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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#221

Post by ghaff »

apwell23 wrote: post #213
ghaff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

also hard on introverts who already get punished in workplaces that promote ppl based on proximity and visiblity.

Well, they also promote people based on impact and, with rare exceptions, if you're holed up in a corner someplace you're probably not having a huge amount of impact.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#222

Post by bluefirebrand »

Clubber wrote: post #94
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 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…

> Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure."

My answer would be along the lines of "It's 2025, no one has talked about procedures for 20+ years"

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#223

Post by williamdclt »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #150
jghn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is harder than it sounds, although I agree in a vacuum the idea is a good one. So much value of the code review comes from having actual knowledge of the larger context. Mundane stuff like formatting quirks and obvious bad practices should be getting hoovered up by the linters anyways. But what someone new may *not* know is that this cruft is actually important for some arcane reason. Or that it's important that…

You can do code review exercises without larger context. An example from the interview: the code included a python web API and SQL schema. Some obvious points I noticed were no input validation, string concatenating for the database access (SQL injection), no input scrubbing (XSS), based on the call pattern there were some missing indices, a few bad data type choices (e.g. integer for user ID), a possible infinite lo…

> no input validation, string concatenating for the database access (SQL injection), no input scrubbing (XSS), based on the call pattern there were some missing indices, a few bad data type choices (e.g. integer for user ID), a possible infinite loop in one case

I'd say all this stuff is junior-level (maybe ~mid for things like user ID integers). It's just a checklist of "obvious bad practices", it doesn't require experience.

The senior stuff is much higher-level: domain modelling, code architecture, consistency guarantees, system resilience... system design in general.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#224

Post by ukd1 »

karaterobot wrote: post #184

The best interview process I've ever been a part of involved pair programming with the person for a couple hours, after doing the tech screening having a phone call with a member of the team. You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job, and be a good coworker. This process worked so well, it created the best team, most productive team I've worked on in 20+ years in the industry,…

Pairing on something close to whatever real work they'd be doing, but familiar to the applicant is my favorite way to evaluate someone (e.g. choose a side project, pre agree adding a feature).

I don't care if someone uses modern tools (like AI assists), google, etc - e.g. "open book" - as that's the how they want to work. Evaluating their style of thinking / solving problems, comms, and output is the win.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#225

Post by Izkata »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #85
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

> Art doesn't have source code.

Drawn art absolutely does have something like it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learntodraw/comments/nibjjn/any_adv...

It could be considered similar to scaffolding or boilerplate in code, except usually none of this is visible in the end product, while the code boilerplate is always there. These lines are drawn light and completely covered up by the end result - sometimes even manually erased depending on the medium.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#226

Post by perlgeek »

siva7 wrote: post #206
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?

Maybe.

Maybe now, or maybe in a year or two, AI coding tools will be good enough that a single semi-technical person can be Product Manager for a small product, and implement all the feature through AI/LLM tools.

Probably not for something of the complexity of Google Maps, but for a simpler website with some interactive elements, that could work.

But then, this was just an example. There can be lots of reasons that companies still need engineers, my point was that they need to think about these reasons, and then use these reasons to decide how to select their engineers.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#227

Post by Apocryphon »

Rhapso wrote: post #198
nottorp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem And do you frame the problem like that when giving interviews? Or the candidates are led to believe working code is expected?

Do I? yes. I also teach my students that the goal of an interview is to convince the interviewer you are a good candidate, not to answer the questions correctly. Sometimes they correlate. Give the customer what they need not what they asked for. Do I see others doing so? sadly no. I feel like a lot of the replies to my comment didn't read to the end, I agree the implementation is bad. The whiteboard just isn't actual…

The replies are addressing the reality of the interview landscape that fails to live up to your theory of how whiteboarding interviews should be.

It's all well and good that you and other "wise interviewer" commenters on HN actually grok what the point of interviews are, but you are unicorns in the landscape.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#228

Post by diob »

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.…

It's because coding interview questions aren't so much assessing job skills as much as they are thinly veiled IQ tests.

I think if it was socially acceptable they'd just do the latter.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#229

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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.

> Is there a site where one could review some code and see what many others say about it and their experience level?

https://codereview.stackexchange.com

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#230

Post by CharlieDigital »

williamdclt wrote: post #223
CharlieDigital wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do code review exercises without larger context. An example from the interview: the code included a python web API and SQL schema. Some obvious points I noticed were no input validation, string concatenating for the database access (SQL injection), no input scrubbing (XSS), based on the call pattern there were some missing indices, a few bad data type choices (e.g. integer for user ID), a possible infinite lo…

> no input validation, string concatenating for the database access (SQL injection), no input scrubbing (XSS), based on the call pattern there were some missing indices, a few bad data type choices (e.g. integer for user ID), a possible infinite loop in one case I'd say all this stuff is junior-level (maybe ~mid for things like user ID integers). It's just a checklist of "obvious bad practices", it doesn't require ex…

You can do all of that in a code review; the point is that it actually allows for better stratification because you can incorporate different challenges in a reasonable time frame and without having to do take homes and get working environments (you'll end up reviewing their code anyways in a followup session).
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