How to include AI in the developer interview process

-

What problem are we trying to solve?

In an earlier post I put forward an observation that as of September 2025 (month of posting), companies that are looking to hire professional software developers include a setup in the interviewing process that takes away common code assistance, which is in stark contrast to the way that developers joining the company would be expected to operate in their day to day work.

I've had a little bit of time to contemplate this, and while I do not have a solution that involves keeping the AI features enabled, I do have the an idea of an alternative approach to include some consideration of AI.

Look what the AI made us do

Instead of getting developers to cram revision of computer science fundamentals by re-reading Cracking The Coding Interview to fit a cookie-cutter template of what a good developer should be expected to produce for a given coding challenge, we could instead present examples of code that has been generated by AI, and have the candidate evaluate the quality and / or suggest refinements to the prompt.

This could get us closer to aligning the interview process with the new reality of how software development is increasingly being assisted by the application of artificial intelligence systems.

For a limited time only 

I fully expect that cleaning up after loosely applied AI generated code will become less of a requirement as systems evolve, but at this point in time it should be considered as a valuable skill to have.

The amount of buzz on LinkedIn mentioning Vibe coding is either a sign that a lot of people are getting into it, or that AI companies are doing well at loading up the hype train (or both).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speeding up Software Builds for Continuous Integration

-
Downloading the Internet Can you remember the last time you started out on a clean development environment and ran the build of some software using Maven or Gradle for dependency management? It takes ages to download all of the necessary third party libraries from one or more remote repositories, leading to expression like, "Just waiting for Maven to download the Internet". Once your development environment has been used for building a few projects the range of dependencies that will need to be downloaded for other builds reduces down as the previously referenced onces will now be cached and found locally on your computer's hard drive. What happens on the Continuous Integration environment? Now consider what goes on when Jenkins or your other preferred Continuous Integration server comes to build your software. If it doesn't have a local copy of the libraries that have been referenced then it is going to pay the cost of that slow " download the Internet" p...
Read more

2022 - A year in review

-
Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics.  This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April   Had my first direct experience with Covid-19.  I only went for a test because ...
Read more

Running Java with Preview Features in the Cloud - Part One

-
Introduction I've been catching up on some features that have been added in recent versions of Java. The 6 month release cadence of new versions of Java is great, but can lead to a build up of new things to learn about. The support for pattern matching in switch statements - JEP 406 - is particularly appealing, but for now it is still only available as a preview feature, meaning that at compile time and at run time we need to explicitly specify to enable preview. A shallow view of the main cloud providers A lot of online applications these days will run in some sort of cloud runtime environment.  Some examples from the main cloud providers are: AWS Lambda Azure Functions   Google Cloud Function   According to what the documentation currently specifies, AWS Lambda's pre-packaged Java environments only support versions 8 and 11 unless you bring your own Docker container. Similarly, Azure Functions only offer versions 8 and 11. This leaves us to consider Google Cloud Functi...
Read more