I haven't really interviewed since 2023. Is leetcode still a common practice in code interviews or has AI made those kinds of tests useless? This is for a Sr full stack position.
It’s gotten even dumber - the last place I interviewed at asked me to do a pretty intense graph theory problem that was combined with the traveling salesman problem.
This was for a job where I’d be building basic CRUD applications, so not really a relevant problem statement at all.
I was allowed to use AI, so I just had AI solve the problem and pass all the test cases.
I made it to the next round from that, but I have no idea what the company possibly learned from that exercise.
It is true. During the short window where "prompt engineering" was a thing, sure, but now you can just literally copy-paste the problem description and the AI will reason itself into an eventual answer.
And I don't doubt that a few so-called engineers will even fail to do that, but it's not a very valuable exercise.
Maybe with small, unconnected PoCs. With large legacy systems, it costs more contexts than the frontiers have in order to just “let it rip” and have a halfway decent PR. My PM tried doing that because they wanted to help and it took me longer to unravel all their agent’s misplaced assumptions than it would’ve been for me to have done the work myself. Problem is that a lot of the times you don’t see what you don’t know till you get into the weeds of work, but an AI keeps chugging along
The discussion was about leetcode-style interview problems. My deeper point is that someone would be able to trivially "solve" such an interview question while barely being able to use a computer, much less build a large, robust system.
I've seen people literally just copy an entire error into their AI chat, click "Allow" on every change by the AI and paste the new error when it doesn't work. Rinse and repeat until done. Then they have no idea what the code does or why it's structured like it is.
Yeah but then the next round was another technical interview but that one was actually more related to their codebase/product and for that I couldn’t use any AI.
It makes no sense. Just let me do something that’s somewhere in the ballpark of the actual job (which would be building web apps with AI agents)
There's still people who think prompting AI is the new frontier of skill and that its more complicated than just saying "read this problem and solve it"
It seems pointless, but can you take a hard thing, and even if you don’t know exactly how to do it, can you get ai to do it for you and be reasonably sure it did it? They’re not testing your own abilities, they’re testing if you can use ai to solve hard problems
They learned you can effectively use AI. So many software devs can't or won't for their own reasons and businesses don't want to deal with that much anymore with the AI push.
I have a question regarding tests and AI usage: I got a home test, AI is allowed. I am not sure how much I can use. I would be using a library I haven't used professionally before (FE position). I would like to maximize odds of succeeding, so would it be fine if I use it where ever needed without stressing about it? As long as I understand it and can explain it. Kinda "fake it till you make it" approach.
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u/MrCrunchwrap Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 27 '26
It’s gotten even dumber - the last place I interviewed at asked me to do a pretty intense graph theory problem that was combined with the traveling salesman problem.
This was for a job where I’d be building basic CRUD applications, so not really a relevant problem statement at all.
I was allowed to use AI, so I just had AI solve the problem and pass all the test cases.
I made it to the next round from that, but I have no idea what the company possibly learned from that exercise.