Meta advised staff that it’s going to permit some coding job candidates to make use of an AI assistant in the course of the interview course of, in response to inside Meta communications seen by 404 Media. The corporate has additionally requested current staff to volunteer for a “mock AI-enabled interview,” the messages say.
It’s the most recent indication that Silicon Valley giants are pushing software program engineers to make use of AI of their jobs, and it indicators a broader transfer towards hiring staff who can vibecode as a part of their jobs.
“AI-Enabled Interviews—Name for Mock Candidates,” a publish from earlier this month on an inside Meta message board reads. “Meta is growing a brand new kind of coding interview during which candidates have entry to an AI assistant. That is extra consultant of the developer atmosphere that our future staff will work in, and in addition makes LLM-based dishonest much less efficient.”
“We want mock candidates,” the publish continues. “If you need to expertise a mock AI-enabled interview, please join on this sheet. The questions are nonetheless in improvement; knowledge from you’ll assist form the way forward for interviewing at Meta.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made clear at quite a few all-hands and in public podcast interviews that he’s not simply pushing the corporate’s software program engineers in direction of utilizing AI of their work, however that he foresees human beings managing “AI coding brokers” that can write code for the corporate.
“I believe this 12 months, in all probability in 2025, we at Meta in addition to the opposite corporations which are principally engaged on this, are going to have an AI that may successfully be a midlevel engineer that you’ve got at your organization that may write code,” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in January. “Over time we’ll get to a degree the place a number of the code in our apps and together with the AI that we generate is definitely going to be constructed by AI engineers as a substitute of individuals engineers … Sooner or later persons are going to be a lot extra inventive, they usually’re going to be freed as much as do form of loopy issues.”
In April, Zuckerberg expanded on this barely on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, the place he mentioned that “someday within the subsequent 12 to 18 months, we’ll attain the purpose the place many of the code that’s going in direction of [AI] efforts is written by AI.”
Whereas it’s true that many tech corporations have pushed software program engineers to make use of AI of their work, they’ve been slower to permit new candidates to make use of AI in the course of the interview course of. In reality, Anthropic, which makes the AI instrument Claude, has particularly advised job candidates that they cannot use AI during the interview process. To bypass that kind of ban, some AI instruments promise to permit candidates to secretly use AI during coding interviews. The subject, normally, has been a controversial one in Silicon Valley. Established software program engineers fear that the following batch of coders will probably be extra AI “prompters” and “vibecoders” than software program engineers, and that they might not know easy methods to troubleshoot AI-written code when one thing goes incorrect.
“We’re clearly targeted on utilizing AI to assist engineers with their day-to-day work, so it ought to be no shock that we’re testing easy methods to present these instruments to candidates throughout interviews,” a Meta spokesperson advised 404 Media.