[christofosho]

For take home reviews, I wonder what the impact of generative AI would be. I can see a lot of people feeding the code segment into an AI and using it's comments instead of generating their own. Of course, people will do that with programming questions as well, so I suppose it's up to the hiring manager to decide on the best method to handle this situation.

What strategies do people leverage to avoid purely AI answers?

[Aurornis]

A good take-home interview process usually involves a review phase where the candidate talks about their solution and how it works.

This is remarkably effective at filtering out people who had a little too much help in solving it, either from friends, Googling it, or now using an LLM.

It doesn’t happen often, but from time to time someone will come in with a solution they supposedly wrote in the past week but they are unable to discuss it. “I don’t remember exactly what I did here…” and other excuses. It doesn’t take much discussion to reveal someone who never actually understood their own submission.

Of course, I always continue the technical interview to cover the odd possibility that maybe they were too nervous or something. So far I haven’t had anyone who is unable to discuss their own take-home yet shows well in the rest of the interview process.

[bluGill]

Time will tell, but there optimists are already predicting that in just a few years great programmers will feed requirements into AI and then review the code it produces, not write code themselves. I'm not sure I believe it, but given that someone who can make AI produce good results is worth a lot more than a great programmer without an AI.

[trescenzi]

With a take home, and honestly any kind of interview, the key is not in the deliverable it's in the discussion about it. To be totally honest as a hiring manager I don't care if a take home was fully written by AI so long as when we discuss the solution the candidate can clearly explain how the code works and why it was written that way. Of course in the case of an AI the why might be flimsy but if it isn't then who cares. The goal is to hire someone who's capable of solving problems and in turn explaining their solutions I don't care who wrote the code.