I've been arguing that "AI" has very little impact on meaningful technical interviews, that is ones that don't test for memorization of programming trivia: https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/llm-interviews/
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed at a place where I had to do a take-home exercise. It's fine, I don't mind. No Leetcode. Just my own IDE, my own shortcuts, and write a piece code that solves a problem.
I was asked whether I used AI/LLM for the solution. I didn't. I felt like using an LLM to solve the problem for me wasn't the right way of showcasing knowledge. The role was for some form of 'come in with knowledge and help us'.
The response to that was basically: everybody here uses AI.
I declined the follow-up interview, as I felt that if all you have is the speed of AI to be ahead of your competitors, you're not really building the kind of things that I want to be a part of. It basically implies that the role is up in the air as soon as the AI gets better.
When I started coding I did it in notepad. I thought it was hardcore and cool. I was young and stupid. Then I adopted an IDE and I became much better at writing code.
To me AI is just another tool that helps me solve problems with code. An auto complete on steroids. A context aware stack overflow search. Not wanting to adopt or not even work somewhere where colleagues use it, sounds to me like coding in notepad AND in the process scoffing those who use an IDE.
Besides, if AI gets to the point it can replace you, it will replace you. Better to start learning how to work with it so you can fill whatever gap AI can't.
I still mainly use a text editor after several decades, and do a lot of thinking and initial design with pencil and paper. IDEs just get in the way.
I've seen the type of code AI generates. It might work, but if you think that's good or that massaging it so it works will make you any better, I have some bad news for you...
We have been interviewing people who are obviously using covert AI helper tools. Ask them a question and they respond with coherent response, but they are just reading off of a window we can't see.
In some cases it is obvious they are blathering a stream of words they don't understand. But others are able to hold something resembling a coherent conversation. We also have to allow for the fact that most people we interview aren't native English speakers, and are talking over Teams. It can be very hard to tell if they are cheating.
Asking questions to probe their technical skills is essential, otherwise you are just selecting for people who are good at talking and self promotion. We aren't just asking trivia questions.
We also give a simple code challenge, nothing difficult. If they have a working knowledge of the language, they should be able to work through the problem in 30 minutes, and we let them use an IDE and google for things like regex syntax.
Some of them are obviously using an AI, since they just start typing in a working solution. But in theory they could be a Scala expert who remembers how to use map plus a simple regex...
The clicking to restart is there mainly for phone users, I realized after sharing with a friend that hotkeys aren't very mobile-friendly. I don't have a good way to detect desktop vs. mobile clients, and technically one can also have a keyboard connected to a phone.
I've also been thinking about zooming, I'll see what I can do over my next lunch break :D
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Remote: Preferred, but not required, been remote for ~5 years
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Rust, Clojure, Go, Python, SQL, k8s
Résumé/CV: https://blog.sulami.xyz/pages/robin-schroer-cv.pdf
Email: hire@sulami.xyz
Hi,
I'm Robin, (Senior) Staff Engineer with 10 years of experience. On the Will Larson staff archetype chart I register mostly as Architect and/or Solver, and I enjoy figuring out what is needed for organisational success. I've most recently worked at CircleCI on the core pipeline orchestration platform as well as config processing. Relevant experiences here include high throughput distributed systems and compilers.
I'm somewhat conversational in Japanese, but by no means business level (yet). Native in German, and can get by in French or Dutch, if need be.
I had a similar kind of idea for a long time, which I put into action a few weeks ago via a standalone transpiler of Emacs' rx macro to common regexp syntaxes.[0] I ended up getting interrupted and didn't completely finish it, but it generally works, though is probably riddled with edge cases.
The basic idea of rx is to use S-expressions to describe regular expressions, and my elevator pitch would've been to embed rx invocations in shell scripts using $(syntax), the main use case being something like sed invocations.
I still think it's a neat idea, and complex regular expressions tend to be hard to parse for humans.
Thank you and sorry for detracting from the point of your very interesting article. I'm using Chromium 108 on Debian - i can see the scrollbar appear fine in Firefox 102.
> a good terminal mode so I don't need to switch to another terminal, the builtin terminals either lag badly after 10K lines of input or render/behave strangely when used with ncurses programs
I found vterm[1] to be pretty reliable for any kind of "advanced" terminal use. Also much faster when dealing with large amounts of output.
The only problems we are seeing is the significant startup time cost (hence the Go bits, where it matters).
Memory usage also isn't always great, but that's more a JVM problem, as it's not releasing reclaimed memory as quickly as you'd like it to. Fine on servers, annoying on a 16GB laptop.
The Common Lisp problems you outlined don't really apply to Clojure, it's a modern lanaguage and has been stable and versatile for us.
Having used Clojure in production many years ago, I was very satisfied. And solid interop with existing Java libraries really brings in a whole ecosystem if needed.
Persistent data structures are really game-changing.
Is the new frontend also written in ClojureScript? Seems you've closed sourced the frontend (old source is here https://github.com/circleci/frontend) but you used to use CLJS, but maybe new one is written in something else?
I'm on the backend, but all I've seen of the new frontend is TypeScript. There has been a decision to switch languages for reasons that someone else can probably explain better than I could, a lot of us lurk here.
I wouldn't call it good, but I'm using Pandoc to generate LaTeX. The whole thing is wrapped in Hakyll, which already uses Pandoc to generate the HTML from the source (org/markdown).
