Re: [tlug] Ghosted?

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On Wednesday, 30 July 2025 at 03:02, Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com> wrote:

> For a developer position, another approach is to have them
> do some basic demonstration work and ask them about aspects of the
> design choices they made.

This is what I've been doing in hiring for the last 10 years. At Klarna, we sent candidates a take-home coding task designed to take 1-2 hours, with one task being a pretty straight-forward map / filter / reduce problem (this was for functional programming positions) and a second task being to refactor some nasty code. People in the hiring pipeline were initially worried about candidates crowdsourcing a solution on Stack Overflow or finding a solution that a previous candidate shared, but my position is that's just fine, because in the follow-up interview, candidates were required to implement a new feature in the refactored code and talk through their design choices, so they had to understand the code, even if they hadn't written it themselves.

I think this is actually more like what programmers do; we often work on code that we didn't write, or look stuff up on Stack Overflow, or these days, increasingly use LLM coding tools (though I don't--see https://politechs.dev/), and have to understand, modify, and maintain that code (though many devs who use LLM tools think the requirement to understand and be able to maintain the code doesn't apply).

This approach worked before LLMs became widely used, and still works with LLMs in the picture.

The other interview I use in the process is a so-called behavioural or situational interview: "Tell me about a time when X. What did you do? What was the outcome?" This kind of interview is almost impossible to have an LLM do on your behalf, since it's ultra-specific and I ask a load of follow-up questions to drill down on how a candidate approaches situations, deals with challenges, and learns from the experience. I use this type of interview for non-programming positions as well; for example, when hiring Product Managers, we have one behavioural interview focused on discovery and stakeholder management, and a second focused on leadership and core values.

This approach has worked well over the years. Of course I've occasionally hired someone who doesn't work out, but I can't remember hiring someone who turned out to be incompetent.

Cheers,
Josh