[danielvaughn]

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour.

Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge.

Not only is this LLM proof, but you also get a sense of their opinions, their interests, their passion, etc.

[bilsbie]

It’s a major improvement but you still want to be careful on what you consider common knowledge. There’s a lot of breadth to software engineering and there can be whole areas someone is missing but can learn.

For example I was always a great employee but early in my career I wasn’t big on unit testing.

Or I interviewed for an ML job and they dinged me for not knowing a bunch of statistics things off the top of my head.

[bluefirebrand]

> I was always a great employee but early in my career I wasn’t big on unit testing

Unit testing does have drawbacks though, so as long as you could explain why you aren't a huge fan of it, I don't see why this would be a disqualification

[koliber]

This is a great approach and I like it as well. I did have a few situations where the person could talk shop like an expert but when it came to actually writing some code they failed. I literally had a person fail fizzbuzz that was supposedly senior and talked shop really well.

[bilsbie]

I’d really want to dig into that. Maybe they were nervous? I’ve gotten so nervous in some situations I’ve forgotten the next sentence was going to say. I wonder if it’s an issue like that. Your mind just blanks.

[SilverRubicon]

As a senior developer I had to search for "wtf is fizzbuzz". How many senior developers spend their time solving these kinds of problems?

[Ferret7446]

This doesn't scale, and opens up legal liability to unfair hiring accusations.