Anthropic Engineer Declares the Coding Interview Dead 152
An Anthropic engineering manager says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews because AI can now outperform candidates on the kinds of programming challenges they typically contain. "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," said Felix Rieseberg in a blog post. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." The Register reports: "I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future -- or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction."
At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills."
"We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications."
"The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.
At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills."
"We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications."
"The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.
From one dev manager to another (Score:5, Insightful)
Your process for interviewing should not change. You need engineers that can think well to judge the output of an LLM well.
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Re:From one dev manager to another (Score:5, Insightful)
I have worked with junior level devs who just take a dev task's requirements, hand it straight to AI, put that through basic testing (only the main intended cases) and then offer that up as a finished solution. The solution was, of course, full of holes, some of them quite serious, just not obvious. The holes were in the edge cases and how it handles and recovers from errors. These were exactly the kinds of mistakes I would expect a junior level developer to make (in at least one case I am thinking of, the task shouldn't have even been handed to someone so inexperienced, but the people making that decision didn't really know how advanced the task was and anyway the dev wanted to get real experience).
So, our process worked because we had senior level human code review, which caught these. But the real risk here is that without such experienced senior level people to do that review this would have seemed like a "slam dunk" where AI saved a whole lot of time and eliminated the need for expensive veterans on the team (only to fail catastrophically in production as soon as something hiccupped). This is what I am most concerned about. Companies will fall for this. Especially new companies where leadership is just as inexperienced at running a tech business as the cheap vibe coders they hire.
So if we are hiring people who will be using AI to do most of the coding work, I think we need to test the thoroughness of their thinking, their ability to detect unspoken problematic edge cases and know to focus on them when reviewing the AIs output, and the ability to recognize dangerous vagueness in requirements and ask for clarity. Also, the ability to mentally translate between "business speak" and "tech speak" is extremely valuable.
Though I still don't feel right about skipping a proof of coding skills. I just don't think we are yet at the point where it is safe for someone who can't code to be relying on AI to get it right. The aforementioned senior developers doing the code review are all people who have been coding by hand for years, and in order for such people to continue being available to do code reviews in the future, we need to make sure we hire people who can do this.
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Anyone who has enough development experience and dealt with the client facing side of it knows that the client never has a clue about the requirements. An important part of the job is, in polite terms, telling them how stupid their original set of requirements is and hammering out with them exactly what they actually need (that or just ignoring them, intuiting all of that, then just making the specific changes they want after you hand them a prototype). Basically, what we seem to be talking about here is tu
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I wouldn't say clients never have clue about requirements. They do have some clues but are unable to express them using the right language and sufficient detail.
Once in a previous life I did process controls. I was given a pipe expander, think a piston with a mushroom head that can expand; the head is slid into a pipe, expanded, and then slid further, expanded....until the pipe had all its joints tested by the expander. I did the controls (motor, sensors, etc.). What I got from our salesman was "deficient",
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No actual disagreement with what you're saying there, but a few things about your example. A. You were dealing with at least one competent engineer and B. you're talking about mechanical engineering. We both agree that you need to hammer out the details with the client, but many clients looking for software to be developed are not engineers and frequently not even all that technical plus the ease of rolling out a mockup or prototype is generally a lot easier in a pure software environment. So sometimes hamm
Then test what they will be doing at work (Score:3)
I have worked with junior level devs who just take a dev task's requirements, hand it straight to AI, put that through basic testing (only the main intended cases) and then offer that up as a finished solution. The solution was, of course, full of holes, some of them quite serious, just not obvious.
So change the coding interview to match what they will do on the job. If they aren't going to turn a requirement described in natural language into code that implements and tests that requirement, the test them on their ability to review a code implementation and the set of corresponding tests. The latter can provide some of the struggle they need to learn. And how well their code review goes can help distinguish between those that know more from those that know less. Those that actually debigged agentic co
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The thing is, if you have caught a lot of holes a year ago, a current AI would not have done these holes. You still find work where current AI struggles, but let's talk about these problems in a year. Currently the tech is getting better at exponential rate and every "But we will still need vibe code cleaners!" statement is either uninformed or coping. It is unclear how coding will look like in a few years, but few people will need the current "senior expertise" anymore when they have a LLM. And if you say
You keep using that word. I do not think it means- (Score:3)
Currently the tech is getting better at exponential rate
I keep seeing people say this. If the tech were in fact getting better at an exponential rate for the past 3-5 years, we would be at the actual Singularity today. We would already have reached the end of human history as the apex mind on this planet.
