Technical IT interviews
Why Technical IT interview and not just IT interview? First of all, by Technical IT interview I mean your aptitude to problem resolution using your skills, knowledge and experience to find solutions or workarounds provided certain constraints. Is that the only aspect of an IT interview? No. Is that the most important aspect of an IT interview? No. So why does that matter? It does matter because it is the only part of the interview where there is no ambiguity or at least there shouldn’t be.
A technical IT interview should no longer be a series of questions and answers especially in an age where technology allows us to leverage all these tools to create a realistic test environment.
Exhibit A – Internet
Never memorize something that you can lookup.
— Albert Einstein
This is a funny contradiction because nowadays, the use of the Internet has become inalienable and more so for people working in Information Technologies, yet the latter group is generally forbidden to make use of it during an Interview! Why? Because with the current state of technical IT interviews, solutions to the vast majority of technical questions is just one click away.
Exhibit B – Theory Vs Practice
Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why.
— Herman Hesse
As engineers, the theory is as good as we can apply it otherwise we are being treated like academics, that is, memorizing a bunch of concepts just for the sake of knowledge. Don’t get it me wrong because theorizing implies the freedom to think or imagine without sometimes the constraints of practicality or the impediments of large-scale testing, and we definitely need such brains. But any interview which is purely verbal can only be theoretical hence pretty remote to the reality of engineering which requires not only testing to find a solution but testing to find the optimal solution which takes into consideration the technical environment, the cost, the time and most importantly the human factor.
Exhibit C – AI (Artificial Intelligence)
If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
— Fei Fei Li
Artificial Intelligence and humans will solve society’s biggest challenges by working together.
In How many technical interviews have you been where you were using AI was allowed? Or better yet is there any interviewer who can survive a face off against the symbiotic relationship between AI and an IT professional? I don’t think so! The same way educational institutions have to accommodate the rise of AI in the way they teach and test, it is just fair to ask the professional world to catch up with the technology.
What can we do?
We now dispose of all the tools we can possibly need to evaluate a candidate at least from a technical perspective and they are essentially made up of virtualization coupled with automation. In the case of Network Engineering for example:
- First a company can identify some of the use cases they are faced with on a regular basis and replicate them in a virtual environment like GNS3, EveNg or CML.
- Then the candidate is given remote access to the virtual environment.
- The candidate is finally presented with a request from the perspective of a potential customer and asked to address it.
Our expectations
The expectation remains the same as for a verbal interview with the only difference that the candidate can better express himself/herself because he/she is now in his/her “natural“ environment:
- Candidate can use the Internet.
- Candidate can use AI like ChatGPT
- Candidate can ask question to the interviewer panel (collaboration with peers).
- Candidate can be asked to justify his/her solutions (demonstration of the level of understanding through the search of an optimal solution).
Conclusion
I firmly believe that this approach will not only help to identify skilled engineers but it will also shine the light on talented Engineers who can become very skilled if exposed to the right training, team and mentorship.