Job interview for a tech company has always been an arms race. With the LLM boom, it’s even worse. Candidates are trying to use AI assistant to cheat. Companies make interviews even more tiresome and difficult.

But there’s a better way to approach this.

I had an interview for a Go Developer position, recently. The interview was just one hour long and contained three sections:

• Short introduction
• Live coding
• Follow-up questions

The introduction was quite brief from interviewer’s side. I followed the pattern and skipped all the unnecessary details, announcing just high-level overview of my background and current position.

Live coding is always the hard part, isn’t it? But not this time. Interviewer said, “You can use all the tools you use on a day-to-day basis”. Nice! I launched Cursor with an AI subscription enabled. I was given a simple HTTP server to handle a JSON payload and return a summary (less than 100 lines, including comments). My task was to implement the missing part of the logic to calculate summary for the response. Most of the coding was done by tabbing through code suggestions. I commented thoroughly throughout the process, explaining what was going on and why I agreed or disagreed with the AI suggestions.

The follow-up questions were around AI tools I use and how they help me.

Overall, that was my best interview experience ever. I’m not sure if it will become a trend, but I hope so.

Sun Aug 31, 2025 / 241 words / Job Interview Motivation