But semantic nit-picking aside, you still have not shown your work and established why you believe that we know the current growth rate (of whatever mathematical type) will continue indefinitely.
We haven't seen a Singularity before. We haven't created a syntheti
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On the one hand, its not "uninformed or coping" since it is objectively true right now. Maybe that will change in the future, but until it changes, we still need humans reviewing the code, right now, and that's a fact.
On the other hand, Singularity here we come! Woooooooo!
Re: From one dev manager to another (Score:2)
The most moronic comment so far. Keep up being dummy.
Re:From one dev manager to another (Score:5, Insightful)
Your process for interviewing should not change. You need engineers that can think well to judge the output of an LLM well.
Quite right. The logic the manager from the article is presenting is incomprehensible. They're arguing what? That you don't need coding problems in interviews because an AI can do them instead. Classically, they have been stock problems that are pretty much just mild variations of standard stuff from textbooks. So if you don't need to bother with them now because AI can do them, then you never should have needed to bother with them because the problems had already been done before, thousands of times, and written down. What does this guy think, that the coding problems in interviews are vital new developments in computer science or something? Now, some companies do actually present those as problems just to see how the interviewee approaches them, and there are also some stories about unethical companies that have used long-form interviews as a way to get programming piecework done for free by suckers, but that's not what's being discussed here. The point is that we're talking about a basic way to make sure that interviewees actually understand the concepts themselves, not asking for the interviewee to demonstrate that they can accomplish some amazing task that no-one else on Earth could perform.
christ on a pogo stick (Score:2, Funny)
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Naa, thinking is now the computer's job! At least that is what these assholes are pushing. Obviously, that cannot work until we have AGI (and may not work even then).
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IMHO, the coding test was a proxy for evaluating how much of an engineer the candidate is. That is, to separate the coding monkey from the engineer. That's still required, so you're right that the process shouldn't change - although the nature of the tech test might, and the crappy interviewers need to pick up their game a bit.
To elaborate a bit, if a task looks like "listen to a network socket, accept the request, parse what comes at you and respond in one of 10 ways", then you can just hand that to an AI
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I was gonna write that.
Interviews still make sense but the skills required are different. You need to know functions, data, data flow, language, communication, steering, prompting, AI investigation, software architecture, etc. You need to know what a state machine is and how it works, but knowing how to hand coding one is pointless.
Software engineers know what assembly code is, how instructions are compiled and packed for the CPU etc. BUt that doesn't mean that you should be expected to write a whole little
Re:From one dev manager to another (Score:4, Interesting)
I would argue that, while you shouldn't expect someone to know a particular architectures assembly code by heart, or anything like that, if they can't - given a reference for a simple pseudo assemnbly - create a basic program they probably should be screened out.
Re: From one dev manager to another (Score:2)
Re: From one dev manager to another (Score:3)
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You seem to be a bot, without the ability to provide any reasoning for your statement. People who don't understand how to code also can't DESIGN code to make the AI produce code without logic problems. A very basic and elementary bit of code, ask for a number between 0 and 9...now, what happens if someone puts a letter or other character in there? So, the idea of parsing the input to restrict what can be put in had to be done. It's a BASIC BASIC concept in code, but you still hear the occasional "bu
Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:5, Insightful)
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If a person can't manage to give reasonable, logical instructions to a computer, the LLM isn't going to help.
Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:3)
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If I'm trying to determine if they can think (or control the computer), probably not. If they are having trouble, one of the interviewers can pretend to be AI and give answers. In the past I've had one of the interviewers pretend to be auto-complete, since the candidate depended on that, and I care if they can logic, not if they've memorized all the function names.
Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:2)
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Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:2)
The problem is, anybody can use AI. We don't test for how well people type, or for familiarity with Outlook.
Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:2)
How do you reconcile "variation in speed is fine" with the requirement that "coding is second nature"?
