The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
AI killed the tech interview. Now what? (News)
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.
Chapter 1: What changes has AI brought to technical interviews?
Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the already fraught technical interview process. He says hacker rank is pretty much broken, comp, sci fundamentals, and coding interviews are also out, but architectural interviews still work, at least for now. Quote, from talking to people who have run these, it's evident when someone is using AI.
Chapter 2: What are the proposed solutions to AI's impact on interviews?
They often stop with long pauses, do not quite explain things succinctly, and do not understand the questions well enough to prompt the correct answer. As AI gets better and faster, this will likely follow the same fate as the rest, but I would give it some years yet. End quote. Kane suggests five options of how we can adapt, some of which are better than others. One, stop remote tech interviews.
Two, require some Pearson Vue-type spyware. Three, bury our heads in the sand. Four, change our interviews to allow AI. And five, a hybrid approach. Something's gotta give. In the meantime, Kane thinks we'll see more people passing their interviews than being let go during their probation period. That sucks for everybody involved. What are you doing and seeing in this space?
Chapter 3: How can an app help reduce screen time?
Let us know in the comments. I'd love to hear about it. An app to lock your apps until you touch grass. Reese Kentish wanted to change the habit of reaching for his phone in the morning and doom scrolling away for an hour. So he built an app to help him do just that. It's built in SwiftUI and uses the Screen Time APIs provided by Apple, plus Google Vision to recognize grass or not.
Cool idea, but tough to manage for anybody living in deserts or tundras. Maybe he should add an in-app purchase to change touch grass to touch snow, touch dirt, or touch sand. It's now time for sponsored news. Play with Retool's Guided Tour. Now you can play with Retool, no account required, and you get a guided tour.
Chapter 4: What is Retool's new guided tour feature?
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You'll get to see how simple they've made it to build tooling without any front-enders needed, allowing them to focus on customer-facing things. If you haven't yet, now's a good time to play with Retool's guided tour to see how simple it is to build apps on top of their managed Postgres database or your own database. Check the link in the newsletter or head to retool.com to learn more.
Microsoft's Majorana One chip. Microsoft tried really hard to make a big splash last week announcing their quantum computing efforts. Quote, quantum computers promise to transform science and society, but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive. And their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction.
Today, we're announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing. End quote. Are you excited yet? No? Well, then just hear this copy. Quote, built with a breakthrough class of materials called a topoconductor, Majorana 1 marks a transformative leap toward practical quantum computing. End quote. Their hype-inducing efforts kind of worked.
People are excited about the progress despite the fact that quantum computing isn't useful in any real way yet, but hopefully someday. And even if not, you have to admit, the Majorana 1 looks really cool. on washing machines and estimations. Chris Horsley recently had a saga installing a new washing machine that he thought would take 10 minutes. It ended up taking him four whole hours.
Sound like anything we know? In this excellent analogical post, Chris tells the tale of the six yaks he had to shave during his install process and what he learned from the whole ordeal. Quote, what we fail to factor in is that while 90% of the project will be the same,
There's going to be one critical difference between the last five projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation, but we'll throw off our whole schedule. Discover the IndieWeb one blog post at a time. Andreas Gore built something cool. It's like stumble upon before capitalism got it. But for the IndieWeb, why did Andreas build it?
Quote, I love reading text written by real people, texts that don't want to sell something. But how can you discover texts you can't search for because you don't know they exist? That's where this page comes in. Click a button, be surprised, and maybe discover your new favorite thing. You can suggest your own or a friend's personal site as long as it has an RSS feed. RSS for the win, once again.
That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for all the links and more, including Google served Go backdoor to devs for three plus years, Wireshark for Docker containers, and a year of UV, pros, cons, and should you migrate? If you don't get the newsletter, sign up today at changelog.com slash news. Scroll back in your feed for some awesome pods.
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