The heart of the coding interview is to get signal on a candidates’ ability to solve a problem without all of the inputs given to them, see how they and explain their thought process as they do it.
Because of AI, what it means to “not have all of the inputs” has changed as anyone can cut and paste a Leetcode problem to a chatbot and solve it.
I think we are going to iterate a bit to figure out a better signal than the typical coding interview. For junior engineers, I think coding questions will move towards MBA style problems when someone is given more of an open ended question with a codebase and you see what the candidate does without context to reduce the problem.
I used to have a stack of books with references notes on my desk. The internet came and I could search and even stack-overflow improved this. Doing a whiteboard riddle from rote knowledge is something I always fail. That particular solution I maybe used it once or twice in my 30 years as SWE. Why would I remember this. I do remember where I can find the solution for it.
This Ousterhout lecture lives in my brain (this one and the one about scar tissue).
"A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE98Is1quwY
> Pick a radical idea
> Build it over a weekend:
What AI has done is that we can do 10x more work a week, while only delivering 2x to production.
Right now, there are 4 people (and me) working on the same idea in 5 different ways - we're all training small language models, the goal is to get smaller or fewer active parameters.
By next week, we'll have lost on 3 different approaches. I know my approach is a dead-end already, but I'm not ready to give up till the pencils down.
The people I work with are great, because they will see the better solution by the end of it, whether they proposed it or someone else did.
A couple of them have been in the industry for less than 5 years and I feel like their slope is better than mine, which means I'm going to have a good time when they're fully up to speed :)
Thank you for that link. I started feeling rusty and needed something to shake off.
On a side note, I did founded my startup this year, and had that bug of doubt back of my head, but oh well…
In the new world, normalised interviews are going away, because business value is not normalized. This means that domain based interviewing and signals are going to make a comeback.
It would make sense to build your career in a single domain, since your built up expertize will transfer to other companies within that domain.
Far fewer switches will happen for seniors across domains.
I choose to argue the complete inverse. In the age of AI there is increasing value on being a reasonably well rounded generalist. Exposure to different paradigms and possibilities matters significantly more than depth within a single purview.
From a career risk perspective, this is also the right answer. Domains disappear, though they frequently morph. Cross domain knowledge allows the individual to apply lessons and patterns they've learned elsewhere.
"Work to live, don't live to work". When you're on your deathbed work won't sit there with you and hold your hand. People are critical, not buildings or computers or networks. If you do choose to go down the path of overwork for recognition (as I did in my early 20s to earn a business visa) set strict guidelines around it and ensure you benefit as much as your employer. No one will manage your own work life balance better than you.
Imo, you dont even have to wait for deathbed. I have seen this exact philosophy on developer/tech/enterpreneur forums for years.
The same exact forums are super engaged with "loneliness epidemic we are all lonely" topic, where everyone other person describes difficulty in that area. Well, yeah, if you work all the time, you wont have real friends. And yeah, if all you focus on is competition, all you will have are competitors and frenemies. And no, friends will not magically pop out of nothing the moment you wish them to.
"Everyone who does not spend whole weekends and evenings coding/vibing/working/writing is lazy. Also it is society fault that I do not have friends and cant find a partner".
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leetcodes as much as we dont like them. could help to reduce bias. you either pass or fail them at the very least. now too much is being left to hand waving, interpretations can be charitable on the mood of the interviewer, or the opposite.
One could even think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect
Although I do appreciate, giving green minds the chance, I cannot help but think hiring managers will read into "A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept" as an excuse for ageism. Which the industry is already pretty rife with.
The issue that most people bring up is that it optimises for people with free time who can work on these things out of hours.
The same arguments are made against take-home tests.
Personally I'm not sure we can do anything really except try to make ourselves excellent judges of character when interviewing... because people will optimise for the interview if they know what's coming.
No one’s time is free though. Whiteboard coding was imo more fair, less biased, and signal rich. AI does change the equation a bit now.
