What companies test for now
1. The signal mix changed
Interviews always test for a mix of signals. The mix shifted.
Some signals got more weight. Some moved down the ladder, so they show up at junior interviews now when they used to show up at senior. Some dropped out of interviews entirely because the model made them cheap.
Here's the rough new mix, signal by signal.
2. Specification clarity (new)
The interview question used to be "can you write the code." It's becoming "can you state what the code is supposed to do, precisely enough that another person could write it."
You'll see this as a take-home prompt that asks for a design document before any code. Or a live round where the interviewer hands you a vague feature description and watches how you tighten it before writing a line. The grading rubric rewards you for asking the questions a senior engineer would ask — about edge cases, about the inputs the model wouldn't think of, about what failure looks like.
This is the round most candidates underperform on, because they're used to jumping into code.
3. Verification thinking (new)
Companies want to know that you don't ship code you can't verify. The new signal is whether you reach for tests, types, evals, and runs by reflex — not as an afterthought.
In an interview this looks like: you write a function, and before you say you're done, you describe how you'd convince yourself it works. The wrong answer is "I'd test it manually." A passable answer names the cases you'd write tests for. A strong answer names the failure modes the model would miss and how you'd catch them.
4. Architecture vision (now at lower levels)
System design used to be a senior-level interview. It's started showing up at the mid level and even some junior interviews now.
The reason is output. A junior who can drive the model can produce a working feature in a day. But if they can't think about how that feature fits into a system, the feature is a liability. Companies caught on. They started asking architectural questions of candidates two levels earlier than they used to.
You don't have to be an architect to pass — you just have to show you think about systems, not just functions.
5. System design (unchanged)
For senior roles and above, system design didn't move. It's still the round that gates promotions. It's still where the deepest engineering signal lives.
If anything, the bar went up. Interviewers have less patience for hand-wavy answers because the candidates they're seeing have read more system design content than ever. The deep dives matter more. The vocabulary expectations are higher. The discussion goes further into tradeoffs.
If you're interviewing at senior or above, [[question-to-offer]] is the deep dive on this round, mapped to specific companies.
6. The coding round (still here, tests different things)
The coding round didn't go away. It changed.
Some companies still do the closed-laptop, algorithms-on-a-whiteboard version. That's getting rarer. Most now let you use the model in the round, and they grade you on how well you use it. Did you write a precise prompt or a vague one. Did you verify the output. Did you catch the bug the model introduced. Did you read what came back.
The shift: it used to test whether you could write the code. Now it tests whether you can drive the work to a correct result, with whatever tools you have.
7. What got dropped
Memorization-heavy rounds are mostly gone. Reverse a linked list in your head, no IDE. Implement quicksort from memory. The kind of round that punished forgetting and rewarded recent cramming.
Those still exist at some companies, but the trend is away from them. The reasoning: the model knows quicksort. What's scarce isn't recall — it's judgment.
8. The summary
The interview mix shifted toward judgment, specification, verification, and architecture. It shifted away from memorization and from typing-speed-as-proxy-for-competence.