interviewing users book

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition)

Interviewing people is a skill that most professionals who do research assume they already possess. But not everyone knows how to ask questions well. Expert researcher Steve Portigal updates his classic Interviewing Users to provide fresh guidance on interviewing techniques, as well as new content. This edition includes a new foreword by Jamika D. Burge and features two new chapters: one about analysis and synthesis and sharing research results, and another about ensuring that your user research efforts will have an impact on your organization. There are seven new short essays (we call them sidebars) from guest contributors. Plus, you’ll find updated examples, stories, and tips for leading interviews, and new sections about bias, remote research, ResearchOps, planning research, and research logistics. You’ll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.

• Interviewing Addresses a Business Need
• Research Logistics
• Contextual Methods—More Than Just Asking Questions
• The Successful Fieldwork Experience
• Best Practices for Interviewing
• The Intricacies of Asking Questions
• Better Interviews
• Documenting the Interview
• Making Sense of Your Data
• Making an Impact with Your Research
• A guide to participating in fieldwork
• Stakeholder interview guide
• Sample screener
• Sample interview guide
• Observation frameworks
• Observation guide
• Debrief worksheets

Praise for the Book

“Clear and concise with great examples, this is quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies. Whether you’re new to interviewing or have had years of experience, there’s a wealth of information here for you.”

Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

“Steve Portigal is one of my go-to veterans for field research, interviewing users, thoughtful insights, and teaching/coaching others to do this effectively. If you need to interview users, you need this book.”

Rich Mironov, CEO and smokejumper product executive

“Steve Portigal wrote the book on interviewing users, and then he made it even better. What more do you need to know?”

Brendan Jarvis, Facilitator of Human Insights, The Space InBetween

“A complete guide to interviewing that teaches you a considerate, humane, actionable approach to learning from users.”

Aras Bilgen, UX consultant

“As a research leader who has been out of the field for too long, Interviewing Users reminded me of what I once knew, taught me some new approaches, and fired me up to get back out there and do this work of learning about humans with renewed confidence and reverence.”

Robin Beers, PhD, Ubuntu Culture Company

“ Interviewing Users is a straightforward guide to the practice of UX research. Steve also invites the reader into the community of practice of UX research by bringing in writings from other practitioners from across the globe.”

Sam Ladner, PhD, author of Practical Ethnography and Mixed Methods

“ Interviewing Users is a goldmine of knowledge for anyone who wants to effectively conduct user interviews. It’s well-written, engaging, and full of practical advice.”

Tomer Sharon, author of Validating Product Ideas and It’s Our Research

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Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights Kindle Edition

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users , Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries .

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies." —Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you .
• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.
• Print length 276 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Rosenfeld Media
• Publication date October 17, 2023
• File size 55639 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

About the author.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CHBH8W92
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rosenfeld Media; 2nd edition (October 17, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 17, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 55639 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 276 pages
• #22 in User Experience & Usability
• #71 in Web Site Design
• #79 in Computer Graphic Design

About the author

Steve portigal.

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher and consultant who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Over the past 25 years, he has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, film production accountants, hotel maintenance staff, architects, realtors, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and rock musicians. He has informed the development of commercial lighting controls, medical information systems, professional music gear, wine packaging, design systems, work-from-home practices, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and music streaming services.

Steve is the author of two books: Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights, and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an in-demand presenter who gives talks and leads workshops at corporate events and conferences around the world.

He built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today.

After growing up near Toronto, Steve eventually made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area where he’s been for more than 25 years. He lives in the coastal town of Montara with his partner Anne and their silly dog Ripley. Steve loves to travel and eat interesting food and to take pictures of travel and interesting food. He also really loves to nap.

You can find Steve at portigal.com.

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Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights Kindle Edition

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users , Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries .

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies." —Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you .
• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.
• Print length 276 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Rosenfeld Media
• Publication date Oct. 17 2023
• File size 55639 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Product description

About the author.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CHBH8W92
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rosenfeld Media; 2 edition (Oct. 17 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 55639 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 276 pages
• #70 in Website Architecture & Usability (Kindle Store)
• #77 in Counselling Research (Kindle Store)
• #100 in Market Research (Kindle Store)

About the author

Steve portigal.

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher and consultant who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Over the past 25 years, he has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, film production accountants, hotel maintenance staff, architects, realtors, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and rock musicians. He has informed the development of commercial lighting controls, medical information systems, professional music gear, wine packaging, design systems, work-from-home practices, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and music streaming services.

Steve is the author of two books: Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights, and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an in-demand presenter who gives talks and leads workshops at corporate events and conferences around the world.

He built one of the first online communities (Undercover, a Rolling Stones fan group) in 1992, nurturing it from a time when the Internet was an underground academic technology through to today.

After growing up near Toronto, Steve eventually made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area where he’s been for more than 25 years. He lives in the coastal town of Montara with his partner Anne and their silly dog Ripley. Steve loves to travel and eat interesting food and to take pictures of travel and interesting food. He also really loves to nap.

You can find Steve at portigal.com.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

INTERVIEWING USERS

How to uncover compelling insights.

by Steve Portigal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

An extraordinarily thorough and thoughtful introduction to the art of the research interview.

Portigal presents a comprehensive guide to conducting and analyzing user research interviews.

