AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

I spent the next 8 years married (still married) and raising two step sons and spent the last two and half years traveling extensively including over a year doing the “digital nomad thing”.

We have been averaging getting on a plane to do something on average over a dozen times a year since late 2021.

Of course the Covid lockdown slowed us down for two years.

When I am at home in Florida, I go swimming at one of the multiple pools or workout at one of the two gyms that’s part of our complex. It’s warm enough most of the year at least during the day.

During the weekends, I go downstairs and hang out at the bar and just sip soda while hanging out with my friend the bartender and whoever else is down there.

I “retired my wife” in 2020 when I was 46 and she was 44 8 years into my marriage so she could pursue her passion projects and we could pick up and travel as often as we wanted to - the joys of working remotely.

Are you familiar with busybox ?

What worked well for me was that I made it very clear to my manager, a man who I trust, that I would not be able to provide him with a boolean pass/fail result. I couldn't provide him any objective measure of their ability or performance. What I could do was hang out with the canditates for an hour while we discussed some concepts I thought were important in my position. From that conversation I would be able to provide him a ranking along with a personal evaluation on whether I would personally like to work with the candidate.

I prepared some example problems that I worked for myself a bit. Then I went into the interviews with those problems and let them direct those same explorations of the problem. Some of them took me on detours I hadn't taken on my own. Some of them needed a little nudge at times. I never took specific notes, but just allowed my brain to get a natural impression of the person. I was there to get to know them, not administer an exam.

I feel like the whole experience worked super well. It felt casual, but also very telling. It was almost like a focused date. Afterwards I discussed my impression of the candidates with my manager to ensure the things I was weighing was somewhat commutable to what he desired.

All in all it was a very human process. It must have taken an enormous amount of trust from my manager to allow me the discretion to make a subjective judgment. I was extremely surprised at how clearly I was able to delineate the people, but also how that delineation shifted depending on which axis we evaluated. A simple pass/fail technical interview would have missed that image of a full person.

They asked me to review a function for a residential housing payment workflow, which I'm unfamiliar with. From an actual snippet of their bad production code (which has since been rewritten). In Go which I've never used (I've never professionally used the language that doesn't have error handling built-in, for example).

I had to spend more than half of my time asking questions to try and get enough context about Go error handling techniques, the abstractions they were using which we only had the import statements to and the way that the external system was structured to handle these requests to review the hundred lines of code they shared.

I was able to identify a bunch of things incidentally, like making all of the DB changes as part of a transaction so that we don't get inconsistent state or breaking up the function into sub functions, because the names were extremely long, but this was so far outside my area of expertise and comfort zone that I felt like shooting in the dark.

So just like any other interview style, they can be done very poorly.

Outside of work, I just don't have the motivation to code anything. I don't have sufficient at-home problems where code will fix them.

In an interview, ask me anything! ... except to show you code on Github.