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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

#41

Post by sarmadgulzar »

bonoboTP wrote: post #36
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…

Precisely my point. But unfortunately companies are rushing to get the features out. No cares if you’re learning and augmenting your own understanding or not.

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

#42

Post by bonoboTP »

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…

Depends a lot on the college. I had electives like Java phone app development (J2ME, dating myself), DirectX game engine development, web development, alongside the more theoretical math classes.

> 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.

Actually this kind of timing attacks were taught to me in information security and cryptography class, alongside other side channel attacks.

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

#43

Post by wild_egg »

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.

CS and SWE are radically different subjects. Science vs Engineering. I'm sure it varies by school but many CS grads will have approximately zero exposure to engineering concepts or any of the latest and greatest frameworks.

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

#44

Post by lukewarm707 »

bravetraveler wrote: post #15
dgellow wrote: post #6

Something I appreciated when going through Anthropic interview process was that I only dealt with humans. They could have been showcasing how even their interviews are done with Claude or something, but no, the whole loop was interacting with real humans, and nothing was on the topic “how do you work with LLMs”. It was about how me, the human, think and approach situations, and how I handle working with others (human…

Fourth crack commandment: never get high on your own supply

they will use their own product. but they will rule like the plutocracy that they are. they will tell me that they are not privileged to have my custom, rather, i am privileged to be their customer.

we will tell ourselves that we should wait eagerly to see if we will be graced by "tibo's" largesse, like peasants clamouring to see a royal throwing bread among the masses.

or that it is right and good that claude should refuse to answer on account of safety, but hack other companies on behalf of anthropic. surely we are too simple, and sometimes naive, truly we know not what is best for ourselves.

no more.

Vive la révolution!!

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

#45

Post by ryanSrich »

wild_egg wrote: post #43
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. CS and SWE are radically different subjects. Science vs Engineering. I'm sure it varies by school but many CS grads will have approximately zero exposure to engineering concepts or any of the latest and great…

SWE was a sub degree within the school of CS where I went to school. You could do CS with a minor in SWE and get the best of both. I suppose if you're just doing a straight ticket CS degree you'll have little exposure to engineering (I believe when I went to school 13 years ago there were 3 courses over 4 years on engineering within a pure CS degree).

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

#46

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

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 :)

I wish but at $work the push has been the opposite. I'm still allowed to write code, but interns and juniors are being told that they need to prompt all the time.

I think upper management are hoping they can replace a possibly reticent or AI skeptical "old guard" with AI native Gen Zs. In practice, the young out of school kids are much less excited about AI than the 50 year olds, so I don't know how well it will work.

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

#47

Post by sarmadgulzar »

bonoboTP wrote: post #42
sarmadgulzar wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Depends a lot on the college. I had electives like Java phone app development (J2ME, dating myself), DirectX game engine development, web development, alongside the more theoretical math classes. > 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…

Agreed. I’m not insinuating that colleges should teach all of these extremely domain-specific things. Most of the stuff would indeed be unnecessary for most students depending on what they do in the future. But that is my original point that you learn this on the job while making a mistake and being corrected by a senior mentor. AI wouldn’t call this out by itself unless you give it a very specific prompt which you also can’t write if you don’t know that these kinds of problems happen in the first place.

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

#48

Post by ghaff »

wild_egg wrote: post #43
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. CS and SWE are radically different subjects. Science vs Engineering. I'm sure it varies by school but many CS grads will have approximately zero exposure to engineering concepts or any of the latest and great…

That's sort of broadly true of engineering (including CS if they call it that) at major research universities. They don't really teach practical basics but mostly expect you to pick it up on your own if you don't already know it. They may use Python as a relatively accessible tool in an algorithms class but they mostly don't teach it.

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

#49

Post by bonoboTP »

sarmadgulzar wrote: post #47
bonoboTP wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends a lot on the college. I had electives like Java phone app development (J2ME, dating myself), DirectX game engine development, web development, alongside the more theoretical math classes. > 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…

Agreed. I’m not insinuating that colleges should teach all of these extremely domain-specific things. Most of the stuff would indeed be unnecessary for most students depending on what they do in the future. But that is my original point that you learn this on the job while making a mistake and being corrected by a senior mentor. AI wouldn’t call this out by itself unless you give it a very specific prompt which you a…

Not so sure. AI can flag non-best-practices like this quite easily from generic prompts. You just have to remember to ask it. I mean general review / audit prompts, like "are there any correctness bugs, or things that don't match best practices for efficiency, maintainability, security, or typical UX/API expectations?" And frontier models often flag such things. And it's just getting better. I would not confidently state "AI will never be able to X".

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

#50

Post by bonoboTP »

layer8 wrote: post #40
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…

> 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 inte…

Do you get it from the job hopping every 1-3 years as typical in the US?
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