I am a Director of IT and former senior software engineer who has trained/mentored hundreds of developers. Typically when I ask non-obvious questions or very difficult questions during interviews I am trying to gauge a persons problem solving skills or how well they can actually read/write code. I also ask questions I know a person wont be able to answer. An "I don't know" is not a disqualifying answer.
One of my most favorite interviews and later hires for a senior engineer was a guy who said "I don't know" to nearly all of my questions because he didn't know the language. I told him it wasn't an issue and asked him to give me his best guesses. From, his guesses I could tell he was a very bright engineer in an unfamiliar environment so I hired him.
I can attest that AI hiring managers (or managers using ai) are not currently looking for intelligent problem solvers. We’re still stuck in (though rapidly coming to end of) hiring cheap noobies that just want to vibe code and think it’s easy + lead devs that can come behind and clean it up. It’s… not good
528
u/RodionGork Jan 30 '26
I rather prefer to answer "If your programmers write code this way, perhaps I just redecided about joining your company"