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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#301

Post by SJC_Hacker »

frankfrank13 wrote: post #262
vasco wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

McK's case interview is just as game-able as HackerRank style interviews. There are entire consulting clubs at many colleges that teach this exact interview style. It's true that it's harder (but not impossible) to use AI to help, but calling it an IQ-like test is true only as much as any other technical interview. That being said, McK did create an entire game that they claim can't be studied for ahead of time. If t…

> That being said, McK did create an entire game that they claim can't be studied for ahead of time. If the intention is to test true problem solving skills, then maybe that's roughly equivalent to a systems interview, which is hard(er) to cheat .

Sure, right up until someone leaks it

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#302

Post by codr7 »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #299
codr7 wrote: post #291

The current job market is so messed up that I honestly can't see myself getting a job until we hit a wall and people start using their brains again. I have 26 years of solid experience, been writing code since I was 8. There should be a ton of companies out there just dying to hire someone with that kind of experience. But I'm not perfect, no one is; and faking doesn't work very well for me.

I am with you! Been programming since I was 10 and have 20YoE. Many of my prototypes have grown into full fledged products, I have 40+ published papers, and I am regularly sought out for advice and help by those who know me. Everyone i have been, I am always told I am a good catch. However, I won't do leet coding. I want to hear about why I should come work for u. What about my works makes u think I could help ubm wi…

Part of the problem is there just aren't a lot of people out there who can correctly judge that level of experience, and looking up the spectrum tends to simply look weird.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#303

Post by thayne »

m11a wrote: post #248
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,…

I dislike pair programming interviews - as they currently exist - because they usually feel like a time-crunched exam. You don't realistically have the freedom to actually think as you would in actual pair programming. i.e. if you wag your tail chasing a bad end for 15 mins, this is a fail in an interview, but it's pretty realistic of real life work and entirely a non-problem. It's probably even good to test for at i…

Another problem is it is difficult to compare candidates whose interviews involved working on completely different problems.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#304

Post by tristramb »

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,…

"We need to run through hundreds of candidates per position, not a half dozen"

But you don't! You only need to find the first person who is good enough to do the job. You do not need to find the best person.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#305

Post by michaelt »

bdavisx wrote: post #97
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…

Here's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.

If I'm applying for a Java position and I claim to have Java experience on my resume, it's perfectly valid for them to ask me the difference between an int, an Integer, and a BigInteger.

But it's certainly not a universal question applicable to all programming languages.

Likewise, Clubber says in their post that their 'gotcha' question doesn't apply to most languages.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#306

Post by hobs »

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…

Yep, I've done a lot of SQL interviews and it is always interesting to see the folks who've crash and burned at code review and killed it at writing individual queries and sometimes the unexpected, the opposite happened, the person would fly through a code review and do really subpar on writing it, a signal I usually took to mean that the person was nervous as hell in the interview.

The two folks who showed this behavior I hired anyway (they were contractors so nbd) and they were excellent hires, so I really love the code review approach for climbing up bloom's taxonomy.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#307

Post by SJC_Hacker »

placardloop wrote: post #182
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…

+1 to all this. It still surprises me how many people, even after being in the industry for years, think the goal of any interview is to “write the best code” or “get the right answer”. What I want to know from an interview is if you can be presented an abstract problem and collaboratively work with others on it. After that, getting the “right” answer to my contrived interview question is barely even icing on the cak…

I think you're severely underestimating how much just about every software company has bought into the FAANG philosophy, and how many candidates they get who can answer those questions correctly.

Yes if you don't communicate clearly, you will get points deducted. But if you can't answer the question nearly perfectly, its basically an immediate fail.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#308

Post by alsobrsp »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #162
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 mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation Sir, you have attained dizzying intellectual heights that few men have. My comment is meant to be a compliment, not snarky. And indeed I have noticed that the best people I have encountered can often size people up accurately with very general questions often on unrelated subjects.

Thank you. I took it as both. :)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#309

Post by 542354234235 »

placardloop wrote: post #178
nottorp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On that, these unreal questions/problems are decent proxies for general knowledge for humans, but not for AI. Humans don't have encyclopedic knowledge, so questions on a topic can do a decent job of indicating a person has the broader depth of knowledge in that topic and could bring that to bear in a job. An AI can answer all the questions but can't bring that to bear in a job.

WE saw this last year with all the "AI can now pass the bar exam" articles, but that doesn't lead to them being able to do anything approaching practicing law, because AI failure modes are not the same as humans and can't be tested the same way.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#310

Post by justin_oaks »

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…

I like the code review approach and tried it a few times when I was needed to do interviews.

The great thing about code reviews is that there are LOTS of ways people can improve code. You can start with the basics like can you make this code run at all (i.e. compile) and can you make it create the right output. And there's also more advanced improvements like how to make the code more performant, more maintainable, and less error-prone.

Also, the candidates can talk about their reasoning about why or why not they'd change the code they're reviewing.

For example, you'd probably view the candidates differently based on their responses to seeing a code sample with a global variable.

Poor: "Everything looks fine here"

Good: "Eliminate that global variable. We can do that by refactoring this function to..."

Better: "I see that there's a global variable here. Some say they're an anti-pattern, and that is true in most but not all cases. This one here may be ok if ..., but if not you'll need to..."

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