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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#641

Post by rmah »

edmundsauto wrote: post #583
rmah wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But companies don't pay high salaries for the 80% mundane and easy tasks you do day to day. They pay for the 20% that is challenging and especially for that 1% of problems that occur only once every few months or years. If that 80% was 100% of the job then the company could pay 1/2 to 1/3rd the amount by outsourcing it.

I disagree, companies pay based on the problems you can solve to make them money or help achieve organizational goals. One of those ways can be coding, but there are many others.

I don't really see how that's a disagreement.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#642

Post by nrb »

OutOfHere wrote: post #593
nrb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think shame is the obstacle; it’s that for many, a break like this is financially straining or outright impossible.

That is a lot like saying that a college degree is financially straining or outright impossible. In many respects, developing open source is a lot less straining, as there are no large fees, with the main expenses being living expenses. This is why it's important to live far below one's means when one does have a job.

This take totally disregards very common family situations that are much less likely during college years: putting kids through school, health issues, caring for/supporting aging parents.

Remember not that not everyone is a coastal techie with loads of extra cash to put away.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#643

Post by codr7 »

xnyan wrote: post #632
ipunchghosts wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Do you have any thoughts on how to mitigate this? After all, its in your best advantage and the companies to hire someone with talents because of the value they can bring.

Unfortunately (at least in my opinion) the way to mitigate it is make contacts, friends, colleagues etc. Meet people, stay in touch with them. In my experience relationships are by far the most important aspect of a career. I'm not naturally someone who forms these relationships easily, but it's by far the most valuable and important thing I've done in terms of the jobs I've had.

It's VERY rare for me to work with people capable of even seeing the level I'm working at, sad but true. I suspect my solutions simply look weird to them, maybe with a touch of NIH-syndrome; even if they eventually grow to appreciate the integrity of the code. And it's difficult to see code that's never written, which is feel is the biggest win I bring to the table.

This means I'm mostly judged by my ability to perform mindless drone work.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#644

Post by hassleblad23 »

hassleblad23 wrote: post #414
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.

And devs wouldn't want to spend substantial time working on stuff unrelated to work just for the interview process.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#645

Post by grandempire »

rightbyte wrote: post #607
swatcoder wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not actually about mastery of binary trees or other abstract computer science concepts. leetcode is really a culture fit test and success points to the combination of "smarts", diligence, and conformity to some acceptable degree. It shows you have some baseline of familiarity with computing, can focus on an arbitrary task to pursue a goal, and will conform to an arbitrary process when it's asked of you. Thos…

"Leetcode" style tests were probably good when almost no one did it. Now it selects for the very very very bad trait of high ambition and knowing to play the system.

That’s not an optimal selection outcome, but it actually is a decent one.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#646

Post by lubujackson »

hobs wrote: post #306
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…

Yep, I've done a lot of SQL interviews and it is always interesting to see the folks who've crash and burned at code review and killed it at writing individual queries and sometimes the unexpected, the opposite happened, the person would fly through a code review and do really subpar on writing it, a signal I usually took to mean that the person was nervous as hell in the interview. The two folks who showed this beha…

I feel like identifying problems is the most important skill for success. Especially with AI, (but even before that) SEs are more often "editing" rather than "writing" code, and most of your time is either fixing odd states or anticipating them.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#648

Post by selfmodruntime »

lubesGordi wrote: post #519
selfmodruntime wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Who are you interviewing? Do these people who can't do this have any experience at all?

On paper yes. Turns out they lie on their applications.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#649

Post by aforwardslash »

I've conducted hundreds of tech interviews in the past decade, and I can tell you, it takes roughly 5 minutes to understand if a candidate is a good fit or not.

I have no problem in having candidates using google, ai or whatever to answer technical stuff - if a candidate can write a query, read the results and be able to explain what he just read, he would be an instant hire. It seems that people keep focusing on the wrong skillset; sure, many companies think knowing sort algorithms and binary trees is super important for a CRUD maintenance job, but they forget the most important tech trait - the ability to adapt and evolve; the ability to learn.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#650

Post by [deleted] »

grandempire wrote: post #645
rightbyte wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Leetcode" style tests were probably good when almost no one did it. Now it selects for the very very very bad trait of high ambition and knowing to play the system.

That’s not an optimal selection outcome, but it actually is a decent one.

[deleted]
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