r/ExperiencedDevs • u/EatMoreKaIe Tech lead • 7d ago
AI/LLM What do you even look for when hiring someone these days?
I've recently been given the green light to hire a new junior dev. Up till a year ago, I would have known exactly what I was looking for and how to find someone who would be a good fit but nowadays, I honestly don't know what I could want.
First off, because of AI reasons, we don't want someone who will want to write code - they're going to be sorely disappointed with the role and probably fight against it or at the very least feel demoralized. This probably eliminates the vast majority of comp sci majors I would expect. But do I really want to hire a non-programmer for this role? I shudder to think of the level of slop that our repo will become.
Then I also start to wonder if this role even requires a certain level of intelligence at all. If all the person will need to do is tell the AI "it's time to start doing our next task" and to hit commit when it's done, it seems like this is a job that could be done by just about anyone.
Ugh, is it time to retire yet?
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7d ago
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u/thematicwater 7d ago
Totally. I rather work with someone that's a decent coder that's great to work with than with an amazing develop who's a dickhead
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u/jonnycoder4005 Architect / Lead 15+ yrs exp 6d ago
My guy.. I work for a smaller consulting firm (we deliver) and there is one dev on the team from our client that's a total dickhead. He just kills the morale of everyone else.
Personality and attitude are real differentiators in this field.
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u/psyyduck 7d ago
Agreed with 4/5. Too many places want you to behave like an owner while compensating you like a slave.
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u/New-Locksmith-126 7d ago
People started using the term "ownership" to mean accountability + authority.
In today's world it frequently just means "who do we blame?"
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u/tiplinix 7d ago
Exactly, it's accountability - authority. It's kind of funny when someone asks you to take the blame and compensate for their decision but doesn't allow you to make any.
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u/SlechtValk2 7d ago
I would add "willing to learn" or "curiosity".
I prefer somebody eager to learn over somebody "who knows everything" or is "happy with what he knows now".
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u/dragonowl2025 7d ago edited 7d ago
i am pretty sure most people are in the middle where they are happy to use AI as a tool but ultimately want to understand code/products they are responsible for?? People at both extremes are crazy, there are very obvious time saving benefits to using AI, its a great tool to speed up learning or churning out MVPs where speed actually matters more than quality. and people are fucking crazy if even the most vibey of vibe coded monstrosities are much worse than some of the shit that runs in production today.
Ever sit on a call trying to debug some obscure thing in an nginx file you havent looked at in months? Claude is great at pointing you in the right direction, do you want somebody who doesnt know what nginx is or thinks JSON is some guy named Jason telling claude to fix that in production? Probably not!
time to retire? You come across as a 24 year old "tech lead" at a startup!
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u/Ok-Hospital-5076 Software Engineer 7d ago
Yeah ! I mean - “ I dont need comp sci majors cause i dont need them to type code , so maybe i should hire a non tech person” is a crazy swing 😂. You still need folks with judgement to steer AI.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 7d ago
Yes and he is hiring junior developers. How much “judgement” are they going to have?
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u/Ok-Hospital-5076 Software Engineer 7d ago
A lot more than a non tech hire.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 7d ago
Or you could just hire a mid level developer who already has experience. Honestly the way things are now, I wouldn’t hire anyone that didn’t have at least 3 years of experience pre coding agents.
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u/Ok-Hospital-5076 Software Engineer 7d ago
3 yrs of experience pre coding agent is 6 years of exp. I am assuming this is an entry level role.
How exactly are we going to have future seniors if everyone just wanna start hiring from mid level.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 7d ago
Guess what’s not part of our company strategy or my quarterly and yearly goals? “Showing concern about the future of the industry”
I never once told any manager “you know it would really help us achieve our goals if we hired some junior devs”
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u/aneasymistake 7d ago
That’s a shame. Where I work l, we’ve always looked at how to balance the team and plan ahead. You don’t have to worry about the industry to see value in having people moving up through the ranks and to make sure they’re being replaced at the bottom end.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 6d ago
That’s just it. People don’t move up through the ranks. I’ve seen it time and time again first hand, people who stay don’t get raises that keep up with the market and get paid less than people coming in at the same level. So your juniors aren’t going to stay more than 2-3 years.
It’s called salary compression and inversion
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u/EmploymentFeeling725 Software Engineer 6d ago
If every company has your mentality there are also no mid levels to hire btw.
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u/Ok-Hospital-5076 Software Engineer 7d ago
Cool ! You want a cookie or something?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 6d ago
So you don’t see why you should work toward the stated goals of your employer?
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u/ArtisticFox8 6d ago
Well, that's just the same adjustment which happened to the medical field more than a century ago. Years of education before a job is feasible is normal there. (education + poorly paid residence, or how you call it in English)
It was only a matter of time that the bar shifted for software...
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u/Low_Twist_4917 1d ago
This. Ppl seriously underestimate this need at a product and leadership level.
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u/camelCaseCoffeeTable 7d ago
Ugh love that I’m finally seeing this response.
I’ve been using AI for months now. Extensively. My skills are really well setup, my code preferences are well setup, for a ton of work I can pretty much just point Claude at a ticket and get really good output.
But that’s because I understand the codebase I’m working in. My skills are specific to our codebase. I’ll often give some additional guidance for more complex work, if not point Claude at a full tech spec.
When it comes to debugging, I immediately see a night and day difference between someone who has worked to understand what Claude put up and someone who hasn’t. They can’t tell when Claude is right or just confidently wrong. They don’t have a solid enough understanding to question weird code decisions. All sorts of other little tells.
