[TransAtlToonz]

I had no idea people took hackerrank as a serious signal rather than as a tool for recent graduates to track interview prep progress. Surely it has all the same issues AI does: you have no way of verifying that the person who takes the interview actually is responsible for that signal.

I don't see AI as a serious threat to the interview process unless your interview process looks a lot like hackerrank.

[shermantanktop]

Your “unless” covers a huge swath of this industry, at the low end and at the high end. Excluding places that do that leaves you with what exactly? Boutique shops filled with 20 year veterans?

[TransAtlToonz]

What do you mean by the "high" end? I would consider this sort of interview style necessarily precluding such a place from being considered a high-quality work-place. Not only is it a miserable way to interview, it's not an effective signal for engineer quality beyond rapid code snippet production.

> Excluding places that do that leaves you with what exactly? Boutique shops filled with 20 year veterans?

We are on a VC forum—I imagine small shops focused on quality are quite common here.

[shermantanktop]

“High end” was meant as shorthand for FAANG …high comp, not necessarily high tech complexity.

You are correct about the deficiencies of the whiteboard interview. It is not a sane way to hire an individual. It makes sense as a way to hire someone in the top 20% from a large unfiltered pool. So wrt high/low, that’s what FAANG companies have to do, and for many nontechnical companies they outsource this work or emulate FAANG practices for no good reason.

My point was that there are very few places that don’t do this.

[TransAtlToonz]

Ah, makes sense.

I just abandoned the code interview altogether and ask them questions about process. It's a very simple workaround, but very effective. I'll admit it helps that there are very few problems these days outside of specific problems to solve that require a high degree of technical competency to tackle.

[shermantanktop]

For the more senior candidates that I interview, I've seen people who talk a great game but cannot deliver, and others who can. Having them write fizzbuzz-type code is a primitive check that has led to surprising results - 25 year industry veterans with all kinds of great projects delivered, and...they can't write a for loop? They can't declare a variable? They don't know what final/const really does? I hate asking them to do it but I can't really stop.