RIP Tech Interviews, Oxy Will Not Miss You

At SageOx we believe the technical skills you earned in the B.C. era — Before Claude — are only loosely correlated with success in the A.D. era. The whiteboard algorithm, the four-hour system-design ritual, the take-home graded on idioms a model now writes for free: cargo cults, every one of them — going the way of bloodletting, a practice we performed with total confidence for two thousand years before anyone bothered to check whether it worked.

So we don't run technical interviews. Like Steve Yegge — who poured one out for the technical interview after 35 years of giving them — we believe in work-trials. Come build with us for a week. Ship something real, alongside the team, in the way the team actually works.

Every single engineer we've invited to a trial in 2026 would have been a confident HIRE under the methods I trusted my entire career. Résumé, references, a sharp interview loop — by every old instrument, each of them was a yes. And these weren't methods I held lightly: Ryan and I were Bar Raisers in the Amazon era Steve writes about — we ran the loops, calibrated the bar, held the veto on hires. So I want to be precise about what I'm claiming, because it is not that the people who don't join us fall short — the uncomfortable part is that my most calibrated judgment said yes to all of them.

We've run six trials. Two clicked. If those instruments were any good, that number should be close to six. The gap between what they predicted and what the week actually revealed is the whole subject of this post.

The Instruments Were Always Broken

Daniel Kahneman named the bias that keeps the technical interview alive. He called it the illusion of validity. Evaluating Israeli Army officer candidates, he and his colleagues made confident predictions about who would lead — and the predictions were worthless against what the recruits actually did. The eerie part wasn't the failure. It was that knowing about the failure didn't dent their confidence:

The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not.

That's every hiring instrument I've ever used. They feel predictive. They produce a confident HIRE. And the confidence survives even when the prediction misses, because we almost never get to watch the counterfactual.

What Six Trials Taught Us

The real surprise was how fast the fit revealed itself — in both directions — usually before anyone had to say a word.

Twice it was an obvious, mutual yes within days. Galex and Emory each clicked into the way we work so naturally that the "decision" had basically made itself by mid-week — for them as much as for us. You could watch the energy compounding. Nobody felt evaluated; we were just building, and it was plainly working.

Other times the week pointed the other way, just as clearly — sometimes that was the candidate's read, and once or twice it was ours. One engineer realized on the morning of day two that this wasn't the world she wanted to be in right now, and said so — clear-eyed, no drama, gone by lunch. Another wrote to me after his week, and his note has stayed with me:

I loved the week with the team and had a lot of cool moments building things and seeing what the team is able to ship in a crazy short time — this was eye opening. We're in a new world. It's going to change the way I build forever. So thank you for the chance to watch you work.

...it's such a different way of working that I can't leverage what I've learned/experienced in my career and that feels like too big a change.

There is no failure anywhere in that. He showed up in good faith, gave real energy, shipped real code, and read his own fit honestly — which is exactly what the week is for. I wrote back: "no harm, no foul." From our first conversation I'd told him these are revolutionary times and the only way to get a read on them is to do exactly what he did — try things out. That's the kind of no a real week of work produces: graceful, mutual, and more informative for both sides.

The trial isn't a filter we apply to people. It's a shared experience that lets everyone — us included — feel the fit instead of guessing at it.

The Wooden Racket Problem

It helps to remember that the reluctance is rational. In the late 1970s tennis was switching from wood to oversize graphite, and the players who legitimized the new frames were not the champions. Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe stayed on wood long after better rackets existed. It was Pam Shriver — sixteen, unseeded, swinging a Prince oversize — who reached the 1978 US Open final and showed the rest of the sport what the new equipment could do. Researchers who later modeled the racket industry found this was the rule, not the exception: challengers adopt the disruption first; the incumbents, with the most invested in the old technique, adopt last.

That's Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma in tennis whites, and the incumbent isn't foolish — he's rationally defending a winning position. A well-paid software engineer in 2026 is holding a beautifully strung wooden racket. "I can't leverage what I've learned and that feels like too big a change" is the dilemma stated perfectly — and it's a real cost that only the person holding the racket can price.

So we don't ask anyone to be braver than the moment deserves. We just offer a low-stakes week to actually swing the new racket and feel how it sits in the hand. Some people light up. Some don't. Both are useful answers.

"Let's Sit Out 2026"

There's a quieter version of the same instinct: things are changing too fast — let it settle, and I'll re-enter when the dust does.

Here's what I worry about. This is a cognitive revolution, and revolutions like this tend to compound. The gap between someone building with agents every day and someone watching from the sidelines may not hold steady while you wait — my fear is that it widens, with every model release. Sitting out feels conservative. I suspect it's closer to the riskiest move on the board, because as best I can tell the longer you wait the harder the catch-up, not easier. I could be wrong about how steep the slope is. I'd be surprised if I'm wrong about the direction.

We Ran the Trial on Ourselves

I'm not asking anyone to do something Ryan and I didn't do first. From May to December 2025 — eight months — the two of us interned. No pay, no benefits, no title. We'd had long careers; we threw ourselves back into the deep end to feel the new way of working in our hands instead of reading about it. We had two or three colleagues at the time who looked at that and saw something well outside their comfort zone. They weren't wrong about the discomfort.

The obvious objection: sure, but you're founders — you had the upside to justify five unpaid months. Completely fair. We're not pretending our stint and an employee's are the same bet, and that asymmetry is exactly why we'd never ask a hire for five months of anything. The ask is a single, bounded week — small enough to be reasonable for someone with a job and a mortgage, long enough to feel whether the work lights you up.

What that stretch taught me — or what I think it taught me, on a sample of two and change — is that the trait that seems to predict who thrives in the A.D. era isn't seniority or pedigree. My best guess is that it's an appetite for novelty and ingenuity for their own sake.

Proposed Trial Criteria

These are a draft — a work in progress like everything else here — and the goal is plain: get to a better conversion than two in six. Some of them already earn their keep before a trial ever starts, by helping people self-select out or by shaping who we invite in the first place.

Be Claude Pilled. By June 2026, this is a must, not a nice-to-have. If agentic coding isn't already part of your daily practice, a week with us will be a firehose.
Has spent real time in our product. Not a glance — actually poked at it.
A prior track record of excellence. We all know what that looks like.
Evidence of a pioneer spirit. Doesn't default to the beaten path; willing to take calculated risks — in work, and in life.
Willing to come in and cook with us for 3–5 days. In person, shoulder to shoulder. That's the trial.

I expect this list to be wrong in places and to keep changing. But it's a start, and it's honest about what we're actually selecting for.

The technical interview had a long run. Rest in peace — Oxy will not miss you.

Curious whether the SageOx way fits you? We're hiring our first ten. hi@sageox.ai.