Re:Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, most interviewers tend to care primarily that the candidate solves the problem in the time allotted. That used to mean writing pseudo code on a white board. Today, that means writing code that compiles, runs, and passes all the tests, including the hidden tests. If a candidate doesn't actually solve the problem, no one cares about the structure of his solution. Any time spent understanding and structuring the solution is wasted.
Secondary consideration is provided to all the traits you listed: decomposing problems, abstraction, structure. Good luck getting an accurate read on all that given the limitations of an interview. Your candidate is working in a high-pressure, high-stress, time-limited situation that's completely artificial and alien to most developers who nearly always have access to their IDE, the internet, and now AI.
You've made a completely artificial situation and think you get genuine results? The thought is laughable. Well, except that you're likely not hiring good candidates due to some BS interview process.
Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:2)
Precisely.
I'm surprised the comment with most sense isn't higher voted.
In a stressful and pressurised environment, most candidates don't do so well. I've seen some who just walked out in the middle!
I'm not testing how much stress they can handle or when they're being watched. Only the logic they use to divide the problem into small tasks using pseudo code, so their thought process.
Sometimes I show them code and tell me to walk through it, but even that, I'm looking at their body language and signs of stress
Re: Still an Extremely Good Signal for Senior Eng (Score:2)
You see an electrician working for day and make a call. It's pretty stupid to think you can do the same with Sw dev.
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How do you sort a list?
std::sort. Because that thing is probably better optimized than my own code and I don't need to maintain it myself.
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Basic understanding (Score:2)
React? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's not talking about the coders doing real work, just the web monkeys.
If their engineers didn't grind algorithms (and math) how are they supposed to intuit the direction to point a LLM for proper software, even if it handles the coding.
How do they go about solving a problem... (Score:2)
The thing to look for is how they go about solving a problem. That's the key. Coding is easy. Figuring out what the problem is and how to go about solving it, that's the hard part. Especially given that the problem the user says they need solved is often not the problem they actually have.
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Indeed. These claims that "coding is over" from AI being able to clone an existing solution are insightless on a really advanced level. Coding the solution is 10% of the work. Adding an unreliable tool like an LLM to the process does not make things better (as numerous organizations are finding). You may just lose the problem solvers that enjoy coding their solution as the final step though, because they will not accept a slop-machine taking that from them.
What I am also wonder is what happens when users th
Re: How do they go about solving a problem... (Score:2)
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If you are self-aware enough to do that, that may work. But most people, including most C-levels are not. Instead they live in some fantasy world, which is the reason a major part of any good software project is finding out what the customer actually needs. And that can only be done by humans because it needs real insight.
should be : How do they go about solving a problem (Score:2)
Raw milk enthusiaist declares pasteurization dead (Score:5, Funny)
NT
Why bother then? (Score:2)
There are many less precarious ways to make a living.
I guess? (Score:4)
The engineers on my team have a tendency when I ask a question to look it answers on AI and them present them to me without any kind of fact checking. Often the content falls along the lines of "its best to drive a car backwards down a road!" style idiocy. The lack of basic compression becomes immediately apparent and I am slowly starting to slide into using the word "stupid", and "idiotic" a lot more than I used to.
If it works out for Anthropic great! But why does everything Anthropic do make my life worse? I'm not seeing these results yet, but I have had them screamed at me for years at this point.
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The lack of basic compression becomes immediately apparent...
They're a real waste of space, huh?
Re: I guess? (Score:2)
Skill issue (Score:2)
It is really not hard for a hands-on and capable hiring manager to find a good person. Coder or otherwise. 30 minutes per person is all a competent hiring manager needs.
The problem happens when the hiring becomes too hands-off and there is no ownership
dipshit says something stupid (Score:3)
so an AI apologist expresses an opinion on human talent evaluation and hiring practices? Why should anyone care? Nothing he claims about the abilities of Claude mean two shits when it comes to hiring a human to do work. If you only cared about the solution in the challenge you wouldn't be hiring.
Frankly, coding challenges during interviews are terrible, good riddance but not because of AI.
