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Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

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Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#31

Post by sarmadgulzar »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #29
sarmadgulzar wrote: post #26

This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? I’m not saying that all code should be typed by hand in 2026 but there are certain subtle things you learn only when you get into nitty gritty details especially related to security. Also today’s AI is…

You hire juniors but don’t let them use AI tools for a year :)

Stakeholders are not technical enough to understand that so CEOs won’t do it. We are already seeing it play out. Entry-level hiring has been consistently down ever since AI got mainstream.

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#32

Post by zitterbewegung »

I'm not sure if it is a good idea when you are referencing your "rebuilding" after you reduce headcount by 14% . If this isn't some kind of entendre then it's actually extremely effective.

https://xcancel.com/brian_armstrong/status/20516167591451857...

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#33

Post by serial_dev »

pards wrote: post #28

> When the cost of building goes to zero Where are they getting all those free tokens from?!? I don't like this rhetoric. It still costs money to write code, only now that wealth gets transferred to Anthropic instead of to individual contributors.

And even ignoring the token costs, that is just not true.

Sure, for some cases, the cost is going down. I and others on my team "one-shotted" impressive features in an hour of agent work that would have taken humans probably a month if done completely manually.

I've also seen agents going in circles for an hour on a fix that would have taken even a junior 3 minutes to get right (after it was struggling for 10 minutes, I wanted to see if it can ever get it right as an experiment).

And when taking a look at the whole organization, orgs still just aren't really shipping that much more quality features to their users as the impressive one-shot demos would make you think.

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#34

Post by pards »

Muromec wrote: post #11
o0ower0o wrote: post #7

I am really looking forward to the day where AI is normalized during interviews. Right now the duality of interviews is basically: - You get a leetcode question and if you're lucky is an easy medium that you can solve, if you're really lucky you already solved it and can pretend you are approaching the problem the first time. Good luck if you get a hard question and you never saw it before. - You get a home assignmen…

I was on the interviewer side last month. We stopped giving take-home assignments because they don't produce a signal anymore. We explicitly said -- feel free to use whatever framework and AI assistant, just show us how you do it. The practical part had no leetcode too. Just build something really basic, then explain a snippet of code (3 lines) and generalize it. A trick question (with a disclosure it's a trick quest…

> people who can't do 2+2 and ones that can't understand the question without rephrasing it three times

We resorted to filtering candidates in-person with 5 basic technical questions on pen and paper. And I mean _really_ basic questions.

This was surprisingly effective because it filters for many non-technical skills like being able to read and write English, follow instructions, and show up to the office, on time, and appropriately dressed.

The number of candidates that failed these basic skills was astounding. We had candidates show up 20 minutes late, or email 2 minutes before the "interview" asking for a Teams link even though the invitation stated the meeting was in-person (highlighted in yellow). Others couldn't write their own name legibly on the paper.

A candidate that cannot answer basic technical questions has no hope of being able to prompt an AI effectively or review the code it produces.

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#35

Post by sarmadgulzar »

ryanSrich wrote: post #30
sarmadgulzar wrote: post #26

This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? I’m not saying that all code should be typed by hand in 2026 but there are certain subtle things you learn only when you get into nitty gritty details especially related to security. Also today’s AI is…

> This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? Shouldn't this be a pretty fundamental part of a degree? If you're in school right now for a CS or SWE related degree, I would imagine you're learning how code actually works, how the math actually w…

> Shouldn't this be a pretty fundamental part of a degree? If you're in school right now for a CS or SWE related degree, I would imagine you're learning how code actually works, how the math actually works, etc.

I’m sorry to say but colleges don’t teach the kinda stuff you’re gonna use day-to-day. They’ll focus on architecture, data structures, algorithms, databases, OS internals theory that only a minuscule number of systems engineers would get to work on. They won’t teach you that in your /login endpoint, if a user is not found, you should verify the password against a pre-computed dummy hash so the response delay matches a real user account workflow to avoid timing attacks. You only learn this on the job under the supervision of a senior mentor.

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#36

Post by bonoboTP »

sarmadgulzar wrote: post #26

This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? I’m not saying that all code should be typed by hand in 2026 but there are certain subtle things you learn only when you get into nitty gritty details especially related to security. Also today’s AI is…

So, how is this different from years ago when there were software libraries but in class we still rolled our own implementation to understand the algo. For example in machine learning, yes you could just use a Matlab toolbox or libsvm or scikit-learn. But then you wouldn't learn the SVM training algorithm, so we had to implement it ourselves. We knew that we wouldn't roll our own SVM at a job, in production. The goal of the exercise was to learn the algorithm and how it actually works.

Today we have AI, which is basically like having infinite libraries available that do what you ask for. But you will not learn if you just take that code, similarly to how you don't learn if you just call scikit-learn to train your SVM.

And of course students grumbled back then also and said why do we need to do this when all those libraries exist?

Learning often requires not taking the most efficient path for every project.

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#37

Post by ryanSrich »

sarmadgulzar wrote: post #35
ryanSrich wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? Shouldn't this be a pretty fundamental part of a degree? If you're in school right now for a CS or SWE related degree, I would imagine you're learning how code actually works, how the math actually w…

> Shouldn't this be a pretty fundamental part of a degree? If you're in school right now for a CS or SWE related degree, I would imagine you're learning how code actually works, how the math actually works, etc. I’m sorry to say but colleges don’t teach the kinda stuff you’re gonna use day-to-day. They’ll focus on architecture, data structures, algorithms, databases, OS internals theory that only a minuscule number o…

> I’m sorry to say but colleges don’t teach the kinda stuff you’re gonna use day-to-day.

This was not my experience in college. A lot of it was VERY applied. Granted, that was 13 years ago.

But even so, if you're at a college where you feel that you're not getting enough exposure, that's why I also called out "Have done dozens of projects" and "Have done several (at least 2) internships".

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#38

Post by cheeaun »

Curious to know:

- does the company provide the harness and specific model for this? Or the interviewee use whatever they have access to? If they don't do a good job, is it the fault of the harness or the model or the interviewee not knowing how to fully utilise the harness and model or alternative harnesses and models?

- if every interviewee uses different harnesses and models, how does the company ensure that it's a fair comparison between interviewees for the same role?

- will the interviewer go through all lines in the code generated or let AI do it?

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#39

Post by [deleted] »

dan_q wrote: post #17
bravetraveler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fourth crack commandment: never get high on your own supply

It's imperative to understand that Anthropic and OpenAI view their customers as subhuman drug addicts (read: *users*). From this perspective, the people who use these tools are beneath the people who design them. From this perspective, the rightful state of the world is for the superior members of the in-group to control the experience of the inferior members of the out-group. By using these tools, you willingly acce…

[deleted]

Re: Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

#40

Post by layer8 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #30
sarmadgulzar wrote: post #26

This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? I’m not saying that all code should be typed by hand in 2026 but there are certain subtle things you learn only when you get into nitty gritty details especially related to security. Also today’s AI is…

> This all sounds good on paper but I have an honest question: How do you develop judgement as a junior or mid level engineer to critique AI if you yourself never learned that skill by making mistakes in the first place? Shouldn't this be a pretty fundamental part of a degree? If you're in school right now for a CS or SWE related degree, I would imagine you're learning how code actually works, how the math actually w…

> internships where you've worked at a real company writing real code

Though why would companies make that nontrivial investment if they can use AI instead?

Furthermore, I’d argue that learning good judgement takes around a decade of full-time dev experience. In particular, experiencing the long-term consequences of one’s design and implementation decisions. You don’t get that just by college education and a few internships.

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