Many companies already found a better way - they stopped interviewing. You don't need to interview anyone because there aren't any jobs available.

If there happen to be any open roles typically they are not advertised and filled via internal referral from a senior employee... for a senior candidate. Interview is more of a formality at that point.

Nothing material has changed. Get them to do the job they will be doing, with you. Or, if that would involve proprietary data an exercise that’s as close as possible. They drive, you’re in the background. Some people get nervous, so try to be helpful if you see them blanking on something they seem to know, for example. Do it open-book, and give them access to the tools they’d have on the job - IDEs, google, LLMs. At the end of an hour you should have a clear idea of whether they could do the thing you want them to do.

Things that don’t work… Talking to candidates about the job won’t do this - a lot of people can talk plausibly about things that they can’t do. Whiteboard exercises won’t do this - they can be trained to without a real-world ability to deliver.

FWIW, I had to do this remotely when I gave interviews and didn’t want candidates to access my corporate desktop, so I built a disposable remote environment we could both log into for this sort of test. https://www.edparcell.com/remote-desktop.html

The better way existed before AI existed. Take-home tasks were always poor attempts to find a measure for technical ability. Pairing exercises or live problem-solving tasks were, and still are, vastly more effective. If your team uses AI for those challenges on the job, then the people you interview should too.

The measure should always be the quality of a solution a candidate produces in response to a problem, not how they got to the solution. If you want to dive into the 'how' then what you're actually measuring is communication, something AI is still pretty bad at.

I will interview candidate tomorrow. I don't know what to ask anymore. He has more than 10 years experience so I should be asking some system design etc. I will prepare the interview with llm questions and I have answers in another page. I am not sure how do I check his soft skills with this way.

I just call and talk to a candidate one call that’s it

Surely any company hiring a developer in Q3 2026 hasn't caught up to the new way of working anyway...?

Pre-2026 you needed someone who could write code to build software. That person isn't needed anymore. Now you need someone with a good product sense and enough soft-technical skills to be able to use AI to do that. This is the person the company should be hiring.

At my job interviews are essentially rejection practice. The debriefings are these cringe sessions where everyone pretends to be better than the candidate, makes fun of them for being old, for their attire, for how they talk, it’s so so bad. Like high school. This is a well known company in San Francisco!

Every single screen is a “No” even when I’ve strongly recommended the candidate. I don’t believe we are really hiring anyone.

I have 2-3 of these interviews per week, been that way since Day 1 at this job for several months now.

Idk if they do it to keep us worried or what but it’s very toxic.