Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

10 points by mdwelsh 2 hours ago | 3 comments

Since the rise of AI coding assistants, about 80% of the dev candidates that I interview tell me that they aren't writing much code themselves anymore - they are directing agents instead. This makes me deeply uncomfortable (although maybe I'm just being old-fashioned). I still want to know that devs on my team can actually write code themselves, and have some idea of what they are doing when it comes to system design. This is increasingly challenging given how rapidly the AI tools are evolving.

I'm curious what other folks are seeing in a post-AI hiring landscape and how you are approaching candidates that tell you they are fully agent-pilled when it comes to their development process. Should I keep doing the conventional leetcode and design interviews? Or just give up and expect everyone is going to use Claude Code no matter what?

Oras 2 hours ago |

Leetcode doesn’t tell you anything apart from someone memorised set of questions and their solution.

For your question, I assume you want people who can solve problems, can explain their thought process and reasons of decisions. I did interview devs recently, and my questions were related to their experience in their CV. Something like, tell me about project X in Y company, what did you do, what did you use, why, what did you learn from it.

My personal opinion is that LLMs are no difference from developers who over engineer and over complicate things. You can get them to do good work with the right steering and right understanding of the whole system within the context of the company.

paulddraper 1 hour ago |

Conventional technical interview (DSA, whiteboard architecture).

Then 1-2 day paid work trial.

Interestingly…no one has said no to the trial.

It turns out that people want to derisk their decision just as much, if not more.

jdlshore 38 minutes ago | |

Were the people you were interviewing already unemployed? Work trials are harder when people are already employed. There can be legal issues as well as scheduling ones.

mathgeek 27 minutes ago | | |

This will always be the problem with trials. Anyone with a job, often underemployed between software roles these days, will be excluded.

Still, it does benefit the hiring company, just not the applicant in these situations.

efortis 2 hours ago |

Recently, I was screen-interviewed for coding speed with a fairly easy project. The company used a 3rd party platform which gave me 90m to complete 4 levels, each one building upon the other.

I think that was a nice test, but the platform is too buggy to recommend.