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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#491

Post by nottorp »

nomel wrote: post #360
nottorp wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> well as it passes through all of those up the chain that are involved with hiring

Yes, this mostly works in small organizations. I'm mostly in positions where I have to pass the feedback once, or at most twice up the chain.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#492

Post by creer »

firstplacelast wrote: post #478
marcosdumay wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Big companies and small need to agree on some standards and create qualifying exams that they will actually accept as proof of competence. Degrees somehow don't prove anything, experience doesn't, blah blah blah. It's exhausting to have to prove to interviewers that I'm not mentally disabled at every turn and it's a waste of time for everyone. Create certifications that actually count for something and aren't just a…

Watch out for what you ask for. Plenty of big vendors have certification programs. ... And for some combinations of field and vendor, they are red flags - rather than pre-validation. That is, far too many applicants have the certification but do not have the grounding knowledge without which the certification is sort of useless - potentially more dangerous than validating.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#493

Post by pizzafeelsright »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #333

Maybe we don't need employers. Maybe we need a bunch of 1-person companies. I don't think AI is yet the force multiplier that makes that feasible for the masses, but who knows what things will look like in a few years.

Anyone with skill and agency needs capital, exposure, resources.

Companies currently provide this.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#494

Post by JumpCrisscross »

m11a wrote: post #248
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 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…

> if you wag your tail chasing a bad end for 15 mins, this is a fail in an interview

Eh, if it's a reasonable bad end and you communicate through it, I wouldn't see it as a fail. Particularly if it's something I would have tried, too. (If it's something I wouldn't have thought of and it's a good idea, you're hired.)

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#495

Post by solarmist »

codr7 wrote: post #474
solarmist wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not talking about being watched closely, I'm talking about regular work and then making a decision. You have to leave people space to do their thing if you want to see what they're capable of.

Sure, that would be even better. But how would that even look?

In the best case applicants needs to apply multiple companies. Companies need to interview multiple applicants and have a way to compare those applicants.

Those are the most basic constraints I can think of. How do you make that cost tens of hours for each round?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#496

Post by gaoshan »

Our tech screen is having the candidate walk me through a small project that I created to highlight our stack. They watch my screen and solve a problem to get the app running then they walk me through a registration flow from the client to the server and then returning to the client. There are no gotchas but there are opportunities to improve on the code (left unstated... some candidates will see something that is suboptimal and ask why or suggest some changes).

We get to touch on client and browser issues, graphQL, Postgres, Node, Typescript (and even the various libraries used). It includes basic CRUD functionality, a third party API integration, basic security concerns and more. It's just meant to gauge a minimal level of fluency for people that will be in hands on keyboard roles (juniors up to leads, basically). I don't think anyone has found a way to use AI to help them (yet) but if this is too much for them they will quickly fall flat in the day to day job.

Where we HAVE encountered AI is in the question/answer portion of the process. So far many of those have been painfully obvious but I'm sure others were cagier about it. The one incident that we have had that kind of shook us was when someone used a stand-in to do the screen (he was fantastic, lol) and then when we hired him it took us about a week to realize that this was a team of people using an AI avatar that looked very much like the person we interviewed. They claimed to be in California but were actually in India and were streaming video from a Windows machine to the Mac we had supplied for Teams meetings. In one meeting (as red flags were accumulating) their Windows machine crashed and the outline of the person in Teams was replaced by the old school blue screen of death.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#497

Post by typewithrhythm »

bongoman42 wrote: post #401
juujian wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The even bigger challenge is that hiring experts in any domain requires domain knowledge, but hiring has been shifted to HR. They aren't experts in anything, and for some years they made do with formulaic approaches, but that doesn't cut it anymore. So now if your group wants to get it done, and done well, you have to get involved yourself, and it's a lot of work on top of your regular tasks. Maybe more work because…

I've never seen hiring completely in the domain of HR. HR filters incoming candidates and checks for culture fit etc, but technical competency is checked by engineers/ML folks. I can't imagine an HR person checking if someone understands neural networks.

HR involvement is unavoidable at big companies; and basics like "years of experience for payband" can cause issues. They fundamentally do not understand the job, but somehow have to ensure its not a biased hiring process.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#498

Post by selfmodruntime »

samr71 wrote: post #378
dowager_dan99 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to run through hundreds of candidates to find someone marginally qualified. I am not exaggerating.

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?

> Do we have different definitions of "marginally qualified"?

Not every candidate is an interview. I recently hired. I got 90 applications and from these, 80% were an instant "No". They didn't match the job description or had no permit to work in my country. I invited the rest. Simple interview, pair-program a dead simple App with a prebuilt skeleton with me with any framework of choice. Make one GET request, render it and realize one needed optimization which needs to be implemented. 90% (I'm not joking) of candidates failed the first task. In half an hour, they couldn't send a GET request and translate that into JSON. All were allowed to google, open any documentation they liked. Of all 18 who failed, 16 asked me if they could use an LLM for this task, which I denied.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#499

Post by reverendsteveii »

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,…

This. Interviewing for a sr dev position with a web app, backend stack is the bog standard java, spring, SQL abstracted away via JPA. We did a first screen, then the tech interview was two of their senior devs shoulder surfing me as I built a simple API. We chatted, I built, they asked questions, I defended my decisions (sometimes successfully, sometimes gracefully conceding defeat), they left knowing that I was who my resume said I was and the reminder that popped up in the middle of the interview to feed my sourdough starter showed them that I'm a culture fit.

I think you're onto something with that last paragraph but I want to try being a bit more generous with why things are the way they are. The question seems to be "When there are hundreds of applicants how do we give everyone a fair shake without hiring an entire team of devs who do nothing but interview?" From that perspective the intentionality is different and even sensible but the end product is likely to be the same. Even when someone is chasing a metric it's because someone else wants what's best and has decided that metric is a sensible way to make that happen. At the end of the day they really do want to hire the best candidate out of a pool whose size is extremely variable and that's challenging.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#500

Post by typewithrhythm »

solarmist wrote: post #317
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 loved the idea of code reviews interviews, i've had several good ones, until yesterday when I had my first bad code review interview. They asked me to review a function for a residential housing payment workflow, which I'm unfamiliar with. From an actual snippet of their bad production code (which has since been rewritten). In Go which I've never used (I've never professionally used the language that doesn't have e…

Honestly this sounds like a successful "bad fit" signal (assuming that they work with go and payment systems mostly).

Language and domain experience are things id like to know after an interview process.

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