The AI Interview Collapse: Engineering Hiring Has Lost Its Signal
The signal is gone. In a recent audit of 19,368 technical interviews, 38.5% of candidates were flagged for AI-assisted cheating, with technical roles hitting 48% and junior candidates cheating at nearly double the rate of senior ones. More damning: 61% of detected cheaters scored above the passing threshold. Without the detection layer, they would have advanced. The interview, as an instrument, is no longer measuring what it was designed to measure.
This is not a moral panic about kids these days. It is a mechanical failure of the instrument. The technical interview was calibrated for a world in which a candidate, under time pressure, in an unfamiliar environment, had to produce correct code from memory and first principles. That constraint — the thing that made the signal legible — has been dissolved by a free-tier chat window running on a second device. Every company that still runs a LeetCode-style screen is now paying to sort candidates on a test the test-taker can trivially outsource.