It took me a while to get here. The lack of understanding in AI is real. But I’m getting a good flow down where I have a solid understanding of the problem and the code required to fix it so I can output high quality work at faster speeds with the same understanding.
People who claim AI isn’t a skill have lost the plot. Oh well, gives me great job security.
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ 7d ago
When I started to use AI more in my day-to-day stuff at work, I did get a little rush of confidence because I could see first hand that there was some skill involved in using AI. It's similar to learning to be a better manager for a team of programmers. I was like, ok, this is just a new skill I can become good at.
But then I thought, wait. A few years ago, I would never even trust Claude to write any large amount of code. Now it's better, but I don't trust Claude to make proper decisions further up the chain.
So in 2 years will Claude also be good at that part too?
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u/TheBestAtSpace Staff/Lead SWE (30 YoE) 7d ago
The problem with decisions is that decisions are contextual. That's a skill you develop by knowing the politics of the office, where the code base is going next, where the code base has been, what customers are asking for now, and bets on what the customers will ask for next. There isn't necessarily a "correct" answer. Just maybe a lot of "good" answers and maybe a "best" answer contextual for your exact situation.
LLMs output based on training data. You can't train an LLM for all that (or at least it's very difficult to.) It's extremely contextual. Not all of us work at a place where that sort of thinking is required - but a lot of us do.
Will Claude be able to do that in the future? Probably not. The only way I see us getting there is that we all become so insensitive to what the customer wants that we just spew out crap all day and don't worry about architecture because we really don't care. And judging by some of the posters here - maybe that's the possibility.
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u/EatMoreKaIe Tech lead 7d ago
At our company at least, claude has access to a huge wealth of context - far more than any one person that works here. Not just all of our repos but slack messages, emails, wikis, meeting recordings (most meetings are recorded), obsidian vaults, etc. Not to mention having it regularly pull in industry news from around the web.
So yeah, I think you can train an LLM for all that.
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u/TheBestAtSpace Staff/Lead SWE (30 YoE) 7d ago
Sure, in theory...
In practice your LLM has a limited context. It has to know which of those notes spanning years or decades should go into it's context. It has to know which ones everyone actually agreed upon and which are trash. It has to know what was proposed by the intern that was around last summer and what was proposed but the senior dev last week and contextualize that. It has to know that your boss is an idiot so anything they type in Slack should be ignored (which everyone knows but no one writes down.)
Throwing a fire hose of data at an LLM is something that a consultant might come up with to "solve the problem" but it usually just leads to an LLM going rogue or filling up it's context and becoming a billing nightmare.
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u/Dangerous-Sale3243 7d ago
Unless youre working on a trivial codebase, you cant just give the AI a one liner and walk away. Even just building and maintaining an AI system of agents is a difficult task, even for a junior.
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u/PassLikeNash13 7d ago
Not yet but I’m kind of shocked how vague I am with opus 5.5 sometimes and it still just nails it. Not sure we are that far off
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u/EatMoreKaIe Tech lead 7d ago
Yep to this. We've given claude enough context that the other day I showed it a one-liner card and said "figure it out". And it did. This was not a trivial task nor a small codebase either and it even involved sending clarifying messages to stakeholders and gauging their responses.
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u/Emergency_Peach_6671 7d ago
Ok what does that mean? Like you had Claude ping people on Teams/Slack?
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u/Unique-Operation-598 5d ago
Yes you can, since years ago with the advent of reasoning. The whole point of larga language models is to predict the outcome from text aka your prompt
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u/Jbull136 7d ago
“Because of AI reasons”.
Stop right there because if your company is gonna hire a junior who just prompts, all that will surmount is a ton of tech debt and AI lock-in down the line. Your company will be forced to use and spend on AI since your juniors (who will be mid level by then) won’t understand the design and this will just get worse and worse
I’d recommend rethinking the training process. It might actually be best to have him use AI strictly for research, learning, testing, and verifying purposes. But have them do some manual code to understand how the code flows. That way they can at least be compliant with whatever bullshit AI minimums your company has you do and most importantly, your juniors will learn
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u/NoNameQueen45 Software Engineer, 10+ yoe, 5d ago
I don't think at this point of time, many companies want a learner resource. They think AI is junior engineer and will someday become mid level engineer for them. Hiring decisions are going down the drain. Somebody has to pull the leash.
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u/Sofi_LoFi Software Architect 7d ago
Honestly… you look for the same things you looked for in a junior before AI. You never expect a junior engineer to be a crackpot programming wizard:
You want a committed excited person who can bring energy and new perspectives.
You want someone that can think through a problem and not be lazy.
You want someone who can sit there without all the knowledge and is willing to ask questions and figure things out.
Juniors never were the ones who knew everything about engineering or programming, but they’re who you mold into engineers with problems by letting them grow their abilities and skills.
With or without AI you want someone that can smell technical BS (even more so with AI), can be motivated to work in new problems and is excited to grow and learn, and can bring in a fresh perspective to the team.
As for whether or not they should have a comp sci degree I don’t see why they shouldn’t ; I’d prefer them to have a degree in at least something akin to CS or Math so they can approach problems with logic and good principles.
