For about fifteen years, the way you proved you could do this job was to produce something. Write the function on the whiteboard. Take the exercise home for the weekend and bring back a small working application. Both of those worked because producing plausible code was hard, so the artifact itself was the evidence.
Producing plausible code is no longer hard. The artifact has stopped being evidence, and hiring is adjusting, slowly and unevenly, but in one clear direction.
What comes back is the conversation. Not the trivia interview, which deserved to die and is not returning. Something closer to a working session. Here is a hundred lines somebody else wrote, tell us what worries you about it. Here is a service that is slow, walk us through how you would find out why. Here is a feature request with a hole in the middle of it, find the hole. Here is a design decision you made two years ago, tell us what it cost you and what would have changed your mind.
Those questions have one thing in common. Output does not answer them. Judgement does, and judgement is very hard to borrow in real time.
Which tells you what to practise, and it is not another exercise site.
Get comfortable thinking out loud while you work, because in this format the silence you find comfortable is the part they cannot evaluate. Be able to tell three stories about real decisions you made, including the price you paid. Practise reviewing generated code aloud, saying what you would check before trusting it. And rehearse saying I do not know, followed immediately by how you would find out, because that pair is now one of the strongest answers available to you.
Expect the other slow shift too. Track record and people who will vouch for you carry more weight when artifacts carry less. The person who remembers working with you is a harder signal to fake than anything you can submit.
This all favours people who genuinely understand what they build rather than people who are fast at producing it. That is a fairer test than the one it replaces, and it is one you can prepare for honestly.
– Asael Shinder
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