If an LLM can pass your tech interview, you’re not testing for software engineering skills. You’re just checking if someone can solve classic puzzles.
And the worst part is that companies would rather go back to flying candidates for an interview than rethinking their process.
@pcalcado yeah, I tried to sell https://zerohr.io solutions for a year and the companies really prefer delusional processes
@JeffGrigg @pcalcado https://memorici.de/posts/pre-mortem/#turning-methodology-into-a-product
Test task texts themselves can be found in this section of my article about the experience.
If someone wants the highly praised[1] task skeletons, I can send them over privately.
[1]: https://zerohr.io/for-developers (testimonial)
@jonn @JeffGrigg This is excellent, thanks! Also I can't believe I never read Sockpuppet's blog you linked, I wrote something around the same ideas at the same time https://philcalcado.com/2016/03/15/on_asking_job_candidates_to_code.html I'm thinking about updating it to an LLM world
@pcalcado awesome read! Btw, I had a super weird thing happen to me when I was between founder jobs: I interviewed to a cryptographic R&D company and at the final round they asked me to implement tetris in 40 minutes.
After the interview I looked up smallest tetris implementation in #Rust and it's 160 lines without data modelling. So I was expected to write 4 loc / minute while solving the problem and telling them what was I thinking about. 
Clearly impossible! Told them "I'm not a competitive programmer" and made a grimace when I heard the question. Maybe I should have told them that I won't be doing this in that amount of time? Idk...
I got a rejection saying that I'm not technically proficient enough, but I have a very strong feeling that it was a test of "attitude, not skill".
What do you think about adversarial hiring tricks like this? Do you think if I would have refused, they would have given me a sub task? Does the company just suck and I dodged a bullet?
@jonn @pcalcado My guess is they probably wanted to see how eagerly you'd approach the task, even if there was no chance of completing it fully. Possibly they wanted to see your initial sketches of data structures, project layout, etc.
I frequently test job applicants, and I'd far rather see a candidate try and come up short than to see them say it's not possible or that the task does not interest them. (Though to be fair, we don't set impossible tests.)
@bobulous hmm, but... Then why not say "implement as much tetris as you can in 40'"?
I continued with a disclaimer that I'll code as fast as I can and implemented the board naively and shift.
But then I realised that I should have implemented row deletion first and ran out of time.
I was *extremely* stressed the whole time, of course. I still hope they wanted to see a refusal to do impossible things.
@bobulous but also, something I can't stop thinking about is that tetris is such a known system that some nerds can randomly have implemented tetris for fun.
Heck, I implemented a hexagonal tetris-like system ages ago during ICFPC!
Imagine they would interview a university student who likes to tinker with systems like this. What sort of information will they get out of this test in this case?
Sorry for ranting! I just can't get over this experience.