🔗 Software engineer interviews for the age of AI

Great engineers are essential because knowledge expands fractally, and production systems require accountability beyond plausible code. People pay for reliable services, not homework assignments, so engineers must own the systems they build with their phone number on the line.

Interview design should assess fractal knowledge through follow-up questions on past projects, revealing what candidates truly understand versus what they merely read about. System design interviews expose hands-on experience versus theoretical knowledge, while coding interviews with real tools, documentation, and AI access test whether candidates can ship working solutions that handle operational concerns and scale.

Leetcode problems are too clean and chewed up to reflect real work, which requires understanding business domains and talking to people. The ideal coding interview provides a stubbed codebase, clear business problem, API documentation, and permission to use AI, Google, and pair with the interviewer to build a working script that reads and writes to databases and third-party APIs.