I don't think it will be the downturn that eliminates it, so much as it will be LLM-accelerated coding, and the normalization and incorporation of these tools into standard development workflows.
If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. A team of 10 tomorrow can probably replace a team of 50 today.
So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."
Who needs LLM-accelerated coding for that? Leetcode was already comically unrealistic as an evaluation of actual engineering skill. When's the last time you had to solve an algorithm puzzle without any ability to do research or check references?
Shoutout to the interview I had where I was asked a tricky graph question, reasoned my way to the optimal solution, then failed because I "should have recognized" that it was a variant of Djikstra's algorithm from the beginning. As we all know, being able to regurgitate an existing algorithm shows far more promise than being able to logically create it yourself!
> So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."
This is very "Monkey's Paw" and I can absolutely see something like that taking hold, as sloppy and stupid as such a task might be.
I had an interview with a YC company who asked me how to do something, and then I did it, and then they asked "how could I make it a one-liner" - immediately thought was "I'm pretty sure I don't want to maintain a codebase full of fun little one-liners for everything" - managed to get it, but it definitely looked like crap.
If I were to get asked to build eBay in an hour, I'm sure my auction model would be 1) shit, 2) very prone to social engineering type attacks (fake bids, etc)
> If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years.
What will it do? It can't write exponentially better code. Maybe 50% better, so that I would need to edit it's outputs less often. The only thing I could see it doing exponentially better would be writing _less_ code. Telling me "stop! close this file. close this project. you are working on the wrong thing!"
Technology can jump sharply but then go relatively flat. We still haven't gone back to the moon, 50 years later. We still don't have at-home nuclear power plants.
If you think co-pilot is cool now, just wait and see what it does in 5 years. A team of 10 tomorrow can probably replace a team of 50 today.
So maybe the interview process in 10 years is more like: "build an auction site like ebay in the next hour."