Curious about "no-AI" policy. From my experience interviewing lately AI is allowed,but the task is usually big in a small time window. So you quickly spin up the project but I see most of work in QA
It's a dangerous line to cross.
An interview is a two way street. I'd like the company to present itself authentically so that I don't waste time if they eventually turn out to have a culture I don't like, e.g. demanding LLM coding assistent use.
Game dev is... different. Game devs fancy themselves more as artists, and using generative AI is an affront to those sensibilities.
Are these huge productivity gains in the room with us now?
LLM-assisted coding makes the easy stuff quick and the hard stuff impossible. But I was spending 80% of my mental energy on the hard stuff anyway, and the easy stuff was down time that's closer to rest than it is to work.
That is not remotely true. It's not clear to me that there is a consensus, but if anything people are more skeptical than favorable of AI in my experience. And even those who favor AI don't make stark declarations such as "you're not really an engineer if you don't use it", instead accepting that their colleagues have a difference of opinion.
I have heard this exact statement with this exact phrasing from working engineers. When it comes to CEOs and the like, making public pronouncements alongside yes-you-will-be-graded-on-this AI mandates, it's couched in softer terms, like "as a technical company we must use these advanced technologies to maximize productivity and increase our market advantage", but the subtext is still clear: AI refuseniks are not doing their work properly and are irresponsible on the job.
Among the investor set there is a much clearer consensus: if the organization does not use AI they are not maximizing ROI and are being fiscally irresponsible.
Even if you are primarily using codegen, your own coding ability, taste, problem solving, etc. are still deciding inputs to the quality of the final result. And it’s much easier to assess these things in an hour when a human is writing and debugging a relatively small amount of code.
AI tools just produce too much code in a short time. It’s hard to assess what the candidate’s quality bar and attention to detail are really like when there’s so much code to wade through. Anyone can vibe code, but not many can do it without creating mountains of tech debt… the ones who can are usually good programmers with or without AI.