Ask HN: How has your company adapted interviews in the AI world?

ravshan 2 days ago

By simply not hiring software developers. I am not really sure whether it is due to AI or just a coincidence.

floro 2 days ago
That would be due to the shit economy globally. People make excuses that it's AI replacing jobs, but that's delusional. Its very rough and none of our clients have any money
- Tryvrsakjo10 2 days ago
  I think it the amalgamation of an ailing global economy, AI and clients not having cash. The number of layoffs due to AI is ghastly and absurd, firms use AI to pick potential employees and then again due to AI I think many tech firms are just not hiring developers that much.
  - floro 2 days ago
    It's not due to AI. As I've said before
    dormento 1 day ago
    I know that yc by virtue of being a startup incubator has a noticeable pro-AI bias, and this naturally influences hn as well.
    That said, there's definitely some influence, and not only on development. Teams are shrinking not only due to the economy, there's a real pressure to deliver more with less, and AI has raised expectations all around.
    - (hw) Hardware issues can be debugged and worked around by an amateur (like yours truly) at home, meaning you no longed need to pay to fix lots of things yourself;
    - (dev) refactoring and rewrites are not as expensive as before, meaning no need for dedicated teams and processes, and _some_ businesses (not all) chose to turn that into budget optimization ("doing the same work with less team", instead of "doing more work with the same team")
    - (media) you can generate a decent 1 minute SaaS landing page product video for 20 bucks and and openRouter key, meaning less need to rely on or shop for specialized marketing/media service.
    And the list just goes on an on. We're in the big pressure cooker of history as usual, but this is one of those occasions where the temperature is rising really fast due to AI and the further commoditization of a lot of workflows that were career specialties yesterday.
    Edit: a killed post below mentions interviews now valuing system design knowledge (like tradeoffs, cost etc) instead of rote memorization (since the need for encyclopedic knowledge arguably hit an all time low). This shows the change in the median profile businesses and recruiting staff are after, certainly influenced by AI.

I'm seeing lower salaries, and work sample on actual codebase consistently happening. Also here an ex employee wanting to come back at just above half their previous pay.

Does not bode well for candidates.

hackermailman 2 days ago

Only thing that changed where I am is if you have any formal methods experience you get called first because us like everyone else has some formal methods team actively hiring with little applications so have to find good fits out of the general pool.

Otherwise interviews are the same more or less with emphasis on reading code and being asked is there a more optimized approach and then seeing if the candidate invalidates the cache. You'll probably still get hired if you do it once but after being told something and you do it again in the next interview then nope. They still fly everyone out and do a superday with back to back interviews (and pay for the time).