As someone with a decade of experience as a software engineer, one thing that I still haven’t perfected are interviews. Coding challenges have always felt artificial and irrelevant to the actual work I would do, and feels more geared towards fresh college graduates, ready to be exploited, eager to be overworked, underpaid, and rushed to find a solution; the exact opposite of what I’d expect from an actual engineering environment.
I like to take the time to actually think over the problem and all use cases/edge cases, and ensure that my code is production ready, performant, and maintainable. Most code interviews don’t measure anything except how much a candidate studied leetcode problems. You’re rushed and have people watching and judging your every move or lack thereof, and just looking for something to complain about, usually irrelevant or nonsense in the context of a rushed test.
So for my last interview I fed the coding interview prompt into ChatGPT and it produced a working example and explained how it worked and what the problem was much more clearly. I didn’t outright copy the solution but instead used it as a tool to quickly gain a better understanding of what the problem was, and treated it as if I was talking with another engineer, brainstorming ideas and talking over the problem, and then I went off to implement my own solution a bit differently that was a bit more concise and more organized.
The interviewers were all impressed, and I was able to finally get an offer that was above market value for the first time in my life, when I would traditionally be forced to low ball myself because of my low self esteem and lacking confidence. Thanks to ChatGPT my self esteem has improved, and I finally have that well paying software job I’ve only ever heard about but could never get because of the low key discriminatory interviewing practices.