Mar 2, 2026 7 min read

🧀 Work-Life Balance, Friction Focused Management, Big Visions, Accountability, Helplessness, New WIP Metrics,SRE, Razors: TMW #471

Interviewing engineers? The paradigm has shifted - how are you affected?

Hello, hello, hello, welcome to the week!

More AI in Hiring Worries - Was the Test Never the Point?

The busiest thread this week in the CTO Craft Slack centred on a question about modern-day hiring: candidates are sailing through take-home coding assessments but then crumbling when asked to defend their solutions - almost certainly because AI wrote the code for them. What followed was a wide-ranging debate about whether take-home tests are salvageable at all in the AI era, or whether they've become a filter for "who's best at prompting" rather than "who can actually engineer." The strongest emerging consensus was that the take-home itself was never really the point - the discussion afterwards is - and that the real challenge is now finding efficient first-stage filters (human CV review, trusted referrals, community networks like CTO Craft) before you invest any engineering time in a candidate at all.

The take-home discussion is the interview: several members noted they encourage AI use on the task itself; what they're evaluating is whether the candidate can explain, defend, and modify the output under pressure.
AI-optimised CVs have broken the resume filter too: the community flagged that both ends of the funnel are now compromised, making warm referrals and trusted networks the highest-signal first step.
Pair programming beats most alternatives: it replicates actual working conditions, surfaces how candidates think rather than what they can produce alone, and is hard to fake in real time.

Thought experiment: If you had to redesign your entire technical hiring process from scratch today knowing candidates will use AI at every stage, what's the one thing you'd keep, and what's the first thing you'd throw out?

That's it, let's look at some links....

Andy @ CTO Craft

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