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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#231

Post by vasco »

diob wrote: post #228
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.

A lot of companies have IQ like tests, in particular big consulting companies like McKinsey and so on.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#232

Post by absolutelastone »

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…

> The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving.

...while being closely monitored in a high-stakes performance in front of an audience of strangers judging them critically.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#233

Post by TransAtlToonz »

shermantanktop wrote: post #200
TransAtlToonz wrote: post #172

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.

Your “unless” covers a huge swath of this industry, at the low end and at the high end. Excluding places that do that leaves you with what exactly? Boutique shops filled with 20 year veterans?

What do you mean by the "high" end? I would consider this sort of interview style necessarily precluding such a place from being considered a high-quality work-place. Not only is it a miserable way to interview, it's not an effective signal for engineer quality beyond rapid code snippet production.

> Excluding places that do that leaves you with what exactly? Boutique shops filled with 20 year veterans?

We are on a VC forum—I imagine small shops focused on quality are quite common here.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#234

Post by jghn »

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…

Yes, ish.

In a previous job we did code review interviews. And went the route you said due to the problem I said. And yes, it's a lot better. But what also happened over time was that the bar slowly raised. Because over time the "harder" pieces of that session started to seem rote to interviewers, they became viewed as table stakes.

Mind you this is true of any interview scheme that has a problem solving component to it. I'm not saying that the code review style is extra bad here, just that it doesn't solve this problem.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#235

Post by williamdclt »

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

> Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project

School was years and years ago, and has nothing to do with my current skills.

From the people i personally know, most do _not_ have a hobby project, even fewer have hobby projects that showcases their technical skills. Nor should they be expected to. Most people have non-programming hobbies.

> I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show.

It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future.

> let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made

If I'm paid for it, sure why not I could do that. I won't love it but hey I'm looking for a job, I'll put the legwork in. But if this is the only or the "preferred" interview process for a company, I need to point out that it is deeply discriminatory as it advantages people who have the time to do a weekend project: for example it benefits males disproportionally (women do most of the care work in any country, also the most house work, also have a higher chance to be a single parent, all of which impacts the time they can put in a "weekend project" if they can do it at all).

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#236

Post by zemvpferreira »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #86
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

> 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 l…

The objective in an interview like this shouldn't be to grade the quality of the code you bring in any sort of scale, but to have a discussion about the options you took. In that sense, it really matters very little what you present as long as we can do a small back-and-forth that lets me into what sort of person you are.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#237

Post by floating-io »

ghaff wrote: post #221
apwell23 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reality is that the ones quietly holed up in the corner are usually doing all the unsexy maintenance-type work that the extroverts don't want to do (because it's not sexy).

Nobody cares about that work... until it doesn't get done. And so, nobody doing it gets promoted.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#238

Post by Tade0 »

michpoch wrote: post #149
Tade0 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> unless you're trying to make the non-tech parts of the role too interesting. Unless your role is trivial to replace with an LLM, you need to understand the business. Maybe not for really junior role, but everything above - you need to solve issues. Tech is just a tool.

You don't have to understand the entire business to start being productive. Particularly when you have experience from other, similar businesses.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#239

Post by 0_____0 »

placardloop wrote: post #208
0_____0 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see the issue here. Nobody expects candidates to build actual product during the interview. Having a (targeted, scope and time-limited) design discussion or giving your candidate some made-up context around an engineering cycle and then doing a retrospective with them are practical and useful ways to interview a candidate.

I'm also not sure what the alternative is? Just not hiring?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#240

Post by pockmarked19 »

absolutelastone wrote: post #232
Rhapso wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving. ...while being closely monitored in a high-stakes performance in front of an audience of strangers judging them critically.

That’s a skill you do need at Google if you’re going to survive. At least nowadays.
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