That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist?
Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?
The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.
This was 2-3 years ago in a remote interview. The candidate would hear the question, BS us a bit and then sometimes provide a good answer.
But then if we asked follow up questions they would blow those.
They also had odd 'AV issues' which were suspicious.
If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away.
I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years).
I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc.
And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it.
If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description).
I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.
I would also add meticulous attention to documenting requirements and decisions taken along the development process, especially where compromises were made. All the "why's", so to speak.
But yes, commercial development, capital-A "Agile" absolutely kills the drive.
And yep I didn't want to make my comment too big. I make double sure to document any step-by-step processes on "how to make X or Y work", especially when I stumble upon a confusing bug in a feature branch. I go out of my way to devise a 100% reproducible process and document it.
Those, plus yours, and even others, are what makes a truly good programmer IMO.
And tbh, at the senior level they rarely care about personal projects. I must have had 60+ interviews and I feel a lack of a github cost me maybe 2 positions. When you job is getting a job, you rarely have the time for passion.I'm doing contract work in the meantime; prevents gaps from showing, more appealing than a personal project, and I can talk about that to the extent of my NDA (plenty of tech to talk about without revealing the project)
Same. I could afford not working throughout most of 2023 but I had to deal with ruined health + my leeway didn't last as long as I hoped so I was back on the treadmill just when I was starting to enjoy some freedom and a peace of mind.
> And tbh, at the senior level they rarely care about personal projects. I must have had 60+ interviews and I feel a lack of a github cost me maybe 2 positions.
I have no idea how much it costed me but I was told in no uncertain terms 10+ times that having a GitHub portfolio would have meant no take-home assignment, and skipping parts of the interview I already attended. So it definitely carries weight _and_ can help shorten hiring processes.
So I don't feel it was a deal-breaker for the people who interviewed me either but I think it would have netted me more points, so to speak.
Assuming you are graded and are the same person:
Without portfolio: 7/10
With portfolio: 8/10
...for example.
> I'm doing contract work in the meantime
Same x2, but it's mentally draining. No stability. That removes future bandwidth that would have been used for those passion projects.
TL;DR a lot of things conspire to rob you of your creative potential. :(
The long term goal should be that you should NOT be energetic, yet be able to pretend that you are. We'll see where you are at the 33 year mark :)
Also if you have a novel or disclosure sensitive passion project, GitHub may be avoided even as a very conservative bright line.
As stated above I think it can be good to find common points to enhance the interview process, but make sure to not use it as a filter.
If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating.
If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a ventriloquist dummy for the AI and get the job. Stated another way, what kind of "effective and well designed open ended interview" can you make that would not succumb to this problem?
In-person interviews, second round comes with a plane ticket. This used to be the norm.
Likewise with hiring; at a small company you're looking to fill an immediate need and are losing money every day the role isn't filled. You wouldn't bring in every viable candidate, you'd bring in the first viable candidate.
FAANG hiring practices assume a budget far past any exit point in your mind.
To put the whole concern in a nutshell: If AI was good enough to fool a seasoned engineer in an interview, that engineer would already be using the AI themselves for work and not need to hire an actual body.
People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past.
If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse.
People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time.
So you create an interview process that can only be passed by a skilled dev, including them signing a doc saying the code is entirely their work, only referencing a language manual/manpages.
And if they show up to work incapable of doing the same, it's time to call the cops.
That's probably the only way to deal with scam artists and scum, going forward.
It costs employers money to on board someone, not just in pay, but in other employees training that person. Obviously the case must be clear cut, but I've personally hired someone who clearly cheated during the remote phone interview, and literally couldn't even code a function in any language in person.
There are people with absolutely no background as a coder, applying to jobs with 5 years experience, then fraudulently misrepresenting the work of others at their own, to get the job.
That's fraud.
As I said, it's not being prosecuted as such now. But if this keeps up?
You can bet it will be.
Because it is fraud.
I won't name names, but there are a lot of Consulting companies that feed off Government contracts that are literally this.
"Experience" means a little or a lot, depending on your background. I've met plenty of people with "years of experience" that are objectively terrible programmers.
If the AI premise is true, then it's this or good programmers, and good companies will never meet.
To be fair, many humans do too, but many promising candidates even at the mid-level band of experience who thrive at organizations I've approved them into are able to eventually get to a good enough balance of many tradeoffs (technical and otherwise) with a pretty clean and compact amount of back and forth that demonstrates thoughtfulness, curiosity and efficacy.
If someone can get to that level of capability in a technical interviewing process using AI without it being noticeable, I'd be really excited about the world. I'm not holding my breath for that, though (and having done LOTS of interviews over the past few quarters, it would be a great problem to have).
My solution, if I were to have the luxury of having that problem, would be a pretty blunt instrument -- I'd instead change my process to actually have AI use of tools be part of the interviewing process -- I'd give them a problem to solve, a tuned in-house AI to use in solving the problem, and have their ability to prompt it well, integrate its results, and pressure check its assumptions (and correct its mistakes or artifacts) be part of the interview itself. I'd press to see how creatively they used the tool -- did they figure out a clever way to use it for leverage that I wouldn't have considered before? Extra points for that. Can they use it fluidly and in the heat of a back and forth of an architectural or prototyping session as an extension of how they problem solve? That will likely become a material precondition of being a senior engineer in the future.
I think we're still a few quarters (to a few years) away from that, but it will be an exciting place to get to. But ultimately, whether they're using a tool or not, it's an augment to how they solve problems and not a replacement. If it ever gets to be the latter, I wouldn't worry too much -- you probably won't need to do much hiring because then you'll truly be able to use agentic AI to pre-empt the need for it! But something tells me that day (which people keep telling me will come) will never actually come, and we will always need good engineers as thought partners, and instead it will just raise the bar and differentiation between truly excellent engineers and middle of the pack ones.
So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?
I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.
I am imagining an AI saying my CV is AI-generated, when in reality, I do not even use Auto-correct or Auto-suggest when I (type)write! :-)
Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing.
If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.
It's as if we were testing for replicants in Blade Runner: The AI response will rarely figure out you are aiming to look for something frustrating, that they are actually proud of, or figure out when you are looking for a hot take you can then disagree with.
Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful response to my question 30 seconds later.
AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.