u/Heavy-Sink7567

I had to conduct a technical interview with a candidate as a senior developer. Strong resume, mostly startups, looked legit on paper.

I had a ton of work that week but since I like the hiring manager I accepted to do the interview in between a crucial release despite my workload. I've been laid off from a previous company. I know how hard it is to find a job, how hard it is to apply constantly and get rejected. I wanted him to pass and get hired.

For the algorithm question I usually ask a medium and watch how they approach it, don't really care if they make a ton of mistakes, put a ton of logs etc.. Don't expect them to remember all the details, they can look stuff up. If they finish in any form it's a pass. If they show promise but don't finish, still a pass. I help them throughout the interview with debugging, not the puzzling "should there be an if there ???" thing but actually helping them like a colleague.

Why do I still ask an algo question even though I hate it myself. Because I've seen people in the past who said they could code but really couldn't write 2 lines of code.

Anyways we talk about tech stuff, he answers questions in a way I didn't expect but it's fine, we all get exposed to different things. I brush it off then we get into the algorithm question..

This guy writes clean code, talks through his approach, hits a wall around minute 15, pauses for a beat, then keeps going with a slightly different framing than what he started with. Caught it because at one point he said "actually wait, let me try the two-pointer way" and his hand was already typing the two-pointer before the words came out. Small tell but I knew. He had something running, probably cluely or interview coder.

Here's the thing though. I didn't care. He still wrote the code, still debugged it himself, still walked me through edge cases when I pushed on them, still answered the follow-up on complexity without missing a beat. The tool gave him a nudge when he froze. So what. My engineers have copilot open all day. Our PMs draft specs with chatgpt. We screen resumes with AI. We score take-homes with AI. The interview being the one room where AI is forbidden makes no sense.

I passed him. Hiring manager passed him too. He starts in two weeks.

Anyways, use the tools, just use them well. The candidates who get caught are the ones who use them badly, eyes on a second screen, copying chatgpt word for word. The ones who use them well still write their own code, still think out loud, still handle the follow-ups. That's a real engineer. That's the same engineer you'd be on day 1 with copilot open at your desk.