An Indian software program engineer who has spent practically a decade working throughout among the world’s greatest know-how firms, together with Google and Amazon, has shared how job interviews and the talents wanted to crack them have basically modified within the age of synthetic intelligence.
In an as-told-to essay printed by Enterprise Insider, Akaash Vishal Hazarika, a 29-year-old senior software program engineer based mostly in Seattle, mirrored on his 8-year profession at Google, Amazon, Splunk and Salesforce, providing insights into how software program engineers should now put together for interviews within the AI period.
“I’ve had a front-row seat to witness the modifications within the tech panorama. I’ve discovered which talent units software program engineers have to land a job supply within the AI period,” he mentioned.
In line with Hazarika, conventional preparation strategies, reminiscent of mastering information buildings, algorithms and system design, are now not sufficient. He mentioned that whereas these fundamentals stay important, they’re now seen as baseline expectations. “AI is now broadly used for coding, evaluate, and design, so tech firms, particularly startups, count on extra from candidates,” he wrote.
Hazarika mentioned he himself makes use of AI extensively for boilerplate code, permitting him to give attention to advanced system design and enterprise logic. Because of this, engineers are more and more anticipated to know immediate engineering, AI-assisted debugging, error dealing with and deciding when AI options make sense over conventional approaches.
“You are still anticipated to have elementary data of core system design, information buildings, and algorithms. You possibly can nonetheless count on interviewers to check your problem-solving approaches, and if you know the way to make the right tradeoffs in time and area. Interviewers nonetheless care about debugging abilities, since AI makes quite a lot of elementary logic errors,” Hazarika mentioned.
Nonetheless, he famous that some firms now enable candidates to make use of AI instruments throughout reside coding interviews to evaluate how successfully they mix engineering judgment with AI help.
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Hazarika went on to recall failing a 2024 interview with a Silicon Valley startup after ignoring express permission to make use of AI whereas debugging a big codebase. “That was an eye-opener for me about AI’s new function on this discipline,” he wrote.
System design interviews, Hazarika added, now usually embody questions on integrating AI into present workflows, managing mannequin lifecycles and evaluating trade-offs reminiscent of price, reliability and scalability. In some circumstances, candidates are given a small codebase and requested to ship a characteristic inside an hour – one thing he mentioned is “practically not possible with out AI.”
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Techie’s recommendation for contemporary graduates
For contemporary graduates, Hazarika suggested growing a manufacturing mindset by way of open-source contributions, constructing AI-integrated tasks deployed on the cloud, mastering cloud instruments and persevering with LeetCode-style apply. For skilled engineers, he careworn pairing area experience with AI abilities, growing an AI product mindset and utilizing AI to enhance workflows at work.
Concluding his recommendation, Hazarika urged engineers to place themselves as “hybrid engineers.” “Do not simply be a pure coder or only a immediate engineer. Be the bridge,” he mentioned.