Coding interview is dead (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to write a lot of code and I was pretty decent at it. A couple of years ago the AI coding assistance just got so good it didn't make sense for me to do that manually anymore. It got so good that I had it analyzing previous projects and improve/harden them to the point where they are rock solid. I got it to build new structures based around my previous work, and break things out into services that could be useful in a lot of different ways I would never have had time to do in the past. My pace of development now is far, far more than I would ever be able to accomplish manually. I have a suite of resources that I can combine in many different ways.
So I agree with these statements about the worthlessness of the coding interview. Me and my preferred LLM coding assistant of the day can run rings around anything you can manually. Before you can even begin to figure out a solution to a problem and start writing a few lines out I can have the complete solution generated for me along with full documentation and some unit tests. No need to waste your time or mine on a manual coding test like this.
What would impress me is if you can do better with AI assistance than I can. Can you go from an initial idea to a crafted proposal to a phased implementation plan that would probably work in about 30 minutes if I give you access to any model you want to use? Can you describe your workflow to me and show that it generates good results and why (using AI for that of course with full markdown documentation)? Can you get AI to create a complete product workflow for the solution to a problem along with some kind of build and deployment cycle, and get it running on one of the free cloud servers? Without writing a line of code? What if we now changed the spec some, how would you work it in?
An ordinary Joe off the street with little-to-no programming experience may have quite a bit of trouble with this, at least for now. But a person who can do it today without even raising a sweat is potentially a valuable employee.
So this is what the skillset interview should evaluate. Can you use the modern tools to generate good product, and do it pretty quick. Do you seem mentally stable enough to work well with people remotely, and conscientious enough to spend the time on it you are being paid for.
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"Sounds like you suck like ordinary Joe off the street". Personal attack all you got, asshole? You are pretty sure just from reading my post that I don't know what a good product is?
You are welcome to show examples of how a seasoned senior programmer plodding along manually can get more quality work done in a week than an average worker-bee with a good understanding modern AI assistance.
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"expose yourself as an incompetent", hey fuck off. I've seen your crap posted here. You don't use these modern tools and you don't know anything about them.
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I did and it failed.
AI is good at problems for which plenty of examples are available on stack overflow and reddit...
But if your problems are not there, or not common, the AI results are not that good...
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Yes. That was what I tried at the beginning of the craze. Stuff you can easily look up (but should usually not need to look up), LLMs can do (mostly), but in the engineering I do I often run into things you cannot look up. Total failure and sometimes hallucinations on top. Since then, I occasionally check back, but nothing has changed really. Simple, well-known things LLMs can usually do, things that require actual insight LLMs cannot do. No change there. The illusion has gotten a bit better, but that is it
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"in the engineering I do I often run into things you cannot look up". In those particular edge cases YOU look it up and inform the AI about whatever it can't determine for itself. Something requires genuine human insight? That's great, nice to know you can still make a meaningful contribution. But for the other 99% of typical programming efforts the LLM's will be far more productive than any human.
The vast majority of the software industry is embracing this tech as a productivity booster and you can just lo
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The vast majority of the software industry is acting even more stupid than usual. But a big shake-up was overdue anyways.
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You are welcome to show examples of how a seasoned senior programmer plodding along manually can get more quality work done in a week than an average worker-bee with a good understanding modern AI assistance. ... ...
What would impress me is if you can do better with AI assistance than I can. Can you go from an initial idea to a crafted proposal to a phased implementation plan that would probably work in about 30 minutes if I give you access to any model you want to use? Can you describe your workflow to me and show that it generates good results and why (using AI for that of course with full markdown documentation)? Can you get AI to create a complete product workflow for the solution to a problem along with some kind of build and deployment cycle, and get it running on one of the free cloud servers? Without writing a line of code? What if we now changed the spec some, how would you work it in?
The vast majority of the software industry is embracing this tech as a productivity booster and you can just look at the layoff statistics for evidence. Microsoft is massively profitable but recently offered buyouts to 60k employees. Oracle laid off 13% of staff. Cloudflare, Wix, and Epic Games furloughed 20% this year. And as they have said, Anthropic uses their own product to write almost 100% of their code and are gearing up for an IPO valuing them at $2 trillion.
I think you've pushed all of the talking points any shill would shill. Focus on proposals, documentation, deployment, signaling this is the future and will cut costs + you're good as dead if you don't use our product. I don't see anything you've missed.
