[63stack]

I see this line of "I need to assess your thinking, not the AI's" thinking so often from people who claim they are interviewing, but they never recognize the elephant in the room for some reason.

If people can AI their way into the position you are advertising, then at least one of the following two things have to be true:

1) the job you are advertising can be _literally_ solved by AI

2) you are not tailoring your interview process properly to the actual job that the candidate will need to do, hence the handwave-y "oh well harder problems will come up later that the AI will not be able to do". Focus the interview on the actual job that the AI can't do, and your worries will disappear.

My impression is that the people who are crying about AI use in interviews are the same people who refuse to make an effort themselves. This is just the variation of the meme where you are asked to flip a red black tree on a whiteboard, but then you get the job, and your task is to center a button with CSS. Make an effort and focus your interview on the actual job, and if you are still worried people will AI their way into it, then what position are you even advertising? Either use the AI to solve the problem then, or admit that the AI can't solve this and stop worrying about people using it.

[sifex]

Right now there’s a lot of engineering that falls outside SWE — think datacenter architecture or integrations, or security operations, or designing automotive assemblies. There are also dozens of components of a job that require context windows measured in the _years_ of experience — knowing what will work at scale and what won’t, client interfacing, communicating decisions down inside organisations through to customer support networks about how they are required to operate.

When we’re hiring for my role, Security Operations, I can’t have someone googling or asking AI what to do during an cyber security incident, but they can certainly use AI as much as they want when writing automations.

I reject candidates at all stages for all sorts of reasons, but more and more candidates believe the job can be done with AI. If we wanted AI, we will probably go wholesale and not include the person asking for the job to do the typing for us.

We’re not crying due to AI, we’re crying over the dozens of lost hours of interviews we’re having to conduct where it’s business critical that people know their stuff — engineering positions with consequences (banks, infrastructure, automotive). There isn’t space for “well I didn’t write the code”.