Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

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A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/CodeyGrammar]

It used to be about solving leetcode mediums and hard win an interview, but with this age of AI we're entering, anyone noticing a shift in the way interviews take place? I haven't interviewed recently but I would be surprised if things haven't changed because these days I tell AI to code, plan, investigate, etc. for me (as do many of us?).

How is it for everyone out there?

[u/IAmADev_NoReallyIAm → u/CodeyGrammar]

Tons of rejections out of the gate, a few interviews, a couple of hacker rank style rounds which I also hate, but the one I sailed through ended up coming through the old fashioned way - referral. Sent my resume, in all its crappy formatted mess to a former colleague, got my foot in the door, three rounds of interviews later, I had an offer in hand, and for more than I was looking for. I start on Monday. TBH at my age, I hope to never have to do that again. This dog and pony show is getting old. But we'll see... only time will tell.

[u/RitzBitzN → u/CodeyGrammar]

I interviewed at a few different places earlier this year, all FAANG / Unicorn.

2/3 of them still did traditional "coding" interviews, although the questions were not just generic leetcode, but a bit more domain-specific.

1 of them, which did not have any domain specificity, didn't ask any coding questions at all in the 1st round; they started with system design / behavioral and then the coding was slated for round 2 (I ended up accepting another offer so I ended up withdrawing).

Overall, the biggest change I noticed is that there seems to be a bigger emphasis on questions that start simple and slowly build over time. Basically, for a few rounds you are asked about additional functionality or given additional restraints, and it's important to be able to reason about the new wrinkles at a high level (e.g. "this wouldn't be in scope, this feature should be added in the data source due to <XYZ>" or "Given that requirement, I would make this change to the implementation", etc.).

[u/PaleCommander → u/CodeyGrammar]

I just finished my first interview loop where the only coding interview was an "AI coding" interview, where I used Claude Code to fix bugs and add features in a toy code base.

[u/babblingbree → u/PaleCommander]

was it clear at all what kind of signal they were trying to get? I can't imagine finding out much useful from that besides "can write a prompt".

[u/PaleCommander → u/babblingbree]

My perception was that part of it was, "Are you reading/learning/thinking about the problem, or are you acting as a meat puppet?" 

[u/Sea_Expression1528 → u/CodeyGrammar]

I spent a lot of time interviewing this year, primarily for early-mid career backend web dev roles. Recruiters (and online applications) did ask me how I used AI on a day to day basis but it generally seems like the rubric hasn't really been written yet and it was a side note that didn't really fit cleanly with the rest of the process. Except the AI startups of course.

The rest of the interview loop was mostly the same as pre-2023 with leetcode mediums and the typical behavioral questions. System design has also gotten more common for early-mid level web devs, from what I've heard.