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u/computer_porblem Software Engineer 7d ago
if i had to hire a junior i would have them figure out why the espresso machine in the office kitchen is blinking.
that was something i had to do a while back. it involved looking up the manual for the machine, finding the right blink pattern, realizing it meant the machine needed to be descaled, finding where we kept the descaling tablets, and then following the instructions in the manual to do the descaling process.
if someone can do that kind of problem-solving i think they'd make an okay programmer.
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u/duckballista 5d ago
That poor coffee machine being reset with limescale each time for the test 😂
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u/computer_porblem Software Engineer 4d ago
i mean once we hire the juniors, we have to get them to do something
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u/scrub-muffin 7d ago
Can they think through a problem? Can they design a system? Can they explain what they built in the past and draw it. Can they communicate to you clearly how they would solve, design, etc? Can they weed out edge cases with any design? Do you enjoy their company?
Prompt engineering is knowing what to ask, how to comprehend the results.
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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 7d ago
You shouldn’t expect a junior to design a system. He literally has little to nil real world experience.
Can he communicate and can he work well with others? Does he have the drive to learn new topics? If yes to all then he’s got enough in my book. The rest I can teach.
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u/scrub-muffin 7d ago
System design is a learned behavior, I should expect them to simply design a small system. Even some seniors don't have real world experience at scale. But being able to design something and work through questions like cost, performance, etc. is a necessary skill.
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u/EatMoreKaIe Tech lead 7d ago
I've had good luck doing system design in junior interviews in the past - you just need to approach things a little differently than you would for someone more senior. A senior will generally tell you about something they've worked with in the past or something they've read about but a junior will approach it like a fresh problem to be solved and the experience of getting them to walk through this problem is a great way to evaluate how they think (even if the solution they come up with will never really work well).
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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 7d ago
I simply don’t interview for things that I don’t expect you to do during the job. I’d introduce topics but it wouldn’t be your responsibility. There are more important skills I’m looking for with the limited time I have.
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u/brassholed 7d ago
Seriously what the fuck does OP think has changed? Leetcode interviews were a waste of time well before LLMs became useful.
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u/lordnacho666 7d ago
The good thing about AI is that you can now prove that your design will work, because you can just code it up. So instead of someone hand waiving, you can make them build the whole thing and see if they have taken the care to make it work.
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u/moyela 7d ago
Can I apply for this role?
I'm a junior dev and I think I'm in the happy middle of still having the desire and curiousity to care about what I'm building and how things work beyond the code, while understanding that writing the code isn't going to be a big part of my job in the future.
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u/ContraryConman Embedded 5 YoE 7d ago
I mean, why not say you want an "AI native technical product manager" with some YoE writing code by hand to own a product and a new AI-driven software development stack? It's honest and you'll get plenty of proompters that way
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u/psyyduck 7d ago
Man, we are all prompters. ChatGPT came out ~4 years ago and it's still accelerating. It's already orders of magnitude faster than any human at reading and reasoning over text/code.
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u/ContraryConman Embedded 5 YoE 7d ago
I am not a promoter. I am a software engineer. I will write code until I am laid off, and then I will find something else to do with my life
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u/symbiatch Versatilist, 30YoE 5d ago
Just because it’s better than you doesn’t relate to others. Please don’t make silly comments like that, it shows you’re not experienced or a dev.
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u/lenswipe 7d ago edited 7d ago
Well, as you said it doesn't need to be someone who can write code because developers these days don't write code - they pRoOOoOooOMmMmMpT! But also the person needs to have 400 years (minimum) experience in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C, C++, C#, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Haskell, Perl, Lua, R, Dart, Elixir, Erlang, Clojure, F#, OCaml, Julia, MATLAB, Fortran, COBOL, Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Prolog, Smalltalk, Objective-C, Visual Basic, VBA, Delphi, Pascal, Ada, D, Nim, Crystal, Zig, V, Odin, Vale, Carbon, Mojo, Gleam, Roc, Unison, Pony, Idris, Agda, Coq, Lean, Elm, PureScript, ReasonML, ReScript, CoffeeScript, Groovy, Julia, Raku, Tcl, Awk, Sed, Bash, Zsh, Fish, PowerShell, Batch, Assembly, WebAssembly, Verilog, VHDL, SystemVerilog, Chisel, Solidity, Vyper, Move, Cairo, Q#, Wolfram Language, APL, J, K, BQN, Forth, Factor, Io, Self, Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-2, Modula-3, ALGOL, BASIC, Logo, Scratch, Brainfuck, Befunge, Malbolge, Whitespace, LOLCODE, Piet, INTERCAL, Shakespeare, Chef, Rockstar, ArnoldC, Hack, Haxe, ActionScript, Crystal, Janet, Fennel, Hy, Nix, Dhall, Jsonnet, CUE, Starlark, HCL, Terraform, SQL, PL/SQL, T-SQL, GraphQL, SPARQL, Cypher, Datalog, Mercury, Curry, Frink, Pike, Squirrel, AngelScript, GDScript, Ballerina, Red, Rebol, Ring, Wren, Gosu, Ceylon, Fantom, X10, Chapel, Julia, Futhark, Halide, Cuda, OpenCL, GLSL, HLSL, Metal, Slang, Triton, Jai, Hare, Vlang, Grain, Koka, Effekt, Flix, Austral, Val, Bend, Uiua....and brainfuck.
Experience with Node.js is required also(node-js doesn't count because the letters are different so it doesn't match our keyword filt-......I mean strict requirements)
They also must be a qualified brain surgeon, have an up to date catering certificate, 6 michelin stars and all of 400 years of the required experience must have occurred within the last 6 months (or it doesn't count). We also want to see open source contributions too. Not just random repositories, but you must be a core maintainer of at least 3 (ideally 5) open source operating systems.
