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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#461

Post by codr7 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #403
trhway wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

There is no one-size-fits-all for software developers. Different companies are looking to hire people at different experience/pay levels, with different skill sets, etc. Just as with dating, most companies are also going to have some understanding of their own "attractiveness", and not try to date out of their league. FAANG companies offering industry leading compensation packages and prestige are in a position to be…

Employers trying to hire for fit and culture has resulted in the most inhumane and counterproductive processes I've witnessed. If that's what you really want to do, let the person work for at least a month in the team.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#462

Post by namuol »

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,…

Does your company operate the same way? I.e. is most, or at least a large chunk of engineering done as pair-programming?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#463

Post by solarmist »

dilyevsky wrote: post #432
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.

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...

And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.

My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#464

Post by solarmist »

codr7 wrote: post #456
drdaeman wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only way to test actual work is to do actual work, should be obvious but here we are.

It is obvious, but it’s also very time-consuming. You can’t solve ambiguous open ended problems in a set amount of time while being watched closely.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#465

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

abenga wrote: post #368
jimbokun wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the point of humans (other than the ai and robotics ip owners) in this scenario?

Probably the same as it ever was. I couldn't tell you what that is, but it never had anything to do with economics anyway.

Having a job has always been a necessary evil. If the time is coming when that changes, all the better. If we can't figure out how to behave in the presence of plenty, we don't deserve utopia anyway.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#466

Post by ghaff »

codr7 wrote: post #461
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no one-size-fits-all for software developers. Different companies are looking to hire people at different experience/pay levels, with different skill sets, etc. Just as with dating, most companies are also going to have some understanding of their own "attractiveness", and not try to date out of their league. FAANG companies offering industry leading compensation packages and prestige are in a position to be…

Employers trying to hire for fit and culture has resulted in the most inhumane and counterproductive processes I've witnessed. If that's what you really want to do, let the person work for at least a month in the team.

Provisional hires (which often exist in theory but they're pretty much a formality in general) don't work for the most part. Lot of overhead for the company. And in many cases you're asking for the candidate to quit a job and possibly relocate on the possibility they'll get a new position assuming that they click in a short time interval.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#467

Post by e12e »

marcosdumay wrote: post #406
dingnuts wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is an interviewer problem, unless the candidate is totally silent. A candidate that can't ask questions isn't going to succeed, anyway. If the candidate will communicate with me, I will offer them a LOT of guidance. It is still very, very easy to tell who knows what they are doing and who does not. You give them a basic but domain-specific task, you give them whatever extra context they need to do it, and you wa…

A lot of good people will close-up and not voluntarily ask you any question if you put them under pressure. (What they automatically are on that exercise.) What is not to say that you are making anything wrong. But watch for bias there.

> A lot of good people will close-up and not voluntarily ask you any question if you put them under pressure.

This sounds like the kind engineer who won't push back or ask for clarification on unclear requirements - and happily spend a month solving a problem the business doesn't have.

So maybe seeing that at interview time is a good thing?

Might not mean the candidate doesn't fit - but can clarify what kind of roles would work?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#468

Post by shipscode »

1point3acres is massacring tech interviews right now. Having to pay $80/month to some China based website where NDA-protected interview questions are posted regularly, then being asked the same questions in the interview, seems insane.

It also feels like interviewers know this and assume you studied the questions, they seem incapable of giving hints, etc if you don't have the questions memorized.

AI is the least of it.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#469

Post by neilv »

> What are our options?

* Take a candidate's track record into account. Talk with them about it.

* Show that you're experienced yourself, by being able to tell something about what someone would be like to work with, by talking with them.

* Get a reputation for your company not tolerating dishonesty. If someone cheats in an interview and gets caught, they're banned there, all the interviewers will know, and the cheater might also start to get a reputation beyond that company. (Bonus: Company reputation for valuing honesty is attractive to people who don't want dishonest coworkers.)

* Treat people like a colleague, trying to assess whether it's a good match. You're not going to be perfectly aligned (e.g., the candidate or the company/role might be a bit out of the other's league right now), but to some degree you both want it to be a good match for both parties. Work as far as you can with that.

(Don't do this: Leetcode hazing, to establish the dynamic of them being there to dance for your approval, so hopefully they'll be negged, and will seek your approval, won't think critically about how competent and viable your self/team/company are, and will also be less likely to get uppity when you make a lowball offer. Which incidentally places the burden of rehearsing for Leetcode ritual performances upon the entire field, at huge cost.)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#470

Post by ryandrake »

jimbokun wrote: post #345
ryandrake wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really not that deep, I'm worried if you really cannot understand. I don't code outside of work, I'm not interested in doing it. I'm good at software engineering, not passionate about it. I have a bunch of other hobbies. There's no reason I'd have any code to show now or at any point in the future. It's like asking a dentist interview candidate to show you examples of fillings and crowns they did at home as a…

[flagged]

The equipment is irrelevant. What other career out there expects that practitioners also perform the work at home during their free time as a hobby?
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