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Sargun Kaur

Founder & CEO @ Byteboard | Forbes 30u30 | ex-Google SWE

Sargun Kaur is a prominent figure in the technology sector, recognized for her innovative contributions to the hiring process through her company, Byteboard. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Byteboard, a platform designed to enhance technical interviews by focusing on candidates' abilities rather than their backgrounds or privileges. This approach aims to create a more equitable hiring process by utilizing identity-blind software that assesses engineering skills through practical projects.13

Kaur's professional journey includes significant experience at Google, where she worked from September 2014 until October 2021 in various roles, including Engineering Manager and Software Engineer. Her work at Google culminated in the development of Byteboard within Area 120, Google's internal incubator, before it was spun out as an independent company in October 2021.24

Her efforts and leadership have earned her a spot on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the Enterprise Technology category since December 2019, highlighting her impact on the tech industry and her commitment to improving the technical interview process.34

Highlights

Mar 1 · linkedin

There's been a lot of talk about AI assisted tools like github copilot and chatGPT and their place in technical hiring. Are technical interviews dead because of them? Should candidates be allowed to use these tools?

At Byteboard, we've certainly been witness to this conversation and it's impact first-hand. There is no doubt these tools are changing the way engineers work and the types of skills they need to do their job.

You can have ChatGPT output a dozen reasonable lines of code for a problem in seconds, which may have taken a human hours to write. But as the complexity of the problem increases, so does the frequency of ChatGPT’s mistakes, as well as the level of expertise it takes to recognize them.

In other words, a poor software engineer can use ChatGPT to quickly produce software systems that appear well-built, but contain significant flaws. But a strong software engineer can use ChatGPT to quickly produce software systems that are well-built.

And until now, in order to assess a candidate’s technical ability, organizations have relied heavily on coding challenges: isolated, complex algorithms in response to a clearly-defined prompt. Those were never great anyways--engineers don’t work in a vacuum nor with such clearly defined requirements.

But now, we have another reason not to like them: these problems are exactly the sort of tasks that ChatGPT is able to easily solve on its own. ChatGPT performs very well on tasks with strictly-defined prompts, clear boundaries, and singular solutions.

“Find the shortest palindrome in a given string” is easy for ChatGPT. “Given our existing codebase, revise our song recommendation algorithm to increase exploration and engagement for new users without upsetting power users too much” is hard for ChatGPT.

To us, the real issue with asking engineers to solve problems that are easy for ChatGPT is not that it makes it easy for engineers to “cheat” by using ChatGPT. The real issue is that being able to answer those sorts of questions is not what makes someone a good software engineer.

A good engineer is someone who can perform real-world tasks, not someone who can write complex algorithms in isolation. ChatGPT is just accelerating our collective understanding of what was already true: algorithmic challenges are poor assessments for the expertise and skills required of a software engineer.

Eventually, we expect AI tools to become like Google and Stack Overflow–a resource that everyone is expected to use to do their job most effectively. At Byteboard, our project-based assessment tools have been built with that future in mind.

You can read more about this and how we’re approaching technical assessments in the age of AI in our blog post https://lnkd.in/gez54y9i

PS: If you’re curious about Byteboard and want to see a demo DM me or you can reach our team here https://byteboard.dev/demo

#ai #hiring #jobs #interviewing #engineers

Related Questions

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Sargun Kaur
Sargun Kaur, photo 1
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New York, New York, United States