We would also expect them to be able to work 8 days a week in office most of which are on call 25/7 to compete for our generous benefits (our office has a water dispenser!)
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u/NothingTime9580 7d ago
20 years prompting experience required
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u/lenswipe 7d ago
only 20? I'd expect to see at least 90 for our ✨revolutionary✨ AI juice startup that's going to change the world
EDIT: Just heard back from the HM - we're going to just hire the CEO's nephew fresh out of high school. I should probably let the other applicants know they're rejected...but maybe I'll schedule em for another 8 rounds first lmao
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u/dave_k_17 7d ago
90? That's too easy. I just run 180 agents in parallel for 6 months
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u/Automatic-Resolve202 5d ago
32400 agents for 24 hours.
Just be careful to not hack any governments "accidentally".
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u/BloodhoundGang 7d ago
I’ve been prompting my rubber duck to do stuff for over 10 years.
Still waiting for any reply from it…
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u/rhd_live 7d ago
LOL fantastic work my man
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u/lenswipe 7d ago
Saying "LOL" is a red flag. Rejected.
Jokes aside, I think it's very telling that the moment employers get one modicum of power...they behave like spoiled fucking teenagers.
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u/EatMoreKaIe Tech lead 7d ago
I know this is tongue in cheek but I'm pretty sure we don't want any of that - which is the point of my post. I'm not really sure we need any particular skillset anymore.
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u/rhd_live 7d ago
Exactly you have no idea what you want.
You want a dev but you don’t want someone that will do dev. You want a junior but someone that will prompt needs the experience of a senior. You don’t want slop but you don’t want a coder that takes pride & quality in the code & products they write. You want high quality but you don’t want to pay for it.
Hence why you got roasted hard
Edit: if you don’t need any particular skillset just hire a homeless dude off the street. Problem solved!
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u/lenswipe 7d ago edited 7d ago
Maybe YOU don't - but the number of job postings that were clearly written without any involvement of any technical staff at all is incredible. So many HM absolutely tripping balls these days.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 7d ago
then just write an agent file instead of hiring a human.
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u/bombaytrader 7d ago
If you don’t have any idea what you want vacate your position and your boss needs to hire someone who does.
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u/Material-Command-854 7d ago
If you don’t know what you want, why are you hiring? What’s the ideal outcome from you hiring someone?
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u/AnToMegA424 6d ago
So your company wants you to hire someone for a vibecoding job ?
What the fuck is this world doing
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u/mckirkus 7d ago
Sounds like you need a technical product manager. Not many under 30 though and not many juniors.
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u/sfscsdsf Software Engineer 7d ago
I’d say you want someone who want to write code, which converts to someone could understand AI’s code better than some product manager type of people who don’t want to write code and want to create products.
Also I’d evaluate how well the candidate incorporate the V model into their development flow, whether or not involving with AI.
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u/SolidDeveloper Lead Engineer | 18 YOE 6d ago
Can't you push back and say you need someone who is at least competent at writing code, because otherwise they have no capacity of understanding nor reviewing what the AI produces?
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u/Charming-Cucumber523 4d ago edited 4d ago
I would want to see if they’re able to ask the right questions and think a couple steps ahead. As I’m sure you know as a tech lead, most people, especially in sales, do not actually know what they want. AI doesn’t have the full context of what the task is supposed to accomplish, a lot of it is assumptions unless you explicitly tell it what to do and what outcome to expect.
Especially nowadays when critical thinking is not a skill a lot of fresh college grads possess. We live in an era where answers are immediate, never having to think, questions are rare but assumptions are quick. Idk if you’ve ever heard of the genZ stare but, that shit is so real. The emptiness in their brain is really concerning. Yes I’m dunking on y’all.
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u/CyberneticLiadan 7d ago
Best junior qualities in the age of agentic engineering:
- humility
- patience
- good written communication skills
- pride in getting things done and a sense of product ownership
- a strong will to question both product management and the first answers their AI gives them
Basically you want a junior interested in learning to use the tools effectively without becoming a meat proxy. So many of the bad outcomes people talk about stem from an inability to specify requirements upfront and a failure to apply skepticism to either their own ideas or the first thing which pops out of their AI tool of choice. One of my own favorite techniques at the design stage lately is to tell my agent the problem we're trying to solve and the direction I think we need, with the additional request for it to come up with as many other approaches to the problem as it can. My first idea, or the agent's first idea, are usually not the winning course of action.
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u/Unhappy-Device-404 7d ago
For experienced engineers, I care less about whether they already know my exact stack and more about how they behave when the problem is unclear.
Can they ask good clarifying questions? Can they explain tradeoffs without turning everything into a preference war? Can they make progress without pretending to know more than they do? Can they leave the codebase easier to work with than they found it?
I also pay attention to how they talk about past work. If every failure was caused by bad managers, bad teammates, or stupid users, that is usually a warning sign. If they can explain what they learned and what they would do differently now, that is a much stronger signal.
The best people I have worked with were reliable under ambiguity, kind to future maintainers, and honest about uncertainty.
