Would You Hire a Calculator?

https://www.june.kim/would-you-hire-a-calculator

by kimjune01 • 1 year ago

8 11 1 year ago

kimjune015• 1 year ago

I'm doing the rounds on interviews this week, and noticed that companies were not adapting to agentic coding that rewrote the software engineer's job description.

orionblastar2• 1 year ago

You need programmers and software engineers to program to remove bugs the AI made that it couldn't detect.

kimjune015• 1 year ago

then removing those bugs should be the skill to be assessed

orionblastar2• 1 year ago

I learned debugging back in college. I am a Super Debugger and can find bugs in someone else's code, my code, or AI code.

NoahZuniga• 1 year ago

data structure & algorithms questions

My understanding is that these questions are a proxy for intelligence, and they were asked because Google and the like want smart employees.

If that's why you're asking these questions, than testing using agents in the interview process doesn't make sense, because:

1. If you're hiring smart people, you can probably teach them how to use agents. (training someone to use agents isn't very hard)

2. If someone is smarter, you might in general expect them to be more capable of finding bugs in AI code.

kimjune015• 1 year ago

Thanks for reading and the thoughtful reply!

proxy for intelligence

you're right, but it's too easy to gamify, or cheat on.

can probably teach them how to use agents

I've met smart people that were anti-agentic coding. It's not a direct translation.

finding bugs in AI code

I think this would be a better proxy for job performance than DS&A.

tuatoru• 1 year ago

Will there be a market for artisanal, hand-crafted code?

kimjune015• 1 year ago

For low-level or custom hardware interfaces, hand-crafted code won't go away.

vrighter2• 1 year ago

Because the LLMs are useless unless you already know the answer to what you're looking for. At least if you're trying to be a serious, competent programmer.

And if you're using an LLM to do your job for you in an interview, then you extremely probably are not smart enough to notice its constant, inevitable mistakes.

kimjune015• 1 year ago

LLM to do your job for you in an interview

Same argument goes for letting LLM to do my job for me at the job. Plenty of smart people use LLMs to help code at work, and they fix the mistakes. Using an LLM doesn't mean accept its output without verifying that it works.

vrighter2• 1 year ago

the only way I would trust you to verify anything an llm outputs, is for me to know that you can do it withoum an llm. If not, I have no reason to trust that your "verification" is actually verifying anything

Would You Hire a Calculator?

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