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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#331

Post by rmah »

endemic wrote: post #186
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…

I think the argument is that for a good chunk of business work, you don't need to use the "interesting"/"deep" concepts. Sure, you'll need time to adapt to the idioms of the language you're using, but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.

But companies don't pay high salaries for the 80% mundane and easy tasks you do day to day. They pay for the 20% that is challenging and especially for that 1% of problems that occur only once every few months or years. If that 80% was 100% of the job then the company could pay 1/2 to 1/3rd the amount by outsourcing it.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#332

Post by superb_dev »

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,…

This is how my team hires and it’s incredible.

I think what makes it work is that our code pair is pretty low stakes. I was told that I didn’t have to finish the problem and I was free to use whatever tools or language I needed. They just wanted to see how I work and collaborate.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#334

Post by fdlaks »

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…

Unfortunately I used to think this was the main purpose of the interview as well, but have been proven wrong time and time again.

The only thing that matters in most places is getting to the optimal solution quickly. It doesn't matter if you explain your thought process or ask clarifying questions, just get to the solution and answer the time and space complexity correctly and you pass.

Like others have said I think this is a symptom of the sheer number of people applying and needing to go through the process, there is no time for nuance or evaluating people on if you would actually like to work with them or not.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#335

Post by slg »

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,…

>The best interview process I've ever been a part of involved pair programming with the person for a couple hours... You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job

There is something funny about the "best interview process" taking "a couple hours" despite giving you the answer "within a few minutes". Seems like even the best process is a little broken.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#336

Post by solarmist »

nickff wrote: post #324
solarmist wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this all the time, but I have yet to experience it. It may be because the small companies that I interview with are all startups, but I have yet to be able to get a call back from any other kind of small company. And the startups I do interview with have a full FAANG interview loops. There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.

> ”There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.” Many smaller companies have noticed that former and wannabe FAANGers are looking for FAANG-type jobs, and are not good fits in their niche. Small companies often have more uncertainty, fewer clear objectives, less structure, and often lower pay. They’re not a good substitute for megacorps.

And then there's people like me who have been at startups, midsize companies, tiny small businesses and FAANGs.

Not everyone at a FAANG is purely motivated by the amount of money that they can get.

I’m looking for a smaller company because I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#337

Post by rmah »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #265
Shorel wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Languages are largely teachable, it's just syntax and keywords. That's only true for a subset of programming languages, and it requires you to already know how to program in at least another language of the same family. Knowing Java will not help you with Haskell, but it will help you with C#. I have to deal with students using AI to cheat on homework and exams, and I can't allow them to not even learn the basic co…

I'm not arguing to let people cheat with AI. I'm saying asking people to write code in interviews is useless.

It's not useless because some people will lie and cheat. Over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of people and a substantial minority could not write even the simplest code. Many will say they would be able to filter out such people after a conversation. But, IMO, the fact that they are still able to get hired at some places shows how wrong that often is.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#338

Post by cryptozeus »

One option is to make the interviews harder and let candidates use ai to see how they can work with ai and actually build working product. They will be using ai in the job anyway so let them use it instead of asking stupid algorithm questions to sort an array

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#339

Post by tonymet »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #314
tonymet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you be able to document this negative fit in an impartial way when rejecting a protected class?

You just send out a generic decline, and document it as there's a better candidate fit for the role. I'm not sure if you guys have been in charge of hiring, but there's no real alternative. In my most recent experience, we had one open position, and after interviewing 10 candidates, 3 of them were basically identical in terms of technical qualifications. How do you choose one over the other, other than the "vibes"? A…

a large company doing this (no documentation of a skills gap) who gets subpoenaed would lose 10/10 times

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#340

Post by jimbokun »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #333

Maybe we don't need employers. Maybe we need a bunch of 1-person companies. I don't think AI is yet the force multiplier that makes that feasible for the masses, but who knows what things will look like in a few years.

That is the end point of AI in the economy, until we are removed from the economy entirely.

Everyone on the planet is a one person startup, using AI and robotics to do all the actual work.

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