Interview processes are changing in a tech market that’s both cooling AND heating up at the same time. A deepdive with Hello Interview founders, Evan King and Stefan Mai
Thanks Evan & Stefan for this write up. It's brutal right now in the tech hiring landscape. Even after personally running hundreds of tiny AB experiments (and analyzing thousands of resume data points), it's clear that we're in a tech career winter still.
While I've helped 80+ people land tech offers in the past 2 years, the reasons people get rejected are still mostly invisible / totally arbitrary (and sometimes have nothing to do with their resume or interview results).
Great article! One question that came up for me was: Is the advice for EM preparation the same as for Staff+ engineers? I would argue that there is a nuance in what is expected for the EM role, but I am curious to get some other thoughts.
In the past, EM roles focused a lot more on leadership, working with stakeholders (e.g product). From all I gather, EM interviews are becoming a lot more like tech lead and staff engineer ones, plus the topics on eg hiring, performance management, and so on. The technical topics (coding, architecture, being hands on) are more dominant than before - and leadership, stakeholder management, people management etc also remain.
That's my feeling, too. I am an EM, and if I need to start interviewing again, it would be a bit more challenging on the technical side, as I moved from coding to more of this EM role you described.
I still know how to read code and do system design, but I have not been hands-on with coding for a while now. It has been hard to get back to it, and I should invest more time in this and look for resources to catch up.
I‘m still surprised how much effort is invested in „testing“ technical skills - especially nowadays with the availability GenAI. Soft skills are extremely important as these can not be changed if a candidate does not fit. Critical thinking, communication, data thinking or product orientation are important and often missing from candidates as they also only focus on their technical skills. Home office does not mean that soft skills are not relevant.
Andreas: I don't expect this to change, though? Companies will want to hire engineers who can fully understand how the code works and can catch mistakes the AI does. To prove this, they need to prove they can write code without AI assistance.
And yes, the other skillsets are important as well: but this does not mean dropping the technical rounds. At least startups, scaleups and tech companies paying top of market will not drop any of these.
Companies that are not attractive might consider reducing these: then again, what's stopping them to hire a well-rounded great communicator who does not know how to code / understand how the code works and can only prompt AI tools?
Thanks Evan & Stefan for this write up. It's brutal right now in the tech hiring landscape. Even after personally running hundreds of tiny AB experiments (and analyzing thousands of resume data points), it's clear that we're in a tech career winter still.
While I've helped 80+ people land tech offers in the past 2 years, the reasons people get rejected are still mostly invisible / totally arbitrary (and sometimes have nothing to do with their resume or interview results).
Great article! One question that came up for me was: Is the advice for EM preparation the same as for Staff+ engineers? I would argue that there is a nuance in what is expected for the EM role, but I am curious to get some other thoughts.
In the past, EM roles focused a lot more on leadership, working with stakeholders (e.g product). From all I gather, EM interviews are becoming a lot more like tech lead and staff engineer ones, plus the topics on eg hiring, performance management, and so on. The technical topics (coding, architecture, being hands on) are more dominant than before - and leadership, stakeholder management, people management etc also remain.
That's my feeling, too. I am an EM, and if I need to start interviewing again, it would be a bit more challenging on the technical side, as I moved from coding to more of this EM role you described.
I still know how to read code and do system design, but I have not been hands-on with coding for a while now. It has been hard to get back to it, and I should invest more time in this and look for resources to catch up.
I would say yes but there are typically additional behavioral rounds focused on project leadership or people management, etc.
I‘m still surprised how much effort is invested in „testing“ technical skills - especially nowadays with the availability GenAI. Soft skills are extremely important as these can not be changed if a candidate does not fit. Critical thinking, communication, data thinking or product orientation are important and often missing from candidates as they also only focus on their technical skills. Home office does not mean that soft skills are not relevant.
Andreas: I don't expect this to change, though? Companies will want to hire engineers who can fully understand how the code works and can catch mistakes the AI does. To prove this, they need to prove they can write code without AI assistance.
And yes, the other skillsets are important as well: but this does not mean dropping the technical rounds. At least startups, scaleups and tech companies paying top of market will not drop any of these.
Companies that are not attractive might consider reducing these: then again, what's stopping them to hire a well-rounded great communicator who does not know how to code / understand how the code works and can only prompt AI tools?
Meanwhile even ML engineers cannot find work. From blind:
“A machine learning engineer looking for a job for more than 7 months. Is the market that bad or am I doing something wrong?”
Great write up - definitely seeing this at Interview Query at well in terms of trends and the relative growth rate over last year.
Very intresting, thanks for sharing.
We don’t need to test engineers harder. We need to listen better.
We’ve built interview processes around testing what engineers already know.
But we rarely see how they actually think.
But thinking? That’s harder to fake and much more important.
We're hiring clarity.
Judgment.
Pattern recognition.
The ability to stay calm and clear in unfamiliar terrain.
Today tools can write code.
But only people can decide what matters.
We should hire for that.
And the best way to see it?
Give a messy task, a constraint, and a tool like Cursor AI.
Don't just look at the code.
Watch the conversation - and the thinking that emerges from it.
Wrote about it here:
https://medium.com/@ezraroi/what-if-weve-been-evaluating-engineers-all-wrong-7e6ea764ab43