Andrew Hatch, Cisco ThousandEyes
AI tools are now living in your interview loop, reducing once rigorous SRE coding interviews to something solved by an LLM in seconds. Remote interviewing only makes cheating easier, harder to detect and System Design interviews are fast-following as tools grow in sophistication
In 2025, ThousandEyes collided with this reality. AI-assisted cheating, broken coding rounds, requiring us to pivot to take-home challenges that test thinking, not just output. This talk will discuss interviewing and the emerging threat these tools are leading us to a new dawn of Taylorism, albeit wrapped in cheerful Agentic/LLM chatter (as opposed to checklists and a stopwatch), reducing skilled engineers to mindless prompt operators, eroding expertise, lowering morale and, fragile systems and codebases drowning in a sea of AI slop.
Weaving humor, critque and lived experience this talk will encourage debate on what we are hiring for in this new era of our industry
Andrew Hatch is an engineering leader and SRE manager at Cisco ThousandEyes, with over 25 years in the technology industry across Australia, India, and the United States. He moved to the Bay Area in 2020 to join LinkedIn as an SRE Manager before taking up his current role at ThousandEyes. His work spans software engineering, consulting, operations, and building SRE and platform teams for large-scale systems. Andrew has previously spoken at SREcon on learning from complex systems and the realities of SRE management, and continues to explore how organisations can hire, lead, and learn more effectively in an AI-augmented world
author = {Andrew Hatch},
title = {Ghosts in the Interview Loop and Avoiding {AI} Taylorism},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
