If companies are going back to physical onsites but are using remote interviewers, then maybe it makes more sense to have interview centers. They'd be like testing centers --- device lockers, multiple cameras, nearby proctor, shitty desktops from the 2010s with even worse keyboards --- but just for interviews.
AI Broke Interviews
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#72> Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers. Before Google, AFAIK, it was ad hoc, among good programmers. I only ever saw people talking with people about what they'd worked on, and about the company. (And I heard that Microsoft sometime…
Casual interviews definitely still exist, though the companies those jobs are attached to are typically not tech and pay less.
Consulting positions also don't have much leetcode BS. These have always focused much more on practical experience. They also pay less than Staff+ roles at FAANGs.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#73> Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers. Before Google, AFAIK, it was ad hoc, among good programmers. I only ever saw people talking with people about what they'd worked on, and about the company. (And I heard that Microsoft sometime…
Prepping for interviews has been a big deal forever in most other industries though. It's considered normal to read extensively about a company, understand their business, sales strategies, finances, things like that, for any sort of business role. I think tech is and was an exception here.
I remember being told this during my interview prep classes in college in 2008. Interviewing was so much more formal even then (in the NYC area): business casual attire, (p)leather-bound resume folios, expectations of knowing the company, etc. I definitely don't miss any of that nonsense.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prepping for interviews has been a big deal forever in most other industries though. It's considered normal to read extensively about a company, understand their business, sales strategies, finances, things like that, for any sort of business role. I think tech is and was an exception here.
What you're describing sounds to me like just caring for the place we'll be spending half a decade or more and will have the most impact on our health, financial and social life. I'd advise anyone to read the available financial reports on any company they're intending to join, execpt if it's an internship. You'll spend hours interviewing and years dealing with these people, you could as well take an hour or two to u…
Why should anyone do that in a world where fundamentals don't make sense? Yes, knowing how the company makes money is important (though that often is incomplete or unclear from what's publicly available), but knowing their 10-K or earnings reports? Too much.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
kinda silly given the ability of most people to infer anything substantial through finances and marketing copy really company reviews is all that matters and even that has limited value since your life is determined by your manger best you can do is sus out how your interviewers are fairing are they happy? are they stressed, everything else has so much noise to be worse than worthless
"Is the company consistently profitable or not?" and "Are revenue and profits growing over time, stable, or declining?" are very important questions to answer, particularly if stock grants are part of the compensation package. For developers who work on products, getting a sense of whether the product of the team you'd be joining is a core part of the business versus speculative (i.e. stable vs likely to have layoffs…
So many ways to juice those numbers though.
And if your team is far from the money, what often matters much much more is how much political capital your skip level manager has and to what extent it can be deployed when the company needs to re-org or cut. Shoot, this can matter even if you're close to the money (if you're joining a team that's in the critical path of the profit center vs a capex moonshot project funded by said profit center).
This is one thing I really like about sales engineering. Sales orgs carry (relatively) very low-BS politically.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#76I’ve conducted about 60 interviews this year, and have spotted a lot of AI usage. At first I was quite concerned, then I realized that in nearly all cases I’d spotted usage, a pattern stood out. Of the folks I spotted, all spoke far too clearly and linearly when it came to problem solving. No self doubt, no suggestion of different approaches and appearance of thought, just a clear A->B solution. Then, because they of…
I interviewed a guy in person and he paused for 5 seconds, then wrote a perfect solution. I tried making the problem more and more complicated and he nailed it anyway, also after a brief pause. We were done in half the time. Maybe he just memorized the solution, I don’t know. Would you fail that guy?
I might hire him, but I would insist he clock out for his 5 second paused. We can’t have him wasting company time like that.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#77If AI can solve all of your interview questions trivially, maybe you should figure out how to use AI to do the job itself.
The questions were just a proxy for the knowledge you needed. If you could answer the questions you must have learned enough to be able to do the work. We invented a way to answer the test questions without being able to do the work.
To continue the point. If the knowledge you need is easily obtained from an LLM then knowledge isn’t really necessary for the job. Stop selecting for what the candidate knows and start selecting for something more relevant to the job.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't something like this work? 1. Get students to work on a more complex than usual project (in relation to their previous peers). Let them use whatever they want and let them know that AI is fine. 2. Make them come in for a physical exam where they have questions about they why of decisions they had to take during the project. And that's it? I believe that if you can a) produce a fully working project meetin…
If I read your suggestion correctly, you're saying the exam is basically a board explaining their decision making around their code. That sounds great in theory but in practice it would be very hard to grade. Or at least, how could someone fail? If you let them use AI you can't really fault them for not understanding the code, can you? Unless you teach the course to 1. use AI and then 2. verify. And step 2 requires a…
If you grade on pass/fail it’s easy to grade. Not every course uses letter grades…
If you let people use AI they are still accountable for the code written under their name. If they can’t look at the code and explain what it’s doing, that’s not demonstrating understanding.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real problem will be in 5 years, when current university students having their brains melted by AI that somehow luck into entry level positions can’t ever get to senior level because they’re too reliant on AI and they literally don’t know how to think for themselves. There will never again be as many senior engineers as there are today. There won’t be any good engineers left to hire. Look around you. 15 years ago…
Most departments at companies run on zero to two good engineers anyway. The rest are personality and nepotism hires limping along some half-baked project or sustainment effort. Most people in my engineering program didn’t deserve their engineering degrees. Where do you think all these people go? Most of them get engineering jobs.
I’m gonna assume you’re being facetious here. I’ve been in tech for 15 years and I’ve never met a “nepotism hire”. Most of my coworkers have been incredible people.
But in case you’re serious, there’s an old saying that says if everywhere you go smells like shit maybe it’s time to check your shoes.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#80So many words just to say interview process is broken.
It always been that way , anyone really think that someone that prepared and solve few leet code question can plan complete distributed system?
The reality is that no correlation was found between interview success and success at work especially for SW engineers, AI toola didn't change it not remote interviews.