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Ask HN: How are you interviewing engineers in this agentic era?

7 pointsjcgr2 comments
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Curious to know how are you interviewing engineers?

Do you have a no-LLM policy? Are take-home tests worth it? How do you make sure engineer is a "good" engineer?

Comments

Try my best to test their systems programming knowledge and general programming expertise, NOT leetcode or academic memorization;

stuff like the pros and cons of JWT, when orchestration is necessary, APIs vs message queues, their opinion on statically vs dynamically typed languages, etc

these questions don't tell you directly how efficient they will be on a project or language stack, but they DO tell you whether or not the person actually understands programming at a deeper and wider level, and not just experts at regurgitating generic PRs for your average 10LOC ticket

Not personally, but I've got friends who are now giving engineers interviews like "Use Claude Code to understand this codebase and explain it to me" or "Use Claude Code to find the cause of this bug".

Those seem practical to me.

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