I still think how many golf balls fit in a 747 is a good interview question. No one needs to give me a number but someone could really wow me but outlining a real plan to estimate this, tell me how you would subcontract estimating the size of the golf ball and the plane. It's not about a right or wrong answer but explaining to me how you think. I do software and hardware interviews and always did them in person so we can focus on how a candidate thinks. You can answer every question wrong in my interview but still be above the bar because of how they show me they can think.
AI Broke Interviews
31–40 of 132 posts
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#32> 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.
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 understand if the company is sinking or a scam in the first place.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#33Earlier 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…
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
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#34> 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…
> And we could interview like adults, instead of like teenagers pledging a frat.
I think you're viewing the "good old days" of interviewing through the lens of nostalgia. Old school interviewing from decades ago or even more recently was significantly more similar to pledging to a frat than modern interviews.
> people who are genuinely enthusiastic
This seems absurdly difficult to measure well and gameable in its own way.
The flip side of "ad hoc" interviewing as you put it was an enormous amount of capriciousness. Being personable could count for a lot (being personable in front of programmers is definitely a different flavor of personable in front of frat bros, but it's just a different flavor is all). Pressure interviews were fairly common, where you would intentionally put the candidate in a stressful situation. Interview rubrics could be nonexistent. For all the cognitive biases present in today's interview process, older interviews were rife with much more.
If you try to systematize the interview process and make it more rigorous you inevitably make a system that is amenable to pre-interview preparation. If you forgo that you end up with a wildly capricious interview system.
If course you rarely have absolutes. Even the most rigorous modern interview systems often still have capriciousness in them and there was still some measure of rigor to old interview styles.
But let's not forget all the pain and problems of the old style of interviews.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#35I still think how many golf balls fit in a 747 is a good interview question. No one needs to give me a number but someone could really wow me but outlining a real plan to estimate this, tell me how you would subcontract estimating the size of the golf ball and the plane. It's not about a right or wrong answer but explaining to me how you think. I do software and hardware interviews and always did them in person so we…
Problem is many people want to grade the answer for correctness instead of thinking. It is easy to figure out a correct answer and you can tell hr they were off by some amount t
so 'no'. It is much harder to tell hr that even though they were within some amount of correct you shouldn't hire them because they can't think (despite getting a correct answer)
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#36> 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.
It was good standard advice even for programmers to know at least a little about the company going in. And you should avoid typos and spellos on your resume.
But no "prep" like months of LeetCode grinding, memorizing the "design interview" recital, practicing all the tips for disingenuous "behavioral" passing, etc.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#37I’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…
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 we didn’t have phones and now kids are so addicted to them they’re giving themselves anxiety and depression. Not just kids, but kids have it the worst. You know it’s gonna be even worse with AI.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#38Interviews are fundamentally really difficult to get right. On one side, you could try to create the best fairest standardized interview process based on certain metrics, but people will eventually optimize on how well they can do on the standardized interview, making it less effective. On the other side, you could create a customized ad hoc interview to try to learn as much about the candidate as possible, and have them do a work trial for a few days to ensure they're the right candidate, but this takes a ton of time and effort on both the company and the candidate.
I personally think the best interview format is the candidate doing a take home project and giving a presentation on it. It feels like the most comprehensive yet minimal way to assess a candidate on a variety of metrics, tests coding ability in the project, real system design rather than hypothetical, communication skills, and depth of understanding on the project when the interviewer asks follow-up questions. It would be difficult to cheat this with AI since you would need a solid understanding of the whole project for the presentation.
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#39The article implies that somewhat, before AI the leetcode/brainteaser/behavioral interview process had somewhat acceptable results. The reality is that AI just blew up something that was a pile of garbage, and the result is exactly what you'd expect. We all treat interviews in this industry as a human resources problem, when in reality is an engineering problem. The people with the skills to assess technical competen…
The results did filter out a few people who could not think.
i reciently interviewed someone who was a senior engineer on the space shuttle, but managed a call center after that. Can this person still write code is a question we couldn't figure out and so had to pass. (We can't prove it but think we ended up with someone who outsourced the work to elsewhere - but at least that person could code if needed as proved by the interview)
Re: AI Broke Interviews
#40I still think how many golf balls fit in a 747 is a good interview question. No one needs to give me a number but someone could really wow me but outlining a real plan to estimate this, tell me how you would subcontract estimating the size of the golf ball and the plane. It's not about a right or wrong answer but explaining to me how you think. I do software and hardware interviews and always did them in person so we…
Some of the best hires I’ve ever made would’ve tanked that sort of interview question. Being able to efficiently work through those puzzles is probably decent positive signal, but failure tells me next to nothing, and a question that can fail to give me signal is a question that wastes valuable time — both mine and theirs.
A format I was fond of when I was interviewing more was asking candidates to pick a topic — any topic, from their favourite data structure to their favourite game or recipe — and explain it to me. I gave the absolute best programmer I ever interviewed a “don’t hire” recommendation, because I could barely keep up with her explanation of something I was actually familiar with, even though I repeatedly asked her to approach it as if explaining it to a layperson.