Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers

> As a hiring manager at Anthropic, I stopped asking candidates to do them.

Before engaging with this content, one should keep in mind the very specific circumstances, that person is working in.

There might be learnings or thoughts that carry over to other businesses, but chances are high that most don't.

"Work to live, don't live to work". When you're on your deathbed work won't sit there with you and hold your hand. People are critical, not buildings or computers or networks. If you do choose to go down the path of overwork for recognition (as I did in my early 20s to earn a business visa) set strict guidelines around it and ensure you benefit as much as your employer. No one will manage your own work life balance better than you.

This Ousterhout lecture lives in my brain (this one and the one about scar tissue).

"A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE98Is1quwY

> Pick a radical idea

> Build it over a weekend:

What AI has done is that we can do 10x more work a week, while only delivering 2x to production.

Right now, there are 4 people (and me) working on the same idea in 5 different ways - we're all training small language models, the goal is to get smaller or fewer active parameters.

By next week, we'll have lost on 3 different approaches. I know my approach is a dead-end already, but I'm not ready to give up till the pencils down.

The people I work with are great, because they will see the better solution by the end of it, whether they proposed it or someone else did.

A couple of them have been in the industry for less than 5 years and I feel like their slope is better than mine, which means I'm going to have a good time when they're fully up to speed :)

The heart of the coding interview is to get signal on a candidates’ ability to solve a problem without all of the inputs given to them, see how they and explain their thought process as they do it.

Because of AI, what it means to “not have all of the inputs” has changed as anyone can cut and paste a Leetcode problem to a chatbot and solve it.

I think we are going to iterate a bit to figure out a better signal than the typical coding interview. For junior engineers, I think coding questions will move towards MBA style problems when someone is given more of an open ended question with a codebase and you see what the candidate does without context to reduce the problem.

In the new world, normalised interviews are going away, because business value is not normalized. This means that domain based interviewing and signals are going to make a comeback.

It would make sense to build your career in a single domain, since your built up expertize will transfer to other companies within that domain.

Far fewer switches will happen for seniors across domains.

leetcodes as much as we dont like them. could help to reduce bias. you either pass or fail them at the very least. now too much is being left to hand waving, interpretations can be charitable on the mood of the interviewer, or the opposite.

One could even think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect

Although I do appreciate, giving green minds the chance, I cannot help but think hiring managers will read into "A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For a Lot of Y-Intercept" as an excuse for ageism. Which the industry is already pretty rife with.

"work on the weekend for free" aka move the risk (of wasted resources) to the employee. Excellent advice.

How about fostering a working culture were employees get a chance of trying out new things during office hours? Especially since AI is rising productivity so much.

While the approach makes sense, I have yet to see a quantifiable and normalised way to replace Leetcode interviews.

It’s probably too soon to claim “death of the coding interview”.

I've been considering very unconventional techniques for interviews. Like requiring candidates participate in a team based multiplayer game as part of the interview process. Completely out of left field without warning.

Assuming the applicant has zero experience with gaming, this would be an incredible opportunity to evaluate how well they cope with uncertainty under pressure and adapt to unusual conditions. If the applicant is already a grandmaster on the ladder, this becomes an excellent test of their humility and teamwork.

If the applicant gets shitty about the mere idea of playing a game as part of a "serious" job interview, I think I would have all the information I need to make the right decision. If you can't get a little bit flexible in this new world, I don't want you on my team anymore.

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