Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

> My current team scrapped the algorithmic questions entirely. We now do pair programming on a small feature in our actual codebase, with full access to Google/docs/AI. The only restriction is we watch how they work. This approach has dramatically improved our hit rate on good hires.

I've been on this gig for about 20 years, this process is by far the best one to participate in an interview both as an interviewee as an interviewer.

As an interviewer I have a lot more joy to tackle an actual task, or a problem very similar to how my team works, with someone applying for the position, it's easier for me to feel like a human instead of an assessment machine. I don't have to learn the N different potential case studies to run the interview, I don't need to feel like I'm ticking boxes when giving my feedback, it's all natural.

As a candidate it relaxes me a fucking lot, I don't have to brush off old books, go through a grind of studying and still feeling like I haven't studied enough because there's an endless amount of knowledge to learn if I need to cover all bases. I also feel a lot more like a human, I can talk through my train of thought, work as I normally would checking documentation, searching, etc.

This bizarre ritual feels almost like hazing by this point, at some point Big Tech decided this was "the way for hiring", then herd mentality took over to the point where tiny startups just cargo-culted processes without even questioning (I heard from a non-technical founder once "if Google does it then it's the best way to do it"). A few generations later of folks hired through this Byzantine process turned it into a hazing ritual, if they had to go through this pain then they might as well inflict the pain to make candidates prove themselves worthy.

It's a giant cycle of bullshit, and no matter how much I tried it's been always impossible to change the minds of HR that this is not the best way to assess candidates, the herd mentality is even stronger around there since there's always the dumb scapegoat: "we do benchmark peers in the industry and they all do this way, so we will do this way".

Sorry for the rant but it's one aspect of this job that really grinds my gears, I fucking hate running interviews with candidates because of it, I never feel I could properly measure someone's real abilities, and I really hate having to go through it myself...

> What does it say about the tech industry that so many orgs continued to use a system that was known to be broken for so long?

Well, broken in what sense? In the sense that HN complains about it? Then it says nothing at all because that is not a signal of anything. HN reliably complains about ALL interview methods including coding challenges, chats about experience, take home exams, paid day-of-work, and so on.

If it is "broken" in another sense, we would have to quantify that and compare it to some alternative. I'm not aware of any good quantitative data on this sort of thing and I can imagine that the challenges to meaningfully measuring this are considerable. A qualitative survey of the tech industry is likely to surface opinions as wide ranging as HN complaints.

Basically you start with the conclusion that what we have is extremely sub optimal, but that's not clear to me. I think it is uncontroversial to assert that coding challenges are not an amazing predictor of job performance and lead to lots of false positives and negatives. Easy to find lots of agreement there. What is unclear is that there are other methods that are better at predicting job performance.

It may just be that predicting job performance is extremely difficult and that even a relatively good method for doing so is not very good.

> System Design interviews

System Design interviews can be crammed too.

I'd find it much better if people would ask you "tell me about some complicated systems you helped build and what high-level challenged you encountered". Instead you get "how would you design google docs?".

> a tool allowing job candidates to commit fraud

It's not fraud.

The candidate could also use this tool to help with the job once they've been hired, and that would not be fraud either.

They wouldn't, but that's just because the interview is stupid and not like real work.

The exact same as normal.

Even before AI you would have candidates of varying skill level so your coding questions should have always scaled depending on the skill of the candidate.

The purpose is not to check if you've memorized some algorithms - it's to verify that you're capable of mentally constructing the model of a problem in your head, thinking through it in a structured way, etc.

Giving a candidate access to AI doesn't eliminate the need to do that.