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Comment by artyom | Hacker News Reader

The article implies that somewhat, before AI the leetcode/brainteaser/behavioral interview process had somewhat acceptable results.

The reality is that AI just blew up something that was a pile of garbage, and the result is exactly what you'd expect.

We all treat interviews in this industry as a human resources problem, when in reality is an engineering problem.

The people with the skills to assess technical competency are even more scarce than actual engineers (b/c they would be engineers with people skills for interviewing), and that kind of people is usually very very busy to be bothered with what's a (again, perceived) human resources problem.

Then the rest is just random HR personnel pretending that they know what they're talking about. AI just exposed (even more) how incompetent they are.

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The results did filter out a few people who could not think.

i reciently interviewed someone who was a senior engineer on the space shuttle, but managed a call center after that. Can this person still write code is a question we couldn't figure out and so had to pass. (We can't prove it but think we ended up with someone who outsourced the work to elsewhere - but at least that person could code if needed as proved by the interview)

Ageism

We have interviewed and hired plenty of people even older (age is not something ever known/discussed and illegal to factor in - but it isn't hard to make a good guess anyway)

senior engineer could be a project manager who never wrote code.

i remember this because it is one of the faw 'no' I have had where it wasn't proved the person would be bad at the job. Normally the no hire signal is because the person would obviously be bad.

Why, after interviewing them, were you unable to figure out if this person can still code?

Because we didn't ask the right questions. We changed the process to require some questions. Which isn't perfect either, but we don't get months to interview someone so.

The person was 23.

Id hardly call this ageism. The person went from being part of engineering on a major space faring project to managing a callcenter. Thats like going back to zero on the career ladder, as far as engineering is concerned. I would have also been questioning whether or not their skills have collected dust, were still relevant, and most specifically why they went from engineering in aerospace to managing a callcenter, and why they want back into engineering again (probably hates callcenter).

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