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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#391

Post by Dylan16807 »

pockmarked19 wrote: post #297
janoc wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that 99% of engineers aren't being hired by Google nor being paid on comparable levels. So why is Google relevant to this in any way?

> Except that 99% of engineers aren't being hired by Google nor being paid on comparable levels. Sucks for you, then. Why are you on a thread about Google-style interviews?

> Why are you on a thread about Google-style interviews?

For the same reason you wrote "Google-style". Because this thread is specifically about those interviews happening not at Google.

Oh, maybe you misunderstood their question. When they suggested Google wasn't relevant, they meant the company culture at Google itself because that's what you were talking about.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#392

Post by nickff »

solarmist wrote: post #380
samr71 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave. Was path dependency for careers always this bad?

I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays. And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.

>"And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience."

This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#393

Post by jitix »

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 used to love getting to know the interviewer and doing things like that but IMO the market has shifted fundamentally on both ends for this to be effective anymore for most SaaS roles. This is anecdotal for US/Canada tech market over the past 10 years so YMMV.

Developers Side: Since developers don't have job security anymore (at least for those who work on common languages like Go, Python, Java and Typescript) they are better off learning and keeping in touch with leetcode and system design questions, looking for new opportunities and interviewing in "batch mode" when looking for a job. The idea is to clear as many interviews as possible using the same concepts, get in and make money asap before you get laid off. No incentive for collaboration or for fulfilling but esoteric stuff like Haskell and Scala. Career security > Job security.

Companies Side: On the other end software companies have less trust in developers staying long term so they want to make the interview process as quick and risk free as possible. In essence they are betting that by perusing 100s of resumes and hiring someone who seemingly knows CS concepts they can get some value out of them before they leave. Standardized tests/vetting > team fit.

TLDR; The art is gone from this job, its become akin to management consulting or investment banking. Quality and UX seems to be regressing across the board as a result.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#394

Post by IshKebab »

endemic wrote: post #189
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 did this once and it was obvious the interviewer wanted me to point out his pet "gotcha." Not a great experience.

Yeah it's really tempting when you discover an interesting fact to think "that would make an interesting interview question" and turn the interview into some kind of pub quiz. Happens with all forms of technical interview though. I mean 90% of leetcode questions are "this one weird trick".

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#395

Post by mempko »

I cannot emphasize this enough. Coding is the EASY part of writing software. You can teach someone to code in a couple of months. Interviews that focus on someone's ability to code are just dumb.

What you need to do is see how well they can design before writing software. What is their process for designing the software they make? Can they architect it correctly? How do they capture user's mental models? How do they deal with the many "tops" that software has?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#396

Post by ghaff »

solarmist wrote: post #390
ghaff wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a more mature industry. I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.

My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers. Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.

Plenty of server software being developed in the early 2000s. (Though minicomputers were mostly off the scene by then.)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#398

Post by apwell23 »

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.

If it was all about impact then ppl wouldn't be paying thousands of dollars to learn to play golf with their bosses. But you knew that already.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#399

Post by swatcoder »

solarmist wrote: post #390
ghaff wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a more mature industry. I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.

My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers. Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.

Pretty much.

Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc

Oh, wait... maybe not!

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#400

Post by toofso »

If using AI is cheating then one solution as the author mentions is have the interview take place at an office but I'm surprised another approach isn't more readily available: having the candidate the the test remotely at a trusted 3rd party location.
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