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AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

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Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#91

Post by CharlieDigital »

wruza wrote: post #84
CharlieDigital wrote: post #73

Code reviews. Teams are really sleeping on code reviews as an assessment tool. As in having the candidate review code. A junior, mid, senior, staff are going to see very different things in the same codebase. Not only that, as AI generated code becomes more common, teams might want to actively select for devs that can efficiently review code for quality and correctness. I went through one interview with a YC company…

Is there a site where one could review some code and see what many others say about it and their experience level? I guess it would degrade to stackoverflow-like poems eventually, but still interesting.

Not that I know of!

It would be interesting, but I agree it would need to be content moderated to some extent.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#92

Post by samartin »

Funny enough, the songs from the website Coding For Nothing about grinding LeetCode and endless take-home projects seem very relevant, and everything nowadays feels like a meme.

Tech interviewing has become a weird survival game, and now AI is flipping the rules again. If you need a laugh: https://codingfornothing.com

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#93

Post by Clubber »

brainwipe wrote: post #71

I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. That discussion went on for a good few minutes and by the end of it I was teetering on leaving because the fit wasn't go…

>I was allowed to use any programming language because they knew them all (allegedly).

After 30 years of doing this, I find that typically the people who claim to know a lot often know very little. They're insecure in their ability so much that they've tricked themselves into not learning anything.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#94

Post by Clubber »

micheles wrote: post #61

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little.

Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between a function and a procedure." It's a one sentence answer, but people who didn't know it would give some pretty enlightening answers.

Edit: From the replies I can see people are a little defensive about not knowing it. Not knowing it is ok because it was a question I asked people 20 years ago relevant to a language long dead in the US. I blame the defensiveness on how FUBAR the current landscape is. Giving a nuanced answer to show your depth of knowledge is actually preferred. A once sentence answer is minimal.

I'm editing this because HN says I'm posting too fast, which is super annoying, but what can I do?

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#95

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #85
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WTF is this hobby coding bullshit expectations? What other professions expect you do more work after work as a hobby and show it? Do bus drivers film themselves driving busses after work as a hobby? Do surgeons cut up people in their spare time as a hobby? I think programming has more commonality with other creative, 'soft' jobs like graphic design (which itself can involve programming), architecture, media, market…

>architecture, media, marketing, etc than meets the eye. I disagree. Programing is more engineering than art. Art doesn't have source code. You can show the final painting and I can show the final product I worked on but not the source code I wrote as that belongs to my employer. Also, most art like paintings are not done by large teams, so you can show what you did in that painting but in a large SW projects, I can'…

I said neither 'art' nor 'paintings' which you have fixated on for some reason. I mentioned creative endeavours that are generally team-based but all generate some sort of portfolio. Whether that portfolio is from work or done in one's personal time, it is still a portfolio of past work.

Plus, software engineering is absolutely a creative endeavour. And I daresay normal 'engineering' (civil, mechanical, aero, etc) is a creative endeavour too; it's just a matter of egos and that seem to separate STEM versus non-STEM. There are portfolios for everything. I don't understand the desire for software engineers to just waltz into an interview, claim to have done X, Y, Z, with no proof, and secure a job.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#96

Post by Rhapso »

brainwipe wrote: post #71

I was asked by an SME to code on a whiteboard for an interview (in 2005? I think?). I asked if I could have a computer, they said no. I asked if I would be using a whiteboard during my day-to-day. They said no. I asked why they used whiteboards, they said they were mimicking Google's best practice. That discussion went on for a good few minutes and by the end of it I was teetering on leaving because the fit wasn't go…

Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer.

Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem.

It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter.

I didn't get this until I was giving interviews. The instructions on how to give them are pretty clear. The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving.

I know many interviewers also didn't get it, and it became just "do you know the trick to my puzzle". That pattern of failure is a good reason to deprecate white board interviews, not "I don't write on a whiteboard when i program in real life".

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#97

Post by bdavisx »

Clubber wrote: post #94
micheles wrote: post #61

Nowadays I am on the other part of the fence, I am the interviewer. We are not a FAANG, so we just use a SANE interview process. Single interview, we ask the candidate about his CV and what his expectations are, what are his competences and we ask him to show us some code he has written. That's all. The process is fast and extremely effective. You can discriminate week candidates in minutes.

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between…

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.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#98

Post by teeray »

Licensing. We do the Leetcode interview in a controlled testing center. When you apply for a position, I look up your license number, then I know you can leetcode without wasting any of my developer resources on determining that.

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#99

Post by Clubber »

bdavisx wrote: post #97
Clubber wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between…

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.

A function returns a value.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/721090/what-is-the-diffe...

Re: AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

#100

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

bdavisx wrote: post #97
Clubber wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do this too, works fine. We ask open ended questions like, "What's your favorite thing you've done in your career and why?" and "What was the most challenging project in your career and why?" If you listen, you can get a lot of insight from just those two questions. If they don't give enough detail, we'll probe a little. Our "gotcha," which doesn't apply to most languages anymore is, "What's the difference between…

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.
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