, etc. I think the same applies to good tech interview. Company should adapt hiring process to friend with AI, not fight.

What would you suggest?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#203

Post by dahart »

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.…

This is a great point. Though what if the answer is that the company can hire that AI to solve a significant fraction of its actual problems? People who do the assessments and decide what features should look like are often called managers (product, engineering, etc.).

For a while I’ve been skeptical that the rate of hiring of engineers would change significantly because of LLMs, but I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m wrong and it’s already changing and companies are looking toward AI to lower costs and require fewer humans. In that case they are probably still going to want people who are technically exceptional - maybe even more so - but are able and willing to create, integrate, and babysit AI generated code, and also do PM and EM style feature management.

If companies are slowing hiring due to AI, I would expect interviews to get worse before they get better.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#204

Post by CharlieDigital »

ctkhn wrote: post #156
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…

Some of the most interesting interviews that I felt like accurately assessed my skills (even non-live ones) where debugging and code review assessments. I didn't get offers from these cos later on because I failed the leetcodes they did later in the process but I felt the review interviews were a good way to be assessed.

Even more relevant now that we are in the age of code generation as the powertool for productivity.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#205

Post by alexjplant »

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'…

> Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer, but people who didn't know it would give some pretty enlightening answers.

If you're asking this question (by virtue of the present-tense "is") in the year 2025 even though by your own admission

> it's not really relevant in today's languages.

then you aren't giving candidates a good impression. Even though I would have nailed this question I would have serious reservations about any job that would ask it in an interview because it means that the person interviewing me has more concern for legacy minutiae than broad technical knowledge or problem-solving skills.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#206

Post by siva7 »

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.…

> 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. Then you could, in an interview, give a bit of context and then ask the candidate to think out loud about an example feature request.

So a Product Manager?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#207

Post by aleph_minus_one »

dingnuts wrote: post #194
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. This is like "learning a natural language is just 'cramming vocabulary and grammar' - voila, you've become a fluent C1 speaker". :-) Seriously: if you argue this way, you have only seen a very biased set of programming languages, and additionally, your knowledge of these programming languages is very superficial (i.e. you have never gotten to the "inte…

No, the comparison to natural languages is what is whack. If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax. The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single l…

> If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax.

If you understand the grammatical topics that a natural language picks, all you have to learn is what word transformation rules map to those concepts, and the natural language's vocabulary.

> The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single language works.

There do exist books on this topic (though more commonly for language families). See for example

https://www.quadrilingual.com/

or the book

EuRom 5. Leggere e capire 5 lingue romanze

> That's not really how natural language works at all, but it does work with programming languages.

... it might give you some shallow knowledge in a very limited subset of programming languages.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#208

Post by placardloop »

0_____0 wrote: post #195
placardloop wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

Really? How short are your interviews, and how big are these Real Problems such that you can't get a sense of how your candidate would start to tackle them?

The “real problems” most companies want people to help solve involve the evolution of products that last for years, involve repeated design discussions, in depth research, and applying retrospective learning. I don’t need someone that can just glue a Rails API together. If I did, I can literally just download that from the internet for free.

If my problems could be solved in the time span of an interview, why would I waste my time doing that interview instead of just solving it?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#210

Post by piyuv »

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…

You should’ve asked them “do you also mimic google’s compensation?”
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