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July 2, 2026

How to interview in the age of neural networks?

Take-home assignments are pretty much useless for assessing knowledge these days. I'm skeptical of live coding (making a candidate sweat under pressure doesn't do much for an objective read on them), and even more so of leetcode-style questions: being able to memorize dynamic programming tricks is a shaky foundation for evaluating anyone.

My favorite question right now is the good old "What happens when you hit Enter in the browser's address bar?"

You can go anywhere with it, from debouncing in the keyboard controller all the way up to the system architecture of high-load services.

It's like a road with hundreds of forks: you can dive into kernel drivers, the network stack, the difference between POST and GET, or wander off into GPU shaders.

Granted, most of this really only applies to senior candidates. But who's hiring anyone else these days?