Episode 76: Interviewing in the AI Era

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, host Mike is joined by Kyle, Matt, and Ryan to discuss how technical interviews are evolving in the age of AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot. The conversation begins with a story about a candidate who plagiarized code during an interview—years before modern AI assistance—which sets the stage for a deeper discussion on integrity and how easy it now is to cheat during remote interviews. The group reflects on how traditional coding challenges and rote questions are becoming less effective, given the accessibility of fast, accurate answers online. Instead of focusing on textbook knowledge or code syntax, the team advocates for interview methods that prioritize problem-solving, communication, and curiosity. They emphasize the value of questions like “Tell me about a project you’re proud of,” or “When did you break production?”—questions that reveal depth of experience, passion, and the candidate’s ability to troubleshoot in real-world scenarios. They also suggest leaning into pseudocode or open-ended challenges that require candidates to explain their thinking, not just deliver a solution. These formats are harder to fake and better assess a person’s reasoning and learning capabilities. The conversation concludes with a shared sentiment that the role of engineers is shifting away from just knowing code toward applying it creatively and collaboratively to solve meaningful problems. Tools like ChatGPT can assist, but they can’t replace real understanding, adaptability, and team skills. For both candidates and interviewers, the core takeaway is clear: be honest, be curious, and focus on showing—not telling—how you think. Transcript: MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. With me, I have Kyle from our platform engineering team, who often joins us, and Matt from...well, you do a bunch of things, Matt [laughs]. He's a leader, I'll say that, and he's a director here at Acima, and is involved in doing a lot of things. I'd like to defer introducing the topic and tell a story. I'm going to do that for...oh, and we also got with us, oh, there we go. We've got Ryan, who's a delivery manager here at Acima and should have some great input. I'm going to start by telling a story. Oh boy, how long ago was this? Over, actually, I don't remember how long ago it was. I think [laughs] I don't even remember which company it was at [laughs], whether it was at Acima or not. I think that this was, like, 12 years ago, so I think this was prior to Acima. I was interviewing somebody, and I thought that I'd give him a coding test. It was a little hard to tell whether he knew what he was talking about or not. And I think I asked him to write some Ruby code that would output a Fibonacci sequence, output the first 10 digits of a Fibonacci sequence. And he said, "Okay,” and he just got quiet for a bit. This was a remote interview, by the way. I think he was overseas. I waited a couple of minutes. He came, and he dropped some code, and there it was, and it worked. It was weird. It was, like, weird code [laughs]. There's stuff that's idiomatically normal for the language that you're writing in. And this was Ruby code, but it barely looked like Ruby code. It looked like somebody had pulled it out of some other piece of code that was doing something else and then tweaked it. It barely fit. It was just really strange. And you don't usually write really strange code when you're on the spot. You're going to write something really simple. And you might have a couple of quirks, but you're not going to have something that's just really weird. So, I finished our interview, and I went and I Googled some of the code because it was weird enough that it was unique. I Googled for it, and it came up immediately on Google. He just copied and pasted from something he’d found online. And not only did he not get hired, but the contract shop he was coming with took a real ding because of that. There were some bad vibes thereafter [chuckles] between us and the shop because you sent us somebody, and he just cheated on the interview. That was before all of the AI tools that we've got now [chuckles], before ChatGPT. Think about all the changes that have happened over the past 15 years or so. This was prior to that, and still managed to cheat. Well, he didn't get away with it [laughs], but he still managed to cheat the interview. And that introduces our topic today. We're going to be talking about how to deal with technology, how to do interviewing in a world where we have technology now, where it makes it very easy for people to pull out answers quickly and hard to verify. This is more broadly applicable even outside of engineering, you think about in schools trying to do testing. It's a general problem. We're going to talk specifically about the software engineering world, because that's what we do, and how ...