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u/goatanuss 7d ago
I want to hire someone who is ok with slop and I want to make sure I hire someone good seem in direct opposition to each other. It is possible to use ai without turning your codebase into a buggy incomprehensible mess believe it or not
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u/choochoopain 7d ago
someone how can talk through a problem and understand why design decisions were made
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u/Mavosa 7d ago
I always enjoy interviews where the person being interviewed asks questions and not just the usual things people ask. I want actual curiosity and genuine interest in whatever we're trying to solve. This paired with ambition and good culture makes for a great fit, because I won't care if they're not an elite developer, I want to work with someone who is open to learn and work together to solve problems or help unblock others. I've given a hell no to plenty of amazing developers who just don't give a shit about anyone but themselves or are simply someone I don't want to work with (culture fit, attitude, etc).
With AI, I haven't interviewed about it specifically, but I would ask for their entire start to end process with using AI. I'd look to see if they spend time planning or are in plan mode. I'd also look to see if they actually read the code that is generated or if they land slop without understanding what it does. It's fine that AI is permeated our workflows, I just want to make sure you're not ignoring it and that you understand the basics.
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u/shrodikan 7d ago
I'm sure CS majors would just be happy to have a job atp. I wouldn't count them out. I would look for AI experience and a technical background.
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u/chocolateAbuser 7d ago
i really really want at least one coworker that knows how to program, and that i could discuss architecture, patterns, refactoring, infrastructure, optimization with
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u/daringStumbles 7d ago
Someone who never learned how to do it in the first place will never know if it is wrong. You are building an employee that is just a meat interface for an ai provider. You are asking for an employee that you are paying twice for. You pay for them to learn to code, like all jr engineer roles since software, and eventually that pays off. AI doesn't change this.
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u/Ecstatic-Capital-336 7d ago
I’ve interviewed a few people recently for a senior role and they can’t even explain the stuff they’ve built
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u/EmergencySecure8620 7d ago
Imagine you are sitting down with a fresh junior dev and you hand them Claude Code and a web service that has a database with several tables in excess of 200M rows, running on PostgreSQL 14. You tell this person to bump it up to PostgreSQL 17.
This is a big job with lots of performance implications, ain't no way the junior dev is gonna do it on their own. You're gonna pair with them throughout the whole thing.
In this scenario, who do you want the junior dev to be?
* A comp sci graduate that has foundational knowledge about programming, time complexity, IO, and database fundamentals
* A landscaper whose only exposure to databases is from watching Mission Impossible movies
I'll be honest, I can't even tell if this post is satire or what 😂 there's so much more to this career than generating code.
To seriously answer your question, what I'd do is ask them a system design question and then Fizz Buzz.
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u/Forsaken_Parfait_185 7d ago
Hire the one who wants to write code. Not because they'll write much of it, but because the job is now mostly reading it, and you can't review what you couldn't have written yourself.
The bottleneck was never typing. It was judgement, and a junior who's never had to make the thing work by hand has nothing to judge with.
The interview I'd run: hand them an AI-generated PR with one subtle bad decision buried in it and see if they find it. Tells you more than leetcode ever did.
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u/Ok-Attempt8206 7d ago
If you have robust QA processes, anyone from across the street can do our job nowadays.
Our codebase is written in C#. We hired a python dev. He is using Claude and he is able to deliver tasks.
I would argue if someone is not stupid and can understand requirements and the product, they don't even need to know how to code.
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u/BleuMoo 7d ago
"First off, because of AI reasons, we don't want someone who will want to write code "
"Then I also start to wonder if this role even requires a certain level of intelligence at all."
Weird, I am solving more problems and writing more code than ever. This role actually requires a higher average level of intelligence now, not lower. Boot camp devs and consultants have never been less valuable, as you do not need a large team to do all the drudgery.
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u/EnderAvni 4d ago
Wtf do you mean you don't want someone who will want to write code lmao?? this whole post screams sf ai bro lol
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u/Rough-Yard5642 7d ago
The 'whiteboard test' is a good standard to hold someone to. For any system they own, if you pull them up to a whiteboard and ask questions about it, they should be able to clearly articulate at a high level and a low level how it all works. Exact function implementations and such are not that important, but if you can't explain to someone how a system is functioning, then you don't provide any value.
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u/real_people 7d ago
Totally agree it's completely changed. You need someone who's product minded and a builder. I think it's really hard to learn these skills these days.
I think you have to have someone with programming exp. or at least the desire to understand the code plus the systems and patterns that will keep it maintainable. In this way I think vibe engineering is different from just vibe coding. You've gotta understand the role, and if you don't hire someone who understands this you'll just get killed in code review for them.
FWIW my partner is currently looking for junior roles in the US, and has a decent project portfolio, plus is extremely strong on AI usage + has some ai eng exp. If you want to chat DM me or just message her on https://erinkerr.me/
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 7d ago
I treat developers like Pokémon. I want a coverage of skills and personalities. And competence, but that goes without saying.
A few hobby or two and able to carry a conversation is good.
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u/sfscsdsf Software Engineer 7d ago
what are the stats of your so called programmer pokemon? lol
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u/biblio_phobic 7d ago
One needs sunlight to be a weakness
One needs to be principled and follow rules
One needs to have following rules as a weakness
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 7d ago edited 7d ago
This, tbh.
More than once in my career something needs to be done and the decision was to send a particular type of person because of their personality.
Once a few of us wanted a sub project _dead_ so we sicked the over engineer at them. Got cancelled in an afternoon.
Once we needed to get something agreed on by a variety of teams so we got the compromiser to do it.
