AI killed the tech interview. Now what? • Hacker News Board

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#351

Post by ghaff » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

floating-io wrote: post #237

ghaff wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or it gets outsourced which is what often happens.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#352

Post by FirmwareBurner » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

acureau wrote: post #159

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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'…

Sounds like you just treat programming more like engineering than art. Some art does have source code, there is plenty of room for creative exploration with code.

>there is plenty of room for creative exploration with code.

That also pays the bills? That's not my experience. That's what hobbies are for. Jobs are for paying bills. Paying bills with hobbies an art are a luxury for privileged.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#353

Post by andyjohnson0 » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #350

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,…

Some of us find the prospect of pairing with an unknown person in an unknown environment, and against the clock, to be very stressful.

Anecdote:

I've been interviewing recently and got through to the last round (of five...) with an interesting company. I knew the interview involved pairing, but I didn't expect: two people sitting behind me while I sat on a wobbly stool at a standing desk, trying to use a sticky wired mouse and a non-UK keyboard, and a very bright monitor (I normally use dark mode). They had a screen recorder running, and a radio was on in the next room.

I totally bombed it. I suspect just the two people behind me would have been enough though.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#354

Post by kagakuninja » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

sulami wrote: post #19

I've been arguing that "AI" has very little impact on meaningful technical interviews, that is ones that don't test for memorization of programming trivia: https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/llm-interviews/

We have been interviewing people who are obviously using covert AI helper tools. Ask them a question and they respond with coherent response, but they are just reading off of a window we can't see.

In some cases it is obvious they are blathering a stream of words they don't understand. But others are able to hold something resembling a coherent conversation. We also have to allow for the fact that most people we interview aren't native English speakers, and are talking over Teams. It can be very hard to tell if they are cheating.

Asking questions to probe their technical skills is essential, otherwise you are just selecting for people who are good at talking and self promotion. We aren't just asking trivia questions.

We also give a simple code challenge, nothing difficult. If they have a working knowledge of the language, they should be able to work through the problem in 30 minutes, and we let them use an IDE and google for things like regex syntax.

Some of them are obviously using an AI, since they just start typing in a working solution. But in theory they could be a Scala expert who remembers how to use map plus a simple regex...

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#355

Post by masterj » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

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.

> 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

You... might want to think about what implicit biases you might be bringing here

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#356

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #109

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…

> 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. The problem is: there is a very negative incentive to give honest answers. If I were to answ…

> Yes, I would have loved to stay in academia, but I switched to industry because of the bad job prospects in academia - this is not what interviewers want to hear. :-(

I would love to hear that from a candidate I'm interviewing. Who can't relate to the distinction between your ideal job and the job that will actually pay you money?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#357

Post by rachofsunshine » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

duck2 wrote: post #343

rachofsunshine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out with our interview bookings so that people know what to expect. The real problems we ask are very similar to it. Do you feel like there's anything there that any reasonably skilled programmer shouldn't be ab…

That's not a typical leetcode problem though. Most companies ask things like "solve this slightly modified knapsack problem" which takes 5 minutes if you know the solution and 50 minutes if you don't.

Yeah, it's very intentionally not a typical leetcode problem, precisely because leetcode is nearly worthless for screening people these days. I was replying to someone who seemed to be objecting to my opinion of some candidates' skills on the basis that maybe they just didn't know the specific thing we ask.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#358

Post by trhway » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

codr7 wrote: post #280

m11a wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hiring doesn't scale, period; deal with it.

it isn't about scale. It is about core principle of the tech hiring - all the companies hire only the best. Not only it is impossible to scale, it is plain impossible. Even if all the companies hired only "above the average" it would still be a pretty tall order :)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#359

Post by solarmist » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #325

codr7 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, been there, done that; wannabe FAANGs are the worst.

At least those are typically honest about what they try to be and give a very clear signal, right at the interview time. It's much worse when the interview gives you different vibes (and expectations) than the actual day-to-day work.

I've had both I've had ones that only tell you what the next interview looks like. Unless you specifically prior it out of the recruiter's hands.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#360

Post by nomel » Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #278

placardloop wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 You just described a contrived, “unreal” problem. > I'm also not sure what the alternative is? Just not hiring? The alternative is to come up with questions that are representative of skills related to “real problems”, as you just did, and u…

I've had some success with just describing what we're doing and seeing what the candidates ask. Mind, I work in very small companies and never had to give input for filling 10 positions at once... just one at a time.

I've tried this, but it becomes very hard to justify, with clarity, why it's a yes or no in the feedback, in a way that can be understood well as it passes through all of those up the chain that are involved with hiring.

And, I've also had people speak very well, doing great with the verbal explanation and questions, even good pseudo code, and then be unable to write a simple for loop, of any kind, in any language. These people also often have a resume full of short runs.

So, I structure mine around a, fixed, work related problem that lets me clearly justify the yes/no in a way that upper management can stomach, but then just bias my feedback a bit based on the "personal interpretation" things like what you describe (which I think are usually better indicators).

Also, resumes are 90% fiction, from what I've seen, especially from certain demographics (not allowed to perceive that though). I don't bother believing them or talking about them, unless there's time after.