from Hacker News

Would You Hire a Calculator?

by kimjune01 on 6/13/25, 1:25 AM with 11 comments

• by orionblastar on 6/13/25, 2:35 AM

  You need programmers and software engineers to program to remove bugs the AI made that it couldn't detect.

• by NoahZuniga on 6/13/25, 3:18 AM

  > data structure & algorithms questions

  My understanding is that these questions are a proxy for intelligence, and they were asked because Google and the like want smart employees.

  If that's why you're asking these questions, than testing using agents in the interview process doesn't make sense, because:

  1. If you're hiring smart people, you can probably teach them how to use agents. (training someone to use agents isn't very hard)

  2. If someone is smarter, you might in general expect them to be more capable of finding bugs in AI code.

• by vrighter on 6/13/25, 7:24 AM

  Because the LLMs are useless unless you already know the answer to what you're looking for. At least if you're trying to be a serious, competent programmer.

  And if you're using an LLM to do your job for you in an interview, then you extremely probably are not smart enough to notice its constant, inevitable mistakes.

• by kimjune01 on 6/13/25, 1:25 AM

  I'm doing the rounds on interviews this week, and noticed that companies were not adapting to agentic coding that rewrote the software engineer's job description.

• by tuatoru on 6/13/25, 6:59 AM

  Will there be a market for artisanal, hand-crafted code?