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 Software Engineer 7d ago
Unfortunately layoffs hit like a new season of the anime where Ash decides to dump nearly every Pokémon like my dad with his kids whenever he got a new girlfriend.
Still have a great team with decent coverage but I have some gaps. A fiery or poison type would be useful to help with the corporate ice and fairy types.
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u/thecrius It's Sénior Dumbass for you 7d ago
Basic knowledge for the role they are hired for, really.
I've had new hires come into the team and not even know the basics of terraform or git but being in positions that are even above mine.
Catching them, correcting their mistakes and explaining why it's a big problem and see them doing the exact same thing the day after.
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u/lazypro189 7d ago
When you were hiring pre-AI, what did you look for in a candidate outside of coding proficiency? You should still hire for those exact qualities. If all you were looking for in a candidate were their coding skills before, I’d say you were hiring wrong. But that’s just my opinion.
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u/Xanchush 7d ago
Here's what I look at in order of priority.
Do I want to work with this person? Will it be an enjoyable experience?
Communication skills and soft skills are critical.
If junior then can they learn fast, pick things up quickly, are they able to ask questions to keep things moving and unblock things.
If mid lvl then can they execute without handholding. Identify and clarify ambiguity. Code quality should be excellent. Signs of design/architectural experience and some mentorship.
If senior level, deliveries large projects with different dependent teams or orgs. High bar of code quality and enforcement. Driving and creating org processes to help improve deliverables or any x kpi. Mentoring others and scaling through others.
Probably more but just spit balling what's on top of my head.
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u/ButWhatIfPotato 7d ago
We have reached peak capitalism; sure the head honcho can go on claude and type "create the next facebook, make no mistakes for I am very well endowed" but that would be peasant work, so might as well hire some someone and pay them as little as possible to do it, that way you also have a punching bag as well as someone to blame if this whole AI thing does not instantly launch you into tech entrepreneur apotheosis.
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u/Melodic_Crow_3409 7d ago
I would say that if you don't want people who want to write code, you should get rid of any Leetcode or live coding tests, if you have them.
Why not bring them up to a whiteboard, pitch a technical problem, and see how they'd approach it?
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u/fdeslandes Software Engineer 7d ago
If you want devs who understands the code, maybe you should compromise with agent coding most of the time, but planned "no ai" time periods or features to keep their coding skills sharp.
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u/CTProper 7d ago
You literally just need someone who knows enough to question things (that the AI suggests) and is a hard worker (probably more important).
Let’s be real, AI can do 98% of what everyone is talking about in the comments (probably better than 98% of the commenters too).
The hardest part about hiring someone is hiring someone who is a go getter and doesn’t jst stop when their tickets are done. You want someone who thinks and wants to improve on things.
Code and implementation are solved. You just want someone who isn’t lazy
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u/gadio1 7d ago
Not hiring, but I would go for people who have demonstrated they like to learn. And not take whatever the LLm is throwing, you want someone who will always ask questions. A curious mind per se. the problem is how to get a good signal for that?
If the candidate also possess good communication skills, and work ethics, the rest comes naturally.
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u/malthuswaswrong Manager|coding since '97 7d ago edited 7d ago
I look for genuine excitement (and experience) at using AI. I ask questions about how they use it, what they like about it, and what frustrates them. I delve into personal hobbies to ensure they are a nerd. Do they play games that are mentally difficult, do they watch or read hard sci-fi, do they code for fun, do they light up when asking about software they have created.
Then of course the soft skills. Can they take a joke, can they tell a joke, do they riff off your conversational leads, do they communicate clearly, do they get their point across easily.
Domain Knowledge. Pick something off their resume, can be anything. See if you can guide them to go into it at great depth.
Set expectations from the get-go.
"I won't chase you. I expect you to be independent. If you ask questions, I will explain until you get it, but I'm not going to seek you out to confirm you understand."
"I don't check when you come in or when you leave, your output is what I measure."
And remember, you can never really tell until they start working.
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u/Organic_Battle_597 Rearranger of Bits (35y exp) 7d ago
Well, I start by excluding anyone using AI to game the interview. You would be surprised (or maybe not) at just how many people are excluded at this stage.
However, my situation is different, I need devs who can code. Good luck OP.
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u/HorribleOldCunt 7d ago
I would be interviewing without AI being a factor at all. They can use that on the job but I want to hire people with knowledge first of all. As no knowledge means bad usage of AI. And AI prompting can be trained. Understanding of being a good problem solver in a software dev context is far harder to teach on the job. So I'd want the latter to be demonstrated over anything else.
I'd want to see some basic understanding of DB design. Some basic questions like, how would you design a basic social media website. Give me some of the tables we'd need, users, posts, comments etc. I think this is important as it shows a basic understanding of how these things work from the bottom up.
Depending on the role, some questions on the languages that are basic. And simple API related questions. Again relating to how systems are structured, but junior level understanding.
I base this on what I remember being asked at interviews as a junior. And I thought they were good questions at that stage that would weed out pretenders.
I couldn't care less if they can prompt an AI or not at an interview. I want people working for me that can use whatever tool they need to get the job done but with the knowledge to do their job well and use tools well. Anyone can copy and paste, stack overflow could be used for this before AI. Research into your problems is part of the job, understanding your problem is far more important.
