AI is the reason interviews are harder now

I wish more companies would have interviewees conduct code reviews. Code reviews as an interview show a number of things you wouldn’t get from a typical interview—what opinions they have, what are the things they call out vs what they don’t waste time on, how they might communicate with another teammate, and more. And if we’re going to a world where AIs do much of the work and we just need to check that they implemented what we intended, those code review skill will still be highly relevant.

It doesn&#x27;t matter if AI makes interviews harder. An utterly broken system is not practically worse when it becomes more broken.<p>We were already well past the point of futility before AI became part of the system. The only real way to get a job is by the equivalent of mass spamming and luck (which also means low chance of fit if hired) or by human connection and familiarity (the one true way for anything in life).

Prior to the pandemic, in-person interviews were the norm at big tech, but they never really went back to them afterward.<p>I wonder if this could be the beginning of the end for purely remote interviewing; seems like in-person interviews would be less likely to be gamed in this way.

I&#x27;m not a great programmer, but I think I&#x27;m quite good, I have contributions in quite a lot of foss projects, I have CS masters, yet I have no idea how would I even start these FAANG problems. In 30 minutes? Who is this optimizing for?<p>I worked in one &quot;unicorn&quot; once and all I did was getting protobufs from one API, putting it to database and taking it back from database and putting it to different API; it was so boring. I solved my boredom by contributing to some in-house framework, after which I was told I am out of my line and should go back to copying data between APIs.<p>Are people at Facebook actually solving these hard CS problems in daily life? Why are these interviews even a thing?

Can anyone confirm the premise of the article? Are interviews actually harder?<p>And if so, maybe it’s because a lot of companies are “hiring” but not really. They’ll hire a senior for a junior position but otherwise just keep waiting for the “right fit”.

Post seems more of a marketing for UltraCode than establishing the connection between AI and Interviews getting harder. Even before AI there were instances where Leetcode Hard questions were asked in interviews that are highly unlikely to solve in 30 mins, unless seen that Q before.

If they interview for someone able to solve leetcode hards on the spot, that&#x27;s what they will get.<p>I hope for them that they they don&#x27;t focus on this (j&#x2F;k, we already know that some do).

I conduct a lot of interviews for front-end developers. And I now settled on something that works well.<p>Step 1 is an online HackerRank test that takes about 30 minutes. Its purpose is to filter out the really bad candidates (if you never did interviews, you can&#x27;t imagine how bad the majority of candidates are).<p>Step 2 is a remote video interview where I go over some code that I write step by step, and then have all these weird bugs that they need to solve. I basically test for &quot;A junior has this strange problem, can you figure out what it is?&quot;.<p>Practically it tests knowledge of the event loop, closures, event propagation, React peculiarities, ... .<p>We do remote video interviews, and sometimes I have candidates that are obviously cheating. It&#x27;s always funny how chaotic and incomprehensible their explanations are. And in the end, don&#x27;t even come to a solution.<p>I never liked homework tasks, because you can always cheat, for example your spouse might be an awesome coder.<p>If any experienced interviewer has more tips, I&#x27;m always happy to hear them :).

When you have a calculator, what is the point of testing people on how fast they can do complex math with paper and pencil.<p>I think same thing applies here. The interview process must evolve to factor in gen ai. If a candidate is effective coding with gen-ai, does it matter that they are not effective without it ?<p>Several people have mentioned code reviews, +1 to that.

Instead of these interviews, consider this approach: Ask the applicant to provide links to their own open projects and&#x2F;or to merged PRs they submitted to others open projects. Over each submitted relevant link, run a script that computes: `log(stars) * git_diff_length`. For one&#x27;s own projects, git_diff_length is relative to an empty repo. If a link is not relevant to the position, do not consider it. For each applicant, use the sum of the top-scoring three links. This is assuming that the stars are not fake which is something you have to evaluate by seeing if the starring users have unique repos of their own or not.

I get the premise , but part of me asks : Well, the candidate was able to come up with an answer, why does it matter how they did it?<p>Presumably these questions are rooted in some kind of developer reality, they&#x27;re asked to gauge technical expertise and suitability.. what&#x27;s the real difference between someone with a magic box that gives them the right answers versus someone who can derive the answers themselves if the questions suitably emulate real life scenarios?<p>why should a company care about &#x27;natural&#x27; problem solvers aside from the context of IP ownership and so on?<p>It sounds like it really just turns application questions into a voight-kampf test for no real good reason when the real point is to ascertain whether or not a candidate can get the job done.<p>I think this kind of stuff is just a gut reaction from a humanity that realizes that it&#x27;s not the cleverness of the interview questions that are the problem, it&#x27;s that machine tools are now at near human levels in the majority of mundane stuff a developer does every day -- the reactions are born from a panicked realization that it no longer makes sense to employ the lower end of the developer skill spectrum.

I think purpose of asking Leetcode hard questions in interviews is to reject if someone solves on the spot, and proceed with someone made reasonable progress and well thought out about the problem

I did (as an interviewer) a lot of interviews last year, and I was always pretty explicit about allowing the candidate to use “whatever tools you&#x27;d use in real life, including copilot and ChatGPT”. This has two big advantages:<p>- if someone not using them is less performant than someone using them, I should definitely hire the later, because mastering the use of these tools is an important skill, like knowing your key bindings or using a proper IDE and debugger.<p>- it forces you to design the interview in a way that isn&#x27;t trivially solved by an AI, and challenges the actual skills of the interviewees. Of course it means the interview cannot be given to brainless hiring managers or HR, but must be handled by software team leaders&#x2F;managers themselves, or at least senior developers.

Fifty years ago there was a big debate about whether or not pocket electronic calculators should be allowed in exams since they would enable people with poor arithmetic skills. Slide rules were allowed since there is some skill using a slide rule. If someone is smart enough to harness AI to cheat on an interview, they are probably worth hiring, unless there is concern about dishonesty, eg in a bank.

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Honestly, I miss all-day _actually on-site_ on sites. Getting on site and meeting people definitely took the edge off of what were otherwise very hard interview rounds.

If the enshittification of the Internet by the proliferation of AI results in the destruction of the awful pop quiz style coding interviews then at least it will have had some value.

Mostly because it is pretty easy to use AI to cheat and if you aren’t leveraging new tools, you are falling behind.<p>You should be using AI for interviews, AI for cover letters, bots to mass spam every remote job on LinkedIn (most of the jobs I have “applied” for in the past few weeks aren’t even dev jobs, but an application costs nothing so better safe than sorry), and all manner of other tools to play this game.