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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#431

Post by jrochkind1 »

> Tech interviews are one of the worst parts of the process and are pretty much universally hated by the people taking them.

True.

> One of the things we can do, however, is change the nature of the interviews themselves. Coding interviews today are quite basic, anywhere from FizzBuzz, to building a calculator. With AI assistants, we could expand this 10x and have people build complete applications. I think a single, longer interview (2 hours) that mixes architecture and coding will probably be the way to go.

Oh.... yeah, that sounds just... great.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#432

Post by dilyevsky »

solarmist wrote: post #279
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…

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.

At a former gig we had a newly hired ex-facebook employee give notice within a month because she didn't like that dev setup had bugs that devs themselves had to fix. At fb they obviously can spend millions of dollars for a whole team that ensures that working dev env is always a button click away, a startup (even a scaleup) usually can't afford to. This is just one example out of many I can tell...

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#433

Post by solarmist »

nickff wrote: post #415
solarmist wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That definitely massively accelerated it but you’re looking way too short term that’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years.

I agree that other industries are not YET at the point where software is , but you’re not looking hard enough if you don’t see the short tenures compared to the 25-30 years they used to have.

And yeah, it might be in an equilibrium now, but how long can it stay in an equilibrium? I’d guess at max 10 to 15 years.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#434

Post by Dylan16807 »

serial_dev wrote: post #417
Dylan16807 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appro…

But I'm talking about the idea of pair programming for an hour or two. Why can't the standardized test still involve that? What doesn't "scale" about it?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#435

Post by downrightmike »

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.

*weak

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#436

Post by samr71 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #427
samr71 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have different definitions of "marginally qualified"? Idk, I feel I'm a decent engineer - I can certainly do whatever leetcode medium they throw at me, as much as this counts of anything - and can actually code, but I still get maybe 1 callback per 50 applications. Does "marginally qualified" mean "Ivy League Competitive Programmer PhD" or something?

The GP is still passing through hundreds of people, dozens of them capable, until he reaches somebody that convinces him of their competence. You were passed down because you weren't convincing enough. Or maybe he is getting resumes from a channel that has been victim of machine-gun filling, and there indeed thousands of incompetent people posting resumes into every channel and just half a dozen real applicants. TBF,…

I have only a resume to convince them. I have job experience at major companies, with examples of what I've built when there, personal projects I've made, a github link, a great GPA from a good school.

And I know similar Junior-mid people in the same boat. We can all do Fizzbuzz, we've all built things, and somehow we're not getting interviews, but people that can't do Fizzbuzz are.

Do thousands of incompetents also machine-gun apply to, say, mechanical engineering, accounting, marketing, HR, or finance gigs? Is it just tech?

Something isn't adding up.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#437

Post by solarmist »

ghaff wrote: post #424
solarmist wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I basically agree with your edit. There was a lot more fluidity among roles and even just moving into computer roles from other engineering (and even non-engineering) fields. But that's not really what you wrote initially.

Fair

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#438

Post by mparnisari »

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.

That process might work for your company precisely because you are not FAANG. You don't get hundreds of applicants that are dying to get in, so people don't have that strong of a motivation to do anything it takes (including lying) to get the job.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#439

Post by mikenei »

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…

The demo video on your homepage looks great! If I may ask, what recording software did you use to create and edit the video?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#440

Post by shihab »

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 biggest victims of these non-scalable process is people without a good network. As an intl PhD student, I am that person.

So now I have this weird dynamic: I get interview calls only from FAANG companies, the ones with the manpower to do your so called "cursed" scalable interviews. But the smaller companies or startups, ones who are a far better fit for my specialized kills, never call me. You need to either "know someone" or be from a big school, or there is zero chance.

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