The only slight wrinkle is the stunning lack of real world results. Layoffs are a result of economic conditions and corrections for pandemic era hiring not "AI". When AI gets to that point it will be obvious to everyone. Right now it is just another tool
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"talking points any shill would shill". Hey, don't use AI tech. I sure don't care and I don't see why anyone else would.
Meanwhile people looking for IT jobs are going to have to show that they do know how to use it effectively or get passed over, as the headline article explains.
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"talking points any shill would shill". Hey, don't use AI tech. I sure don't care and I don't see why anyone else would.
I like LLMs and have a collection of them. I have prompts running in the background continuously most every day. What I don't like are psychologically manipulative shills spewing nonsense divorced from reality.
Meanwhile people looking for IT jobs are going to have to show that they do know how to use it effectively or get passed over, as the headline article explains.
What does this even mean? AI tools are dead simple to use and prompt engineering is long dead. What is left and in how many weeks from now will it have completely changed? This whole notion knowing how to be an end user of an LLM constitutes some kind of "skill" is frankly absurd on its face.
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"I did and it failed."
When? It is a huge difference between today and let's say the models six month ago. The area is changing rapidly and what was true yesterday is no longer valid with today's models.
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Ah, no. Not even remotely. You are pushing a fallacy here, the "fallacy of experience" (https://antsstyle.medium.com/the-logical-fallacy-of-experience-1367653709f0). For some simple examples that may be within your grasp: You do not have to do hard drugs to be able to know doing them is not a good experience. Your also do not have to participate in a pyramid scheme to understand it is a scam and there is nothing to be gained. You may want to look up "cognitive surrender", to find out that using LLMs is act
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"This research is initiated by me and done by students in thesis work."
So you aren't a professional software developer who is adept at using the modern tools. You are a prof at a college who is actively looking for "nice examples of failures from current frontier (!) models".
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"Ah so you are an academic that knows nothing anyways". Nice way to totally expose yourself as completely clueless. And you cannot even read. Funny how that goes.
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"Ah so you are an academic that knows nothing anyways". Obvious lie. I didn't say anything like that, and I see that you have now resorted to childish insults.
Re: Coding interview is dead (Score:2)
If you define a good programmer as someone who writes software that works, is well documented, future proof and secure, and at a reasonable cost, then this means someone who use AI. This wasn't true two years ago. It wasn't so true even a year ago. It is now.
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If you define a good programmer as someone who writes software that works, is well documented, future proof and secure, and at a reasonable cost, then this means someone who use AI. This wasn't true two years ago. It wasn't so true even a year ago. It is now.
Nope. You fail. This never meant AI and it does not mean AI now. You are a scam victim.
If we ever get AGI, this may (or may not) be different, but LLMs cannot get you that.
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"You fail. This never meant AI and it does not mean AI now."
Show evidence. Talk is cheap, especially from someone who obviously has a strong bias and admittedly doesn't even work as a programmer who uses the tech. Google, Anthropic, Cognition, Snap, and Airbnb have publicly said AI generates a majority of their new code. Shopify has reported about half. Are they scam victims?
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Looks like you do not understand how "AI" (by which you mean probably LLMs) works...
It is not what you wrote, it is the best guess based on the examples it found on the internet...
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"I would roll my eyes and walk out if someone pulled this shit on me." Walk on out Anonymous Coward, we don't need you.
These days you can just type in a reasonably clear set of objectives and get a comprehensive project proposal in about 5 minutes to review. Tweak it as desired and ask for a phased implementation plan. You will have set up a standard cookbook ruleset that explains to the AI how you want things to go from there. Unit and integration tests, documentation, build and deployments, the works.
A co
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"Probably half of the suggestions AI wants to do for me is stupid or else just plain wrong", lets see some examples. What were your prompts, what were the responses, and what models were you using.
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"Probably half of the suggestions AI wants to do for me is stupid or else just plain wrong", lets see some examples. What were your prompts, what were the responses, and what models were you using.
Everyone should provide evidence to support their personal experiences to ZipNada's satisfaction. Of course ZipNada the sealioning shill will never be satisfied. It will always be you are doing it wrong or not using enough or using the wrong one.
