I do not understand the obsession with proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that an interviewer can code.
Not being able to code is by far the easiest failure mode to deal with and I can deal with it more quickly by looking at resumes and firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly.
What is much harder to detect is the person who gives up at the first sign of trouble. Or someone who likes to over abstract everything. Or someone who likes to spend all day nitpicking PRs.
The absolute most damaging employee is the technical tornado midlevel who has prolific output and is good at figuring out how to get PRs through the code review process.
I can only bring to begin imagine the kind of damage a person like that could do with an LLM, an inattentive manager, and a buddy willing to rubber stamp PRs.
> firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly
I assume your from the US? The issue with firing people quickly after hiring them is:
* You need to pay whatever headhunter or other personnel that is involved. Some offer a cashback or reduced rate to find a new person, but your still out of the pocket. Do it a few too many times and the headhunter dump you.
* You just wasted a ton of time of other employees, setting up this persons accounts, social benefits, contract negotiation, training time, and more. Again, this is not free.
* Now you are back to looking for other people. You know those people that you rejected, well, the change is reduced that they will come back to your company, maybe they got hired somewhere else, maybe your rejection left a bad impression as you hired that lying person over a actually well qualified person that just did not ace the interview (happens to so many people, often because of nerves).
The trick is, to have a that person (and others in the interview process) work a few days in your company, but this is not covered by a official work contract but a interim contract (of course, you pay those people, some companies are real bastard and do not pay).
That can weed out the people that are good at lying about their skills. But to be honest, if you can not spot them during the interview stage, ...
We had people coming in for Senior positions, and their CVs looked good, they knew how to talk the talk. But when asked for some incredible basic SQL question, they fumbled so much, because they used ORMs their entire life. But loved to place SQL skills on their CV. Seen multiple of those... And so often they then switch to going after the interviewer, thinking that by attacking the interviewer before the boss, that will help them. Yea, "Senior material"...
With AI its going to be the same. People get comfortable using AI, but when you ask code questions without that AI to back them up, that skill gap will exposé themselves very fast during the actual interviews.
I love using AI because it can remove so much boilerplate / repeat / great for finding doc info but you need to know your language. If you grew up with only AI, and do not grow beyond AI to solve every issue, your nothing more but a copy/past dev (AI is just a extension of that dev type).
> Or someone who likes to over abstract everything.
No no, the most annoying ones are those that come in and then want to implement everything into a style they are familiar with! Code rewrites to fit them, framework changes because they are familiar with them... Nothing more fun as hiring somebody to write Angular for 13k/month (talking almost 10 years ago), and then this person pushing Vue, to even rewriting part of the codebase into Vue. Like, we hired you with a insane salary because we are desperate for a Angular developer, if we wanted to rewrite everything to Vue, we will have hired somebody cheaper.
Not being able to code is by far the easiest failure mode to deal with and I can deal with it more quickly by looking at resumes and firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly.
What is much harder to detect is the person who gives up at the first sign of trouble. Or someone who likes to over abstract everything. Or someone who likes to spend all day nitpicking PRs.
The absolute most damaging employee is the technical tornado midlevel who has prolific output and is good at figuring out how to get PRs through the code review process.
I can only bring to begin imagine the kind of damage a person like that could do with an LLM, an inattentive manager, and a buddy willing to rubber stamp PRs.