"work on the weekend for free" aka move the risk (of wasted resources) to the employee. Excellent advice.
How about fostering a working culture were employees get a chance of trying out new things during office hours? Especially since AI is rising productivity so much.
> How about fostering a working culture were employees get a chance of trying out new things during office hours?
Everyone's cutting down on "employee non-billable time" (all while loading ever more BS "cybersecurity" and other compliance trainings).
> Especially since AI is rising productivity so much.
Financially it's better to fire workers, load the work onto much fewer shoulders, and hope AI gets good enough by the time the first remaining people burn out.
I've been considering very unconventional techniques for interviews. Like requiring candidates participate in a team based multiplayer game as part of the interview process. Completely out of left field without warning.
Assuming the applicant has zero experience with gaming, this would be an incredible opportunity to evaluate how well they cope with uncertainty under pressure and adapt to unusual conditions. If the applicant is already a grandmaster on the ladder, this becomes an excellent test of their humility and teamwork.
If the applicant gets shitty about the mere idea of playing a game as part of a "serious" job interview, I think I would have all the information I need to make the right decision. If you can't get a little bit flexible in this new world, I don't want you on my team anymore.
As someone who was job searching in the recent past I can tell you: these type of "alternative" interviews are perceived by job seekers as the circus master making their monkeys dance and, therefore, horribly demoralizing. Asking your candidate to do something completely unrelated to their job just because you think it reveals something about them comes off as flexing your power over someone who's trying to get their basic needs met in a sea of ghostings and AI rejections.
It has nothing to do with applicants discarding games as silly, BTW. Instead, I suggest you re-read your comment replacing online gaming with dancing and see if you'd be excited about such an interview. If your candidate is good enough to have choices they'll go to the one who respects them and their time.
Full agree - the ops idea feels terrible
Why a multiplayer game when you can do the same test in a nicer environment at a local golf course?
It's expensive to move humans around. Sending bits across the internet is very cheap.
They are not unconventional, they were very conventional during boom. They did not lead to great working teams, they led to "mini me" teams. Teams that force employees to "work" overtime by playing games.
Because ultimately, you are not testing working abilities, you are testing whether "he a good partner for a game".
While the approach makes sense, I have yet to see a quantifiable and normalised way to replace Leetcode interviews.
It’s probably too soon to claim “death of the coding interview”.
I have, and it is surprisingly straightforward.
Find an easy to understand product, like a step above a todo list app. Share a spec and have them code it in their own IDE using LLM. Focus on speed. Then have them extended it, adding some features. Then ask them to show you where certain functionality exists in the code and to explain the architecture of how it is built. Ask them where it is weak and could be improved.
That's it, that's the interview. SWEs are getting quite good at the prompting, but fast navigation and understanding of the code is the key.
Anyone that can effectively translate a spec to code with minimal handholding shows product awareness. Anyone who can produce a working app can prompt AI reasonably. Anyone who can revise their design on the fly to support new features is someone with flexible thinking and some humility. Anyone who can navigate and explain what AI built is someone that understands how to build a mental map of a codebase. Anyone who can do all of this in an interview is someone who can handle pressure, work quickly and communicate.
You are welcome to keep trotting out linked list traversals and sliding window problems if you like, but leetcode is now (and maybe always has been) about culture fit more than an ability to build software.
The way you describe your ideal interview is how I conducted leet code style interviews. Ask a problem with a simple algorithm and then ask extensions until the time ran out. This worked pretty well.
For interviews where candidates are using AI I think you can supercharge this approach, but I do not think there is value in turning it into a code navigation puzzle as there is little value in that can be evaluated in the ~45 min you have for coding in a 1 hr interview slot. Ultimately in many software engineering jobs these days we need to understand how to build quality systems without looking into the underlying system except as necessary. I am not sure how to best evaluate this judgement in an AI assisted interview
Ai assisted interviews are pretty good and can replace leetcode parroting pretty well.