My POV comes from someone who's indexed on what works for gauging technical signal at startups, so take it for what it's worth. But a lot of what I gauge for is a blend of not just technical capability, but the ability to translate that into prudent decisions with product instincts around business outcomes. AI is getting better at solving technical problems it's seen before in a black box, but it struggles to tailor that to any kind of context you give it to pre-existing constraints around user behavior, existing infrastructure/architecture, business domain and resource constraints.
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.
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.