Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you forked a library because of reasons. You can tour the original repo and explain the problems. I have at least one of those examples for each time the legal or confidentiality department stepped in.
>Maybe The word maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What if you never had to do that? Not everyone's work is public. Inf act I'd say most people's work is not public. Sometimes even the product is not public since it's B-2-B.
AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
161–170 of 651 posts
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#162I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history. I do have one technical question that st…
Sir, you have attained dizzying intellectual heights that few men have.
My comment is meant to be a compliment, not snarky. And indeed I have noticed that the best people I have encountered can often size people up accurately with very general questions often on unrelated subjects.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#163Company A wants to hire an engineer, an AI could solve all their tech interview questions, so why not hire that AI instead? There's very likely a real answer to that question, and that answer should shape the way that engineer should be assessed and hired. For example, it could be that the company wants the engineer to do some kind of assessment whether a feature should be implemented at all, and if yes, in what way.…
The even bigger challenge is that hiring experts in any domain requires domain knowledge, but hiring has been shifted to HR. They aren't experts in anything, and for some years they made do with formulaic approaches, but that doesn't cut it anymore. So now if your group wants to get it done, and done well, you have to get involved yourself, and it's a lot of work on top of your regular tasks. Maybe more work because…
Well, unless you know sufficiently senior people. But I suspect that is a deeply unsatisfactory answer to many people in this forum.
My long term last, only technically-adjacent, job came through a combination of knowing execs, having gone to the same school as my ultimate manager, and knowing various other people involved. (And having a portfolio of public work.)
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the answer. Let's not pretend 95% of companies are asking asinine interview questions (though I understand the reasons why) that LLMs can easily solve.
Let's go one step further: LLMs can't solve anything, but most interview questions are covered so much online that they'll parrot a passable answer.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's an interesting thought on your "gotcha" - I'm 57 years old, been programming as a career for over 30 years, a lot of languages and I have no idea what the difference is.
I have no idea either. I can easily look it up though. You can often tell an inexperienced interviewer from the extremely domain specific question they ask which _they_ are familiar with.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#166AI might make e.g. your leetcode interview less predictive than it previously would have been. But was it predictive in the first place? I don't think most interviews are written by people thinking in those terms at all. If your method of interviewing never depended on data suggesting it actually, you know, worked in the first place, why would it matter if it starts working even worse?
Insofar as it makes the shittiness of those interviews more visible, the effect of AI is a good thing. An interview focused on recall of some specific algorithm was never predictive, it's just now predictive in a way that Generic Business Idiots can understand.
We frequently interview people who both (a) claim to have been in senior IC roles (not architect positions, roles where they are theoretically coding a lot) for many, many years and (b) cannot code their way out of a paper bag when presented with a problem that requires even a modicum of original reasoning. Some of that might be interview nerves, of course, but a lot of these people are not at all unconfident. They just...suck. And I wonder if what we're seeing is the downstream effects of Generic Business Idiots hiring primarily people who memorize stuff than people who build stuff.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The even bigger challenge is that hiring experts in any domain requires domain knowledge, but hiring has been shifted to HR. They aren't experts in anything, and for some years they made do with formulaic approaches, but that doesn't cut it anymore. So now if your group wants to get it done, and done well, you have to get involved yourself, and it's a lot of work on top of your regular tasks. Maybe more work because…
>hiring has been shifted to HR Well, unless you know sufficiently senior people. But I suspect that is a deeply unsatisfactory answer to many people in this forum. My long term last, only technically-adjacent, job came through a combination of knowing execs, having gone to the same school as my ultimate manager, and knowing various other people involved. (And having a portfolio of public work.)
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have still written code for school or a hobby project. Maybe I'm missing empathy, but I cannot understand how some developers have no code to show. If that's the case however, just let them make a small project over the weekend and then do another interview where you ask stuff about what they've made. It's not that deep
School was a few decades ago, and the code I have on Github is mostly toy stuff I do in rainy weekends, most of us have a life without room to code outside work most of the time. Friends, family, stuff to take care of.
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#169I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history. I do have one technical question that st…
> blanking on a fifth grep? (or ripgrep if allowed)
Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing. My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly - being a little on the spectrum, - "living a little bit in their own world", - having opinions on topics t…
> My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly I am actually a bit weird myself, so I can relate. > What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters". "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people. I don't mean that they have told me that they are skilled, or that their resume has impl…
My experience differs here: these are not "good self-promoters", but impostors.
Good self-promoters typically have some above-average (though commonly not really exceptional) skills in their area, but their expertise is in the capability of smooth talking (including smalltalk), promoting their contributions, and talking at eye level with various stakeholders.
If you are really exceptional in your area, you will often (though not always) consider smalltalk to be waste of your time, and will often have difficulties talking at eye level with various stakeholders, because either they are not sufficiently knowledgable in your area of expertise to understand you, or the other way round (for the latter point: becoming really great in one area often means that you won't have the time to get sufficiently deep into a lot of other areas, even though for some of them you might become quite skilled if you had more time).