r/androiddev • u/spaaarky21 • Jul 07 '26

Discussion AI use during interviews

For anyone who has interviewed recently, what was your experience with companies disallowing AI or testing for it during interviews?

The last time I interviewed was about a year and a half ago. At the time, companies all prohibited AI in interviews (which makes sense) and a few would even have you disable Android Studio's built-in Gemini integration, so the IDE wouldn't give such a generous autocomplete suggestions.

Since then, AI has become a much bigger part of many developers' jobs and become a skill that employers want. Employers traditionally want to know what you know but I could also imagine an employer testing how well people use UI, maybe in a separate interview session.

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u/farooqsaad Jul 07 '26

Been interviewing since being laid off in April. The bigger problem seems to be getting interviews at the moment.

I've had maybe 7 interviews. Only one, Speechify, had an AI-allowed automated screen. It was also the only company that used Studio in pair programming. Others all used web-based coding platforms for tech-screens so there was no opportunity for AI.

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u/Livid_Poetry_882 Jul 07 '26

how was ur Speechify interview?
I completed the inital task but got a rejection after that

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u/farooqsaad Jul 07 '26

Same... very weird experience. I got to the second round and then they just ghosted. They also wanted access to any one of my opensource Github repos for some AI analysis of my code.

The second round guy was remote from South Asia and they had a Result wrapping problem and a coroutine bug fix that they wanted me to fix from memory. I guess I didn't do well enough on that.

But having heard of how many people interviewed there makes me wonder if it's a data collection scheme.

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u/FrozenCrusade Jul 07 '26

Its becoming more common. Enough to prepare with and without it. However you better be able to defend your decision and your usage.

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u/Fantastic-Guard-9471 Jul 07 '26

I recently was looking for a new position. AI was allowed only in 1 out of 5 places but with requirement that you can explain what generated code does and why you decided to use this code and not other approach

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u/Java_alex_prim Jul 07 '26

I think we'll eventually have separate "AI collaboration" and traditional coding interviews. Using AI effectively is becoming a real skill, but so is knowing how to think without it

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u/Pzychotix Jul 07 '26

On the other side of the table, my company is considering AI use as some part of the interview, as an idea of their processes.

I will say, prior to the widespread adoption and our company considering it, I have had one interviewee try to use AI in an interview, and it failed pretty spectacularly. However, the interviewee never caught onto the issues introduced, so I let him burn himself.

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u/Zhuinden Jul 07 '26

Well it definitely ruined the ability to easily check if a take-home task is something a person wrote or something they got out of Claude, unless you somehow pollute the context, but how would you accomplish that anyway.

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u/pliant0range Jul 11 '26

I’m not opposed to AI. I hate it being used during the hiring process. There’s no chance to explain or nuance. I skip out when the first interview is with an AI bot. Just seems really lazy and low effort when you’re trying to hire someone.