Not surprising to me (Score:5, Insightful)
"A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool,"
I'm an old fart so I may be totally out to lunch on this one, but I get the impression that most of today's schools really don't teach students to think, question, analyze, and synthesize. I think this applies across all subjects, not just in technical ones.
Part of me thinks that the ones who DO know how to think and analyze are tilting the table against subsequent generations by under-funding education, healthcare, and nutrition. If you look at today's parasite class - many of whom are in the tech field - you see that their political attacks on taxpayers getting any of the benefit from the money they've paid are increasing. The broligarchs want it all for themselves, and I think they see AI as a stepping stone toward making the bulk of humans now living on Earth expendable. I think that it's in their plans to expend a whole lot of us.
Re:Not surprising to me (Score:5, Insightful)
It has always been like that. In fact, most of those claiming they want to hire critical thinkers actually are not critical thinkers themselves and do not want to hire any. Critical thinkers have always been rare, they are inconvenient, they tell you that you are doing things wrong. There are very few people that want to hire such people and these are critical thinkers themselves. But these people tend to get not promoted and eventually removed from an organization and hence the circle of mental incapability continues.
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Most of the people who I deal with at work who have MBAs or masters of some kind DO NOT READ. There was a short, concise paragraph up on the Zoom screen right in front over everybody's face that answered all the questions they were ping-ponging back and forth trying to wrap their heads around. I answered the question verbally like 3 times in the same meeting. AND pointed out the paragraph of text that I wrote to answer the question that was right in front of them. Even then, the paragraph was too much for t
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I get the impression that most of today's schools really don't teach students to think, question, analyze, and synthesize.
You might be right, but I wonder if it is not due to the ultra-partisan culture that has developed in the last few years. It could be that any ability to think, question, analyze, and synthesize that we might thank the schools for, is subsequently drummed out of young people but the relentless culture wars.
Never Should Have Been So Nothing's Changed For Me (Score:2)
I always thought that coding questions during interviews were stupid anyways even before AI: it's information that one can simply look up with a simple internet search or programming book, so if someone's got those things memorized or not, in my experience, is not a good indicator of how well a person will perform in their job. The only reason to ask programming questions is to figure out if the person was "fibbing" on their resume about their skills.
Plus it shows absolutely nothing about their interpersona
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I always thought that coding questions during interviews were stupid anyways even before AI: it's information that one can simply look up with a simple internet search or programming book.
If you could learn to code with one simple internet search and having one book on your shelf, then you'd be right. Also, ha it occurred to you that you've been asking the wrong questions?
The only reason to ask programming questions is to figure out if the person was "fibbing" on their resume about their skills.
Kinda. That
And replace them with what? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't know what to replace a coding interview with, then you aren't a "thought leader" as they like to call themselves on LinkedIn - you're just trying to make the rest of the industry dogfood your product for you while your company loses amounts of money equivalent to the GDP of small countries every year.
In the meantime, I still need to know if an applicant knows how to code, because if they get an LLM to write something for them and it's shit, I'm not yelling at their LLM, I'm yelling at them. So, the coding interview stays.
Re: (Score:2)
Here is another hint: Nobody that claims to be a "thought leader" or anything like it, is actually one.
We lose insane amounts of money - listen to us :) (Score:2)
Critical thinking: how does one gauge that? (Score:2)
TBH I've only really seen anyone use this phrase in Reddit arguments over the debate of the day.
I can't figure out how one would use this in a technical interview. Would one ask the interviewee to vocalise their thought process?
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that most people do not have critical thinking. To find whether a candidate has it, you need an interviewer that has it. At that point, it is a solved problem, critical thinkers can reliably identify critical thinkers. Only that most people think they are critical thinkers when they are really not, hence finding that respectively qualified interviewer is basically impossible.
Can't be arsed to use AI (Score:3)
Thankfully, the gent in question writes his own tosh, unbesmirched by nasty English idiom.
"I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how."
What exactly do you want?
People who seem to fiddle and piddle well with AIs or perhaps people who exhibit honest engineering habits and skills that can plausibly use a LLM as a tool in the pursuit of their work.