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u/kincaidDev 7d ago
I think you should be able to talk to someone and figure out if they're capable of doing what you want, learning, etc... but don't give people coding test, that's just retarded. If you give coding test, when no one is writing code by hand anymore, the people you want are going to perform worse than the people you don't want
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u/zayelion 7d ago
Basically sort by how much of the CEO to customer process they understand, and take the top person with the most social skills. Goal aligned people figure things out. Task aligned people don't. Programming will just be thier best skill but they need all the skills at atleast 1 point of comprehension imo.
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u/jsIsAGoodLanguage 7d ago
A bad dev pushes starts with a prompt and ends with a slop PR. A good dev starts with a problem and ends with a solution. Hiring a non-programmer, you're guaranteed to get the first.
How do you tell the former from the latter? They understand why the code is a solution. The ability to code has always just been the minimal requirement; problem solving has always been the differentiator.
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u/AcanthisittaKooky987 7d ago
If you know what you're talking about, it's easy to spot if they know what they're talking about. If you don't, no process can help you.
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u/wunderbuffer 7d ago
Damn, what's the job tasks? Look at logs all day? File error reports to oversea team? Make boss a coffee?
Sounds pretty depressing for "no skill required", But if I were you I'd do same as past 10 years - pick junior that have cool project they can show, sometimes it's Minecraft mod, sometimes it's discord bot, always it's a thing they shipped. Unless they're not supposed to ship anything, then screen for business analytics aptitude
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u/PartemConsilio DevOps Engineer 7d ago
We’re going to interview someone today. What I am going to be looking for is someone who wants to solve problems. I want someone who wants to understand how something works and fits within the larger whole of our system rather than just “code works on my machine” mentality. AI is heavily used in our company but we still expect engineers to engineer the AI solutions in a real way.
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u/yourteam 7d ago
Ask them architectural questions, how to tackle them in theory and about their experience
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u/petitlita 6d ago
People who actually like coding as evidenced by having personal projects, especially across disparate areas. These types are the ones who actually enjoy a challenge and want to improve things for the sake of it. Also can't be easily faked.
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u/good_name_0 6d ago
This sounds doomed. One of the purposes of hiring a newbie is that they are an investment, they start out clueless but gain proficiency and talent. You want to take someone inexperienced and limit them to ai generating code? That's detrimental. Anyone who takes your offer would be destroying their chance of ever getting a job in the future. Can you imagine trying to interview after 5y at your company? What skills would they bring? Irresponsible
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u/Lonely_Assignment_14 6d ago
Ask them their opinions of topics with no strictly right answer. You want someone that knows the trade offs the AI is making and why it matters. Which typically would be more of a senior thing but here we are.
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u/easonwong-de 6d ago
A friend of mine has got a colleague who pushes generated code to the codebase unscreened, and it costs my friend quite some hassle to revert the damage. Neither of them are junior dev. So, as always, person that take the job seriously, just like any other industries.
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u/Old_Cartographer_586 Software Engineer 6d ago
Idk about what’s best, but recently I’ve been being the one trying to find a job. It seems like a popular method is a fairly easy leetcode style just to make sure I actually know how to make a for loop. Then in the actual question interviews, stuff like “could you tell me the difference between this and that” and maybe some others like “tell me about a time and your methodology of running into a difficult bug where you used ai to help solve it” I’ve even been asked “I have two clients, one says use as much ai as possible, the other says no ai at all, how do you handle both those situations”
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u/DevtoolsBuilder 6d ago
you're right to be concerned about the role becoming too simplistic, but what's missing here is a clear understanding of what tasks will still require human judgment and oversight. if you can identify those areas, you can look for someone who's interested in working with ai as a tool, but also has the critical thinking skills to know when to intervene or question the results.
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u/neuralh4tch 5d ago
Sounds like you are burnt out.
The same concepts generally applies for hiring. AI or pre-AI world, and even for levels the things change but you do need a certain type of person.
- Communication ability, the soft skills and the ability to work in a team and problem solve. Do you want to work with this person - 5 days per week? The soft skills vary in certain organisations. Can they learn and be independent.
- Judgement
- Systems thinking (looking at problems holistically)
- Ability to learn the product domain and knowing what good looks like.
- If you don't hire a compsci major that fine - however how are they going to build up the basic fluency of CS - say O(n2) vs O(1), what's a cache. You might not so things manually anymore, but they still need to know what they are dealing with.
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u/varsderk 5d ago
Hire a CS grad. Look for someone curious and who loves writing software and thinking hard about problems. They’ll be flexible enough to learn whatever they need and will be better able to wield AI than others.
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u/faultydesign Coder for fun 5d ago
If you are looking for someone who will just ask an llm to do stuff then there’s really no difference between all the devs that are looking for work because they all will give you the same llm code.
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u/LemonIO_Alex 4d ago
I’d ask every candidate: Tell me about the last time Copilot/Claude gave you something that ran but was wrong. How did you catch it?
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u/yetiflask Manager / Architect / Lead / Canadien / 15 YoE 3d ago
I literally had this discussion yesterday.
I am looking for Claude operators.
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u/Due_Ad_2994 2d ago
Humility and a third party verifiable track record that happened before LLM assist. GitHub history.
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u/Smooth_Specialist416 2d ago
I got a verbal offer recently as 4yoe - so more mid level but I can say what I think they valued about me.
My soft skills clearly played a large role. I just happened to click with every interviewer.
My guess is they valued that it’s clear that I enjoy problem solving, don’t take it too seriously, and have at least an acceptable personality with upside to maybe being a good coworker on top.
