alt Hacker NewsWe are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.
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> I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.
If you remove the "without AI" and the end, I've been hearing similar anecdotes about fizzbuzz for years (isn't the whole point of fizzbuzz to filter out those candidates?)
That's actually the origin of FizzBuzz! A puzzle invented to weed out the perplexing multitude of CS graduates who apparently cannot program.
Meh. Before AI I've had "senior" colleagues with 10 and 8 years experience each, doing pair programming for 2 days straight, and in that time they hadn't managed to checkout a new branch in git.
It's not even that they got distracted, they sat there trying, for 2 whole days, with concerned colleagues giving them hints like "have you tried checkout -b"... They didn't manage!
How the hell do you work for a decade in this business without learning even the most basic git commands? Or at least how to look them up? Or how to use a gui?
Incompetent devs is not a new thing.
I first did fizz buzz about 10 years ago fresh out of college. Now, after 10 years in full stack and fully vibe coding, I forgot basic python syntax. An interview like yours would have false positives if you are checking for syntax because well, its like looking up spelling, I just ask the AI for the syntax inline.
I wonder if you’re filtering for the right things.
We usually hire for problem solving capabilities and not so much for technical know-how.
That’s at least how I read your comment.
Don't worry, i never thought I would see someone unable to write fizzbuzz, but it happened 9 years ago.
Also how many people work with linux and can't tell you what 'ls -alh' is doing is staggering (lets ignore the h, even al people struggle hard).
People working with docker for YEARS and don't even understand how docker actually works (cgroups)...
Interviewing was always a bag of emotions in sense of "holy shit my job is save your years to come" and "srsly? how? How do you still have a job?"
I developed for 15 years. I don’t think I can do with AI anymore. Why would I even want to do that? It’s like telling a car driver to build an engine.
Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets?
I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.
Can’t say you’re wrong but the last anecdote describes many I’ve had to review for jobs long before LLMs. Fizzbuzz is a classic thing that shockingly many devs genuinely cannot do, even at home.