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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#411

Post by scarface_74 »

drdaeman wrote: post #387
scarface_74 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with people and communication can be learned. I get it. By nature I was very much an introvert except for certain scenarios when I was in my comfort zone until at least my mid 30s. I was an only child, the stereotypical short, fat kid with a computer growing up in the 80s (still short, became a gym rat, part time fitness instructor and only stopped the latter as my other obligations became greater). Horrible…

> But you can only add so much value to an organization typing on a keyboard. In my understanding, non-junior software development jobs never were about typing on the keyboard. Senior software engineer is a fancy name for a problem solver, and code is just a specialized tool they can build to possibly achieve the goal. It always was about talking to stakeholders, figuring out what the heck they actually want today, h…

The way that most tech companies define levels - yes I’m simplifying slightly. I’ll provide citations:

Junior - you are told what to do (business objective) and how to do it (technical).

Mid - you are told what to do (business objective). But you are expected to use your experience to figure out the “how”. You should be able to lead a decently complicated feature/epic/work stream either by yourself or with others and mentoring other juniors.

Senior - You are expected to lead major projects that involve multiple epics with multiple developers, talk to “the business”, disambiguate, deal with XYProblems, communicate trade offs between time, cost, meeting requirements, etc. Now you also start having to deal with cross team coordination.

Staff - cross team impact, dealing much more with business strategy and setting technical direction.

As an IC, the only things you have at your disposal are your relationships and reputation. Both require soft skills.

Leveling guidelines:

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#412

Post by ghaff »

apwell23 wrote: post #398
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.

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.

Is closing deals on the golf course even still a thing these days? I suppose it probably is in some circles but I haven't seen it in a couple of decades of tech industry life when it was more likely to be fun runs or skiing.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#413

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #207
dingnuts wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the comparison to natural languages is what is whack. If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax. The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single l…

> If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax. If you understand the grammatical topics that a natural language picks, all you have to learn is what word transformation rules map to those concepts, and the natural language's vocabulary. > The comparison to natural languages…

> If you understand the grammatical topics that a natural language picks, all you have to learn is what word transformation rules map to those concepts, and the natural language's vocabulary.

Yes, and then do that in real time while you're having a conversation with someone who's been learning the language since they were a baby. It is an unreasonable comparison.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#414

Post by hassleblad23 »

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,…

Pair programming on what problem though? I dont think many companies would want an outsider to work on their codebase.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#415

Post by nickff »

solarmist wrote: post #405
nickff wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Which was caused by cost cutting measures, MBA disease, in companies to begin with. We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s. It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire. It’s an untenable position to not tr…

I think the primary stimulus which creating the “job hopping culture” was actually the hot labor market for software developers. Other fields experienced real ‘cost-cutting’, without resulting in a lot of ‘job-hopping’.

I agree that this situation is undesirable, but it seems to be stable, somewhat like the result of repeated play of the prisoner’s dilemma.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#416

Post by solarmist »

swatcoder wrote: post #399
solarmist wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

So you’re saying that none of those roles could be cross hired in the early 2000s between any of the other roles?

That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#417

Post by serial_dev »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #381
joshdavham wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've (unfortunately) been interviewing the last two months and the main pattern that I've noticed is that a) big companies have terrible interview processes while b) small companies and startups are great at interviewing. Big companies need to hire tons of people and interview even more so they need some sort of scalable process for it. An early stage startup can just ask you about your past projects and pair program…

What exactly does "scalable" mean here? If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?

In a small company, you can tell your buddy “just have a chat with the candidate and if you like them and you think they can do the job, hire them”.

If the person interviewing your candidates messes up, you’ll know soon enough. In a large company, the bad people will take over and your company is dying a slow death.

That approach doesn’t work on a large scale. Some interviewers are too nitpicky, elitist, others approve anyone who uses the same language as them for side projects. Some are racists, sexist, or have other kinds of biases. Some might have a crush on the candidate. Sometimes the interviewer thinks about their own task while they squeeze in an interview. In some countries, “undoing” a bad hire is hard, so they need to make sure that the candidate can work on any team (or at least on multiple teams reasonably well).

IMO for large companies it makes sense to standardize the interview process.

Also, in my opinion grinding leetcode is also a good personality check for FAANG hires: it shows the candidate can suck it up, study hundreds of hours, and do whatever they need to do to pass an arbitrary test, even if they themselves think it’s a broken process. The larger the company, the more this quality matters in candidates as they will need to deal with a lot of things they will probably not like.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#418

Post by no_wizard »

erikerikson wrote: post #385
BobaFloutist wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, extroverts also have to develop professional skills, sometimes even things that don't come naturally to them.

No question. Yet, social connection seems worth 10x or 100x competence in any particular circumstance and the effects compound. There are some real benefits from and needs to be prosocial and socially competent but I've regularly seen social competent but technically incompetent people advance far over technically competent but less socially agenda driving people (that are nonetheless socially competent). This only g…

What do you mean by 'low level'?

Are you talking about a traditional Staff / Principal engineering role or something different?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#419

Post by whiplash451 »

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,…

It's a super interesting approach, and if you put a strong filter before it (e.g. intense non-BS Q&A), the whole thing could be high-throughput.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#420

Post by apwell23 »

ghaff wrote: post #412
apwell23 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is closing deals on the golf course even still a thing these days? I suppose it probably is in some circles but I haven't seen it in a couple of decades of tech industry life when it was more likely to be fun runs or skiing.

closing deals with your boss? what does that even mean.
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