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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#501

Post by christkv »

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,…

Thats what we did, pair program on some real production code and tickets. This way the person could get a feel about what they potentially were walking into and you get a good idea of how they think and approach problems.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#502

Post by codr7 »

solarmist wrote: post #495
codr7 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You would have to stop optimizing people to hell and back and start committing to a few at a time. Sounds like a really good idea to me.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#503

Post by CharlieDigital »

justin_oaks wrote: post #310
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 like the code review approach and tried it a few times when I was needed to do interviews. The great thing about code reviews is that there are LOTS of ways people can improve code. You can start with the basics like can you make this code run at all (i.e. compile) and can you make it create the right output. And there's also more advanced improvements like how to make the code more performant, more maintainable, a…

100% it is more conducive to a conversational exchange that actually gives you better insight into how a developer thinks much more so than leetcode.

Coding for me is an intensely focused activity and I work from home to boot so most of the time, I'm coding in complete silence. It's very awkward to be talking about my thought process while I'm coding, but not talking is just as awkward!

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#505

Post by LPisGood »

ttyprintk wrote: post #161
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.

But if you’ve worked on something mature and nontrivial, you’ve forked a dependency and are able to tour it. Looks like I’ve done it on average twice per year.

I’ve worked on a piece of software you have at least heard of, probably used, and it is so far from publicly available it’s funny.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#506

Post by LPisGood »

alsobrsp wrote: post #113

I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history. I do have one technical question that st…

> Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job

Huh? Please explain

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#507

Post by weitendorf »

solarmist wrote: post #463
dilyevsky wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rand…

The sad truth of hiring is that you can't afford to interview everyone, and have to keep in mind that prospective employees are showing you a different version of themselves than they'll actually bring to work.

Especially in a small company where your hiring manager may also be busy with development and sales, and not have an HR department to run the process for them, you're much better off interviewing candidates you are 50% sure of being a good fit vs 5%. Personally I prefer interviewing candidates coming from FAANG-ish companies and often make exceptions for candidates that demonstrate exceptional skill/interest, but when you can only interview 1-10% of your applicants you have to prioritize those who are likely to succeed at your company (keeping in mind implicit bias and such).

> filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

In aggregate it most likely is useful for those companies.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#508

Post by BizarreByte »

e12e wrote: post #467
marcosdumay wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Perhaps, but an interview is a fundamentally different environment than day to day work.

There's no way to solve the interview/interviewee problem though, the whole thing is impossibly fucked and is going to have false positives/negatives no matter what.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#509

Post by solarmist »

codr7 wrote: post #502
solarmist wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You would have to stop optimizing people to hell and back and start committing to a few at a time. Sounds like a really good idea to me.

That doesn’t answer the question.

For me as a job applicant even in the best case I would need to do 3 to 5 interview interviews. The same is true for companies in the best case it will take at least 3 to 5 interviews to find somebody. Are they supposed to have 3 to 5 temporary staff for weeks at a time?

How much time should that take per interview? How would somebody that currently has a job manage that kind of time commitment?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#510

Post by LPisGood »

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?

You’re asking what is the point of being alive if you don’t have to work at a company?
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