So as some of you know, I had a technical interview with Wasmer today. I was up till midnight last night preparing and all morning today preparing. I got my velocity MCP deployed to edge, tested, built a nice little dashboard for showcasing, awesome!
then I took my durable workflows system and stripped a chunk of it out, to convert it to a durable state system meant for wasmer cloud, awesome!
I got the IDE nice and fancy, looks good, I can explain it well, fantastic!
I connect to the call, run through the first questions of the interview, did great, I showcase my demos, absolutely blows him away! I'm like YES, I got this!
He says 'I dont think it's necessary, but to be complete'... Oh dear... Oh no... Manual code review... Tiny little file, a simple cache. And I absolutely choked. I'm reading through it, I pause at spots, my brain knows THERE's SOMETHING HERE!!! But I cant explain it. I had gotten so used to just selecting a block of text I instinctively know looks wrong, then have the AI fix it, that I couldnt articulate.
I flagged a mismatch, hash is sha 256, but it's a 16 byte array, that's 1 point... That's about as far as I could get without him hinting... I felt like an undergrad that's never seen code other than that on the teleprompter.
So lesson learned, no matter how good you think you are, even if an interviewer can see you build fantastic systems, dont think that'll save you from manual code review... And instead of polishing up your demo's, rather focus on refreshing the basics, as stupid as it sounds, in the age of AI, that's the skill we're neglecting the most.
I knew that a file create inside an async loop is bad design, but I couldnt remember the name of it, tokio task spawn blocking... And bearer_auth for reqwest... a simple & for borrowing, to make sure it passes through anyhow context, making sure an await has appropriate tiers worth of ?... All things I missed...
Luckily, I redeemed myself during the final questions, I think it caught him by surprise when I asked questions about the exact things they're working on and need the most work on... Which is good...
So instead of getting DQ'd I got through, I had to write an email on the file, with all the fixes. Which I did (It took me 3.5h to refresh enough to catch all 7 bugs). He said while he cant watch me, please no AI. So I stuck to that, I did it without AI and it was a nightmare... All the skills I built up over the 6 years before I started using AI, were gone, I forgot how to correctly phrase my searches and I refused to use the AI assist bit at the top of a search result. It made me realize just how 'in your face' AI is these days, it's literally everywhere, you cant even open up VS Code without AI popping up front and center... Doing things without AI again was quite an eye opening tbh, like writing fortran, you really dont miss it... But refreshing on it just reminds you how far we've come.
I think anyone here who knows me, knows that I am all-in on AI, where it falls flat, I build infrastructure to correct it, rather than correct the code myself. That way I can atleast know it wont do it again... But I use it to make the changes... So my reliance on AI is so deeply vested, while not a bad thing, that I forgot entirely how to manually code.
To just make it clear, errors dont slip past me during AI-assisted work, infact, that's the weird part. I knew where the errors were, I hovered with my mouse over them, I knew they were there just by looking at it, but I lost the ability to explain it? Ok, a fair bit of it is stage-fright, but a considerable part of it is genuinely muscle dystrophy when it comes to coding and I honestly didnt think it'd happen to me? I used to keep up with 9 different programming languages at once (JS, C#, C++, F#, Rust, HTML, CSS, Go, Python), yet now I cant even articulate what's the matter in code, just caveman point at it.
I felt like 1 hell of an idiot and honestly, if it wasnt for the interviewer's final comments, I likely woulda been depressed. He said I had the most impressive demos, I asked really good questions, it's a shame that I fell flat during the manual review, but I'm not disqualified... But that realization. If I hadnt prepared all my demos, my hiring journey would have ended today. All because I didnt keep up with manual writing code and explaining what happens. Dont get me wrong, completely unnecessary skill in real-world execution, but they're still asking those questions? Manual code review? Explain what happens when the hash and the algo dont line up? Things that honestly just never crossed my mind ever having to explain beyond what it took me to make a decision in my head 'a 16 byte array, in a sha256 hash, would mean partial filling and incomplete reading, it would never hit the cache', that's enough for me + AI, but it's not enough when dealing with a human interviewer. And that's scary... The skill we're deliberately losing, is STILL the thing that gets you hired?
So my question is, who needs to change their ways? Do we as developers need to go back to roots and focus on manual code editing, or should the hiring system update it's methods to embrace the new AI age?
Side note: Honestly, blew my mind how much he knew! Clearly, I still have ALOT to learn about distributed systems and the ecosystem that runs things. Not just learn how to use them, but dig deeper into the underlying architecture. He said everything still uses POSIX, but it's archaic. That's definitely my next point of research, because I never paid much mind to POSIX, just POSIX compliant... All I'll say, is that I am extremely excited to work at Wasmer, I think I'm gunna learn ALOT.
Top comments (2)
Bro, your post is an honest admission of a trap we are all falling into. I’ll take it one step further: I don’t even look at the raw code anymore.
The hiring system is stuck in the past—they are testing if you can be a human linter. But the real skill moving forward isn't manual syntax review; it's building the infrastructure that proves whether the AI's context is structurally sound. You choked on the syntax, but your architectural demos proved you know how to build the house. The system just hasn't caught up to what actually matters yet.
@xulingfeng I blew it, but I also didnt 😅