[TheGRS]

I'm thinking of a technical screen I did recently where I didn't move forward. The time to do the screen was 30 minutes, and it was where they had a full frontend/backend and I needed to navigate around to fix a pretty arbitrary issue. I'd say this is preferable to a leetcode problem for sure, but also, I do tend to take my time to understand the system a bit before committing to changes, I mean this is sight unseen. I'm wondering if this felt too slow to the interviewer.

They sent me a summary document before the meeting, but I couldn't see the code until the interview. I felt like I identified the issue and where to make changes rather quickly, like 10 minutes of looking around and talking through how all the components and APIs fit together.

Then the interviewer asked me to implement a datetime solution, which in this time-boxed window my mind raced around to multiple solutions that I talked through out loud: I could write it myself which would definitely take some time for me to remember all of the syntax involved and reason through the problem, I could download an existing library which would also take some time to read documentation, I could google around for existing solutions in somewhere like Stack Overflow which is pretty hit and miss, or I could prompt an AI agent to write a solution for me. I talked through all of these, they wanted to know how I'd do it by hand at first, which I talked through for a bit but admitted I wasn't sure if it was a good way to go about it. Then I said given the time constraints the AI prompt route would probably make the most sense. By the time we arrived at that and tried it for a bit our time was basically up. And I got the impression suggesting AI to help code didn't impress the interviewer at all.

If others are able to stand out in this scenario then I guess I'll just admit I'm not the top candidate. My brain just doesn't work that quickly. I like to spend time gathering context and tinkering before really getting into the solution, and that probably doesn't come across well in these situations.

[glaslong]

It often selects for a confident first shot, which is why we see these orgs drift towards lots of engineers who can blast out code but cannot maintain or evolve any existing systems proficiently. On rare occasion that is even the hiring goal!

[lubujackson]

This is the exact problem. Some people can flip between one shotting for interviews and going deep for real work, but they are extremely rare.

As a senior, I would much prefer a candidate who can discuss options more than write code - the writing itself is secondary, especially with AI. I want to see someone grapple with tradeoffs, clarify what they know and what breadcrumbs they want to follow before committing to a solution.

[eudamoniac]

So it took you 15-20 minutes in an interview just to decide on the method by which you will begin to implement "a datetime solution"?

[TheGRS]

I'm hand waving the exact times, it was probably talking through how to filter by datetime a specific way for maybe 5 minutes followed by some discussion around these other ways to go about finding a solution. It was filtering by date starting from the beginning of the week. I searched around for a little bit since I didn't really know how to do this off the top of my head. Found a function that did what I wanted, then ran into type issues, more flailing around trying to get this working. I'll fully admit I didn't ace this.