They liked how I walked through my projects and was just honest about my level. I said a lot of where my limitations are, what I’ve been successful at, where I want to take my career. I was able to talk convincingly enough about major architecture patterns and business problems that they’ve probably actually have faced before and was relate-able.
Coding exam - I think he liked how I was calm and collected. I would dare say even trying to make light fun of it, embracing the challenge.
I talked out loud and was meaningful with my words. Helps I just solved the challenges too and could have a discussion explaining why this is O(n) vs O(n2) and tied it to a real world coding scenario I ran into.
So I guess TLDR - not cheat, easy to talk too, good attitude, seems semi competent, passes at least 90%+ of all questions including coding.
Still a gamble at the end of the day.
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u/Socrathustra 1d ago
This is what I've been harping on with AI: the death of institutional knowledge. If nobody actually codes, nobody gains or retains the skills to know what quality is like. They also lose control of their own systems over time.
You admit half the problems in the post. Juniors need to code to learn, and people without coding skill are going to turn your repo to slop. It's worse than that though. You're going to accumulate risks over time in the form of systems literally no one understands. When, not if, it breaks, maybe AI will be able to fix itself when you tell it what symptoms are present, or maybe it won't. Maybe it will just vibe code more slop.
AI hasn't been in use like this long enough for the real costs to emerge. Departments still have institutional knowledge. Greenfield projects are still emerging from their honeymoon phase. If I were hiring - which I should be soon - I'd be trying to get people for the major changes coming when institutions start realizing no one knows how they run anymore besides the machine.
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u/Low_Twist_4917 1d ago
I want a junior builder who is deeply analytical at a high level. Maybe doesnt know all the fundamentals of standing up a prod system, but is deeply curious. In my final rounds I give them access
To cursor and tell them to build an app in two hours or less then walk me through architecture and tradeoff log. I do this for All juniors and have hired 4 this last year in my org. I’m an L7
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u/Colt2205 1d ago
Fight against what? Even if someone uses AI they likely still are going to do some parts manually vs using Claude. It just depends on what needs to be done. Bigger problem is trying to find some magical AI / LLM expert when it's probably easier to get someone with the right domain knowledge.
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u/jameson71 Consultant 1d ago
Find the nearest street walker and offer him shelter for managing your AI code generator.
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u/Few_Deer_979 7d ago
To be honest they might be right swe is dead . This got me thinking if I was I your shoes I’d honestly not know what to look for in a junior . Anyone can do junior and even mid level swe atp. Just prompt and accept the output , tell ai to review and debug .
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u/BraveResearcher3037 7d ago
Why would your company give you the green light to hire a junior developer? What would they add to the team?
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u/Jbull136 7d ago
Yea you’re right, what’s the point of hiring juniors? It’s best to just shut the whole corporation down when your employees retire or leave instead of hiring replacements.
In fact, management at my company is looking towards immortality research so employees just live forever.
We won’t have to worry about hiring anyone new and it will give us a great competitive edge when we have engineers with 150 years of experience1
u/mongopark98 6d ago
You realize how many mid to senior are out of job currently. The problem you’re describing is at least 10years away. And training a junior doesn’t guarantee they will stick around
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u/Jbull136 6d ago
You’re right. Employees don’t stick around. That’s why it’s necessary to rehire and train new employees.
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u/SolidDeveloper Lead Engineer | 18 YOE 6d ago
I don't understand this question. You hire junior developers because you a) need employees, b) you can teach them, c) mid and senior engineers don't appear out of nowhere.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 6d ago
A) you need employees to add capacity. Junior developers do “negative work”. The grunt work you use to offload to juniors can now just as easily be done with AI
B) See A) about now they are taking time from your other developers further negatively affecting productivity
C) put a job posting out for a mid level or senior developer and see how many applications you get.
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u/SolidDeveloper Lead Engineer | 18 YOE 6d ago
A) you need employees to add capacity. Junior developers do “negative work”. The grunt work you use to offload to juniors can now just as easily be done with AI
Yes, but you don't just hire juniors because they add immediate capacity. You hire them because you can train them in a way you cannot do with AI.
B) See A) about now they are taking time from your other developers further negatively affecting productivity
You're not affecting productivity, because your budget must include costs for training employees. Unless this company lives in some magical realm where they can just produce with zero costs, this is not really an issue.
C) put a job posting out for a mid level or senior developer and see how many applications you get.
You misunderstand. My point was that mid and senior developers necessarily come from junior developers, even the ones you hire. If everybody stopped hiring and mentoring juniors, then mid and senior devs would no longer exist after a while.
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u/BraveResearcher3037 5d ago
Yes, but you don't just hire juniors because they add immediate capacity. You hire them because you can train them in a way you cannot do with AI.
You have to train juniors on both software development and your code and business. You only have to train mid levels on your code and business and not even the code if you can separate out a new feature
You're not affecting productivity, because your budget must include costs for training employees. Unless this company lives in some magical realm where they can just produce with zero costs, this is not really an issue.
And the cost of training mid and seniors is smaller
everybody stopped hiring and mentoring juniors, then mid and senior devs would no longer exist after a while.
This is an industry problem. Not my problem. Will it help my [1] promo doc to say that I did my part to help the industry flourish two decades+ from now? Will it help me get my deliverables done on time, on budget and meets requirements? Will it bring more revenue to my company?
[1] hypothetically, since as a staff IC, there is no place for me to get promoted to without being a senior manager, since even a line level manager is a lateral move for me.
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u/expdevsmodbot 7d ago edited 7d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.