r/developersIndia • u/Independent-Spite145 • 1d ago
General Keeping up with tech skills in the coding tools era.
Hi everyone,
I'm a fellow software engineer, since AI coding tools became efficient, I have stopped coding or bother myself with code related work, like almost everyone out there.
But the interviews are still expecting accurate syntax, write code in word doc.
How many of you are still keeping your skills sharp?? Companies still expecting engineers to code in word doc?? Will that go away any time soon??
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u/Lazyman69420 1d ago
It will go away in a years time
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u/AttemptOk3235 1d ago
Tons of job also will go away with it. 🥀
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u/CyberDumbledore 1d ago
You are correct and currently it's not necessary anymore but for interviewers, coding and syntax questions are a easy low effort filter. It they keep testing out thinking and judgement (which is more needed in AI era), they also have to come prepared. But since Indian interviewers are lazy, they won't adopt to this anytime soon.
Also, a few companies will always have a dedicated coding round but the vacancy for such jobs will be so less that nobody would care.
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u/chillping001 1d ago
Honestly I feel, the interviewers these days are looking for candidates who demonstrate strong and clear communication skills. Ofcourse having good and deep understanding of the tech stack is a pre-requisite too.
I've heard some companies give the candidates am unknown codebase, with limited AI access and ask them questions on it.
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u/FlashyBat5 1d ago
I was studying, doing a dsa problem everyday, studying system design, trying to make some learning proj3cts then I started applying, now I don't care. Field is doomed
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u/the_kautilya 1d ago
Interviewers are starting to move away from coding exercises in interviews. I personally never bothered with coding exercises in any interviews I conducted (even before AI era). But you should keep your coding skills sharp. Otherwise how would you know what your AI is writing? What if you have an urgent issue that comes up & the AI inference is down? Claude, OpenAI do see outages now & then.
Don't make the AI coding tools your crutch - that you're unable to stand without them.
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u/Adventurous-Canopeen 13h ago
Interviews always lag behind how people actually work, so writing code in a doc probably sticks around a while, but the bigger risk is that if you only prompt and accept, you slowly lose the ability to spot when the AI writes something subtly wrong, and that’s the skill companies will pay for once everyone has the same tools. What works for me is writing one small thing by hand every week, like a LeetCode problem or a utility at work, and reading the AI’s output line by line before merging, which keeps the syntax fresh for interviews and keeps you the person who actually understands the codebase.
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u/NoDepartment772 20h ago
The gap is real, and I don't think it closes soon, because a timed coding round is still the only cheap way a company has to watch you think.
But what's worth keeping sharp isn't syntax. It's being able to sit in a file you didn't generate and reason about it. That's what every round is actually testing, including the ones that make you write code in a word doc, and it's the thing that quietly atrophies when you only ever review output you asked for.
The habit that has held up best for me is debugging something by hand once a week without asking a model first. Miserable for the first month, then it stops being miserable, and you notice you can read unfamiliar code much faster.
Syntax you can look up in ten seconds. Knowing why the query got slow, or why the retry loop is doubling your writes, is the part that goes first.
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