The company had just hired a senior full-stack engineer. Six years of experience. Top-tier interview scores across the board — the kind of signal that makes a hiring team feel good about itself.
The first week did what interviews so rarely do: it checked the work. The new hire could not resolve a basic Git merge conflict. Not a subtle architectural debate, not a disagreement over abstractions — a merge conflict, the everyday plumbing of the job.
The explanation arrived soon enough. The live-coding round, the one that produced those excellent scores, had been run by an AI proxy. The candidate who aced the interview was not entirely the candidate who showed up for week one.
Which is the quietly unnerving part: the process was not undone by a bad question or a ghosted recruiter. It was certified end-to-end. Six years of filters, a live-coding gauntlet, a hire — all of it validating someone who could not merge a branch. The interview did not fail to catch it. The interview produced it.