Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
felixrieseberg.com21 points by akavi 7 hours ago
21 points by akavi 7 hours ago
The heart of the coding interview is to get signal on a candidates’ ability to solve a problem without all of the inputs given to them, see how they and explain their thought process as they do it.
Because of AI, what it means to “not have all of the inputs” has changed as anyone can cut and paste a Leetcode problem to a chatbot and solve it.
I think we are going to iterate a bit to figure out a better signal than the typical coding interview. For junior engineers, I think coding questions will move towards MBA style problems when someone is given more of an open ended question with a codebase and you see what the candidate does without context to reduce the problem.
While the approach makes sense, I have yet to see a quantifiable and normalised way to replace Leetcode interviews.
It’s probably too soon to claim “death of the coding interview”.
I have, and it is surprisingly straightforward.
Find an easy to understand product, like a step above a todo list app. Share a spec and have them code it in their own IDE using LLM. Focus on speed. Then have them extended it, adding some features. Then ask them to show you where certain functionality exists in the code and to explain the architecture of how it is built. Ask them where it is weak and could be improved.
That's it, that's the interview. SWEs are getting quite good at the prompting, but fast navigation and understanding of the code is the key.
Anyone that can effectively translate a spec to code with minimal handholding shows product awareness. Anyone who can produce a working app can prompt AI reasonably. Anyone who can revise their design on the fly to support new features is someone with flexible thinking and some humility. Anyone who can navigate and explain what AI built is someone that understands how to build a mental map of a codebase. Anyone who can do all of this in an interview is someone who can handle pressure, work quickly and communicate.
You are welcome to keep trotting out linked list traversals and sliding window problems if you like, but leetcode is now (and maybe always has been) about culture fit more than an ability to build software.
Ai assisted interviews are pretty good and can replace leetcode parroting pretty well.