> aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them
I’m assuming “unable” means not complete lack of knowledge how to approach it, but lack of detail knowledge. E.g. a junior likely remembers some $algorithm in detail (from all the recent grind), while a senior may no longer do so but only know that it exists, what properties it has (when to use, when to not use), and how to look it up.
If you don’t think of something regularly, memory of that fades away, becomes just a vague remembrance, and you eventually lose that knowledge - that’s just how we are.
However, consider that not doing junior-level tasks means it was unnecessary for the position and the position was about doing something else. It’s literally a matter of specialization and nomenclature mismatch: “junior” and “senior” are frequently not different levels of same skill set, but somewhat different skill sets. A simple test: if at your place you have juniors - check if they do the same tasks as seniors do, or if they’re doing something different.
Plus the title inflation - demand shifts and title-catching culture had messed up the nomenclature.
I don’t test rote algorithmic knowledge in our coding tests. Candidates can pick their language
Candidates can ask for help, and can google/llm as well if they can’t recall methods. I just do not allow them to post the whole problem in an LLM and need to see them solve through the problem themselves to see how they think and approach issues.
This therefore also requires they know the language that they picked to do simple tasks , including iterating iterables
That’s weird. Any senior developer worth their salt surely should know that LLMs produce a lot of weird nonsense with one-shot prompts, so they need to talk design first, then code the implementation.
This said, IMHO one-shot is worth a try because it’s typically cheap nowadays - but if it’s not good (or, for interview reasons, unavailable) any developer should have the skills to break the problem down and iterate on it, especially if all learning/memory-refreshing resources are so available. That’s the skill that every engineer should have.
I guess I must take my words back - if that’s how nowadays “seniors” are then I don’t know what’s going on. My only guess is that you must’ve met a bunch of scammers/pretenders who don’t know anything but trying to pass for a developer.
> including iterating iterables
I would've chosen a language without iterators, what would you do then??
It doesn’t need to explicitly be an iterable. But can you loop through an array as part of the problem solve.
That sounds really hard, you can only hope to solve that with AI. /s
Good luck, sounds like a fair hiring process.