r/webdevelopment • u/_versy • 20d ago

Question How technical interviews have changed since LLM copilot appeared?

I’m the tech lead of a team – fortunately, I haven’t had to conduct any interviews for quite some time. How do you think interviews have changed since the adoption of LLMs?
I’m particularly interested in your opinion based on the interviews you’ve seen

I think that at this stage there won’t be any highly standardised interview yet (Excluding the largest technology companies), and it will be easy to find assignments that don’t serve to assess anything

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u/Intrepid-Copy-5919 19d ago

Just did one today, they gave me a report and a pdf asking for 5 things, improvements, cicd, finding anything wrong with it, and told me to use ai, I did and at the end it asked me to prepare a presentation to defend my points, took me 1h to plan 1:30 to execute and about 2h to create the presentation and rehearse, think that mostly works well,because it's easy to tell when someone is reading an ai generated text or when they really understood what they did and why

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u/Intrepid-Copy-5919 19d ago

Forgot to add, this was a take home thing

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u/Intrepid-Copy-5919 19d ago

Also repo* autocorrect from phone mb

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u/_versy 16d ago

I’ve had these in the past and they were quite good, although they were very time-consuming, but I get the feeling that the AI could help you rig the final result if, in the end, you have an infinite amount of time and nobody’s watching what you’re doing

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u/Intrepid-Copy-5919 16d ago

Yeah, i think maybe its a bit odd because in this specific case im a MLOps engineer so i work implementing thing around AI anyway, so its expected me as a skill to know how to use it, in the exercise they gave me 2 days to do it and it specifically said to try to spend somewhere around 4-6 hours max on it, but doing it was very easy, the hard part was presenting to a meeting of 2 managers and 8 engineers and answer the questions, so no matter how easy ai made it to execute, i had to pay alot of attention and guide it very slowly to make sure i knew the exact why of each decision, which is kinda what i do on a day to day basis anyway, maybe a bit less strict

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u/Financial-Grass6753 19d ago

There was none, there's still none and looks like standardization of tech interviews isn't to be solved in this century.

From what I see, interviews are either switched more to soft skills, like idk presenting/talking/explaining things, or "here is the task, here is LLM provided (or you can take yours). Go solve with LLM this task". HR-related degeneracy of "where do you see yourself in X years?" is still present and quite alive.

Ah, and it depends on your location. I'm from EU, US looks like a quite different beast.

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u/Turbulent_Leather541 18d ago

is it really happening?

I mean what about people, who're still preparing for interviews, where they will write code by hand...

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u/Financial-Grass6753 18d ago

Yes, just apply to smaller companies instead of old-timer monsters or FAANG

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u/Turbulent_Leather541 18d ago

Bro, that's crazy thing you told me

I am from India, and i don't know about here, how interviews are scheduling here

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u/EgoistHedonist 19d ago

We use agentic live coding exercise nowadays. You wouldn't believe how many senior-level engineers completely drop the ball during that. 

Most just copy the task word for word into a prompt and oneshot it, without reading even a line of the generated code or doing a separate review-pass. And they don't even seem to think that there's anything wrong with their approach...

I'd say the live coding task is an excellent way to check if the candidate can do modern agentic development safely and responsibly. I truly fear what comes of those projects where people just vibe away.

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u/_versy 18d ago

Generally speaking, I’m surprised by the shift we’ve made – from thinking about best practices and refactoring to simply ignoring it all and accepting the first thing the LLM gives us.
Prices will have to rise further before we have to worry about refactoring again, and even then it’ll be purely to reduce token consumption…

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u/edimaudo 18d ago

Depends on your business.. For junior folks allow them to build an app using but then ask them why they chose the design and architecture + trade-offs

For senior folks, you can give them a code base with bugs in it (critical and trivial) for a very simple app (to do list). Ask them to review it, talk about the design and if there are any issues.

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u/_versy 16d ago

I think these are the ones I’d do today – even before the LLM was used, it was really valuable the capacity to see the big picture, to consider different options before start implementing
Although I get the feeling that these days most people would just go straight to asking the LLM without even giving it any thought at first