Re: (Score:2)
"What exactly do you want?"
What I would want to see is some substantial things that you have created with AI assistance and posted as open source to Github. I want to clone your repositories and run your stuff, it better work. I want my AI to examine your projects and critique them. I may want my AI to make some suggested improvements and submit them as pull requests to see how you handle it.
Like it or not, this is the way modern software development happens these days. Anyone who can't get their head aroun
These are not "tests" (Score:2)
At least not if you do them right. It seems this person has never done that. If you do these interviews right, you can find out how somebody approaches a problem, what motivates them and what they are good at.
On the other hand, this "story" may just be more "AI is great!"-type slop and essentially a lie.
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We've somehow lucked out with our stupid interview programming test. It is the most basic and dumb thing possible: an HTML based fizzbuzz. Candidates come up with some really elaborate solutions and present their work beautifully. Then we ask them to make some changes in real-time. You know, like, change a color. Add some inputs to control the factors. How do you approach a change in requirements? What I've been noticing is that people are delegating everything to LLMs and have no idea at all how the
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These days, I actually think FizzBuzz is not bad. I read about it long ago on the Coding Horror blog, wrote it in 4 different languages on the commandline in a few minutes, was unimpressed and forgot about it again. But later I got back to it and it actually has something going for it. Especially when a candidate starts to discuss different approaches and aspects, because the smart ones can see that it is utterly trivial, deliver a minimal (!) solution and will try to add value by discussing its aspects. Go
Gee why can't we hire anyone good? (Score:4, Interesting)
None of the junior people can pass our interviews. And none of the seniors want a full time job babysitting an code-generation machine. Modern AI has turned coding into the equivalent of a mindless factory job watching things go by on the conveyor belt.
Representative of a major AI company (Score:2)
how AI now does everything--you just need to buy the AI from them.
What a surprise.
Coding will proper-die in about 5 years-ish (Score:2)
What companies will require is articulate people, who can tell the AI exactly what is needed. "Here's our budget (is it good enough?), here's our existing codebase, this is what we need. Get it done, fix any bugs or prior bad architectural decisions, use the highest industry standards for everything with these unique twists if they are secure. Let me, with a BS in basket weaving, peruse the plan and give you the OK."
Note: in 5 years, 90% of that line I typed would be implied obvious and not even needed in t
Re: (Score:2)
"will require is articulate people, who can tell the AI exactly what is needed"
Most companies with an IT staff have loads of legacy code that runs the company operations or produces the product they sell. It was written by people who are long gone. There may be zero documentation. The code eventually starts to rot, and the typical worker-bee programmer spends the majority of his time fixing bugs rather than writing fresh new greenfield code.
AI is an ace at this. It can review your codebase in minutes and wr
irrelevant - anthropic only hires friends & fa (Score:2)
Taste and Empathy (Score:2)
Anthropic engineering manager is looking for taste and empathy. That pretty much rules all of you out.
Coding interviews are a waste. (Score:2)
Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.
I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.
The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily
Not the point (Score:2)
Obvious Answer (Score:2)
Why not just ask the AI to hire people for him?
Making coding tests more relevant (Score:2)
Now that we have LLMs, the important thing is for developers to be really understand what they are doing. It has always been the case, but it is even more important now.
So I think a better way to do it is to give the candidate access to a terrible LLM, one that is almost guaranteed to be wrong, and see how he approaches the problem. If he goes "the code is shit, fuck it, I am doing it myself", and he does it right, it is a good sign, if he manages to point out the mistakes to the LLM and though good prompti
Re: (Score:2)
"the code is shit, fuck it, I am doing it myself"
If you've learned how to use AI tools properly you don't start out by having it write any code. You tell it what you want to accomplish in as much detail as you are comfortable with, and tell it to create a proposal for you to review. This is the most important step, and anyone who skips it should be rejected. A good model will propose several options and describe the pros and cons.
You make some careful decisions and tell it to generate an implementation plan
Re: (Score:3)
Anthropic is simply really, really good at producing these little gems. They've learned the art of getting free advertising. Google hasn't done quite so well with Google Meet. Maybe they should take a cue from Anthropic, and release a statement to the press talking about how dangerous Google Meet is.