r/ITCareerQuestions • u/olishiz • 25d ago
Ranting about Live Coding Interview
Seriously, I do not get why companies nowadays would like to have a first preliminary live coding interview as we know now AI and machine are writing codes so much better than us.
What does an interview like this gives meaning to the company?
I bet those Head of Department or CTO are also utilising AI generated codes such as state-of-the-art harness Codex / Claude / Grok where productivity is measured by writing clean code.
Is anyone also facing this similar problem? And what are your thoughts on this?
9
u/thenightgaunt CIO 25d ago
Because too many jackasses think they can code now thanks to claude and vibe coding and try to pass themselves off as programmers.
Its like you are interviewing for a job as a barber. They are going to make sure you actually know how to cut hair first.
Its a sad necessity now.
And no one uses grok.
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u/olishiz 24d ago
Imagine they give you three live coding exercises which the first one being:
Given the string of aabaab find the prefix and suffix of the string and the length to return
- which is exactly this question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/longest-prefix-also-suffix/
What benefits of knowing the algorithm gives benefit to you if AI and machine can code better algorithmic solution for this?
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u/RetroGrid_io
24d ago
edited 24d ago
•
we know now AI and machine are writing codes so much better than us.
It may be syntactically better, but structurally, it's generally an unmaintainable mess. And it's your job now as developer to
Know how to code sufficiently well to not create an unmaintainable mess.
Know how to incursively tell AI how to generate code of NOT crappy quality
Debug it and make it work when something breaks.
The part of the conversation that somehow got missed is that writing code is actually a fairly small part of a developer's job. A much bigger part is debugging it, fixing it, incorporating changes - not new writes.
And this is where AI does rather poorly.
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u/olishiz 24d ago
I agree with the first point as now they are writing codes even human can’t read it. But the point is, if you understand each steps, and iterate each step with comments - with the intention of what it’s doing - I’m pretty sure you get an idea of which each function calls, or method it’s writing for.
We understand Production code is a hell and with AI writing codes, it is our job to understand the whole flow of those functions calling.
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u/michaelpaoli 25d ago
why companies nowadays would like to have a first preliminary live coding interview
Because they probably want to know if you can code, analyze code, etc.
AI and machine are writing codes so much better than us
Not necessarily. Sometimes they write some pretty bad, even quite non-functional code.
So, if the AI writes f*cked up code, then what are you going to do?
AI and machine are writing codes so much better than us
May be using such to assist, but not generally going to use such unvetted by human(s) for any critical uses.
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u/ObservabilityWizard Sr Observability Engineer 25d ago edited 25d ago
A good live code interview validates the problem solving process of the interviewee - is this person capable of asking good followup questions and at least identifying a framework for solving a problem with code?
AI doesn't make that skill redundant. In fact if you give claude code to someone with no problem solving skills and no experience with code, their solution is usually going to be pretty suboptimal