I’ve sat through some interviews recently with candidates who started their careers in the last 6 years or so… during the boom cycle. Some were quite good but a troubling amount were clearly over-leveled at their current/previous employers.
For example, last month we interviewed someone for a Staff Engineering role (current role: L5 Senior II engineer), for Python. This person was unable to explain what a set was in Python, didn’t seem to grok the basic HTTP request/response pattern etc. This wasn’t a leetcode interview; it was an engineering conversation. It was the same questions we’d given dozens and dozens engineers in the past. It wasn’t a language barrier issue (guy was American, interviewer was American). Dude just seemed to have a very very narrow set of skills.
For people like this I imagine AI feels like a superpower.
I'm pretty sure that's what's going on too. The quality of junior -> midlevel engineers has plummeted and these AI tools have been a major crutch to help them appear productive/competent again.
Problem is they don't know enough to really assess if what the LLM is spitting out is any good or not so they claim amazing wins.
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You might not be getting gaslit.
I’ve sat through some interviews recently with candidates who started their careers in the last 6 years or so… during the boom cycle. Some were quite good but a troubling amount were clearly over-leveled at their current/previous employers.
For example, last month we interviewed someone for a Staff Engineering role (current role: L5 Senior II engineer), for Python. This person was unable to explain what a set was in Python, didn’t seem to grok the basic HTTP request/response pattern etc. This wasn’t a leetcode interview; it was an engineering conversation. It was the same questions we’d given dozens and dozens engineers in the past. It wasn’t a language barrier issue (guy was American, interviewer was American). Dude just seemed to have a very very narrow set of skills.
For people like this I imagine AI feels like a superpower.
I'm pretty sure that's what's going on too. The quality of junior -> midlevel engineers has plummeted and these AI tools have been a major crutch to help them appear productive/competent again.
Problem is they don't know enough to really assess if what the LLM is spitting out is any good or not so they claim amazing wins.