Conducting a professional interview, the author astutely observes, is not the same as casually “chatting”; in fact, a well-structured interview can be “fundamentally different” from an ordinary conversation. “Interviewing users involves a special set of skills. It takes work to develop these skills. The fact that it looks like an everyday act can actually make it harder to learn how to conduct a good interview because it’s easy to take false refuge in existing conversational approaches.” Portigal, who has 25 of years of experience as a researcher and consultant, rigorously anatomizes the chief structural elements of an interview—the formation of a plan, the interviews themselves, and the consequent analysis of the data yielded. The text covers a remarkable expanse of intellectual territory very concisely—the book is less than 300 pages long—especially considering that it includes guest essays from industry experts. With great clarity (the author never indulges gratuitously inaccessible jargon), Portigal walks readers through every constituent part of the interview process, from finding the participants to interpreting their answers. This is more than a technical field guide—the author deftly analyzes the human element of the interview as well, this “shared, unnatural experience” that can produce “something profoundly new” but can also be unsafe, awkward, and hostile. He details how to build a quick rapport with a stranger and empathetically encounter the interviewee as a “real live person in all their glorious complexity.” An effective interview requires more than a “toolkit” for asking questions—it demands a “way of being” that cultivates an undogmatic openness to others. While the focus of the book is on user research interviews, this guide will be helpful to anyone in a position to extract information from others in a professional environment.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9781959029786

Page Count: 276

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2023

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

BUSINESS | SALES & MARKETING | GENERAL BUSINESS

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011

BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY

More by Daniel Kahneman

BOOK REVIEW

by Daniel Kahneman & Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein

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IN THE NEWS

THE CULTURE MAP

Breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business.

by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.

“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014

BUSINESS | PSYCHOLOGY

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Interviewing users: how to uncover compelling insights (paperback).

Description

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it... but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users , Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further-showing the methods and details behind asking questions-from the words themselves to the interviewer's actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it's simply a good read.

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• Paperback (May 1st, 2013): $29.99

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Frequently Asked Questions

These common questions about interviewing users and their short answers are taken from Steve Portigal’s book  Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights . You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

• Why is this even a book? Isn’t this really just talking to people? I already know how to do that! To learn something new requires interviewing, not just chatting. Poor interviews produce inaccurate information that can take your business in the wrong direction. Interviewing is a skill that at times can be fundamentally different than what you do normally in conversation. Great interviewers leverage their natural style of interacting with people but make deliberate, specific choices about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and when to say nothing. Doing this well is hard and takes years of practice. Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to techniques for asking questions.
• Why would we bother to talk to our users? We use our products every single day and know exactly what we need to build. People who make a product think and talk about it fundamentally differently than people who don’t. While both groups may use the same product, their context—understanding, language, expectations, and so on—is completely different. From a user’s point of view, a Big Mac eaten in Moscow is hardly the same product as a Big Mac eaten in San Jose, CA. And neither one is very much like a Big Mac eaten at McDonald’s Hamburger University in Oak Grove, IL. A strong product vision is important, but understanding what that vision means when it leaves your bubble is make-or-break stuff. In Chapter 1, I examine the impact that interviewing has on project teams.
• We don’t have time in our development process to interview our users, so what should we do? Developing insights about users doesn’t always have to be a milestone in a product development process. Insights can be an organizational asset that is assembled quarterly (or whenever) to feed into all aspects of product development, marketing, and so on. Once a baseline is established, subsequent research can enhance and expand that body of knowledge. Within time constraints, I’m constantly impressed by people I meet who are so hungry to bring user information into their work that they find ways to do whatever they can. In Chapter 9, I discuss the trade-offs when time is the constraining resource.
• Which team members should interview users? While more design organizations are staffing a research role, the designated researchers aren’t the only ones who go out and meet customers. I’ve seen many times that as companies buy in to the value of research insights, the researchers shift from struggling for acceptance to being overwhelmed by demand. It’s not unusual to see them scaling up their own teams, working with outside partners, and training their colleagues to be better researchers themselves. Ultimately, who shouldn’t be interviewing users? There will always be a range of strengths in interviewing skills; leading research is a specialized function, but user research is something that everyone can and should participate in. In most cases, this will exclude functions unrelated to key aspects of the business, but given the cultural value of understanding the customer, everyone could be involved in consuming the results of interviewing users, even if they aren’t directly speaking to those users themselves. In Chapter 5, I look at how to manage a team composed of seasoned interviewers and less-savvy colleagues.
• We interviewed users and didn’t learn anything new. How does that happen?  Sometimes it’s perfectly appropriate to validate hypotheses or to confirm the findings from previous research. But often when stakeholders report they didn’t hear anything new, that’s a symptom of something else. Were stakeholders fully involved in planning the research? Did the researchers develop a rich understanding of what these stakeholders already believed and what burning questions they had? Not hearing anything new may be a result of not digging into the research data enough to pull out more nuanced insights. Finally, if customers are still expressing the same needs they’ve expressed before, it begs the question, “Why haven’t you done something about that?” In Chapter 3, I discuss working with stakeholders to establish project objectives.

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Interview Techniques: The Essentials

Publisher description.

Prior to becoming a Career Coach, I spent many years in both the private (City) and public sectors (BBC and NHS) interviewing well over 1500 people for positions at different levels. My belief is that any Interview is a two-way process and is just as much about the Interviewee interviewing the organisation and interviewer, as it is about the interviewer, interviewing the interviewee. This short guide is based on my own experiences and designed to offer you a last-minute or "night before" guide to doing the very best you can at the Interview. Ideally, you will read this guide at least a few days before your interview, giving you time to research your prospective employer. The advice is designed to make sure the role you take is one you will be happy in, that will benefit you in your career and benefit the organisation in its objectives. This book can be used as a workbook and includes exercises at the end of each section as well as spaces for notes. This book contains the following sections Researching your prospective employer Preparing for the Interview Detox your Social Media Get your story straight Telepathy What to Wear Self-Affirmations The Day of the Interview First Impressions of your prospective employer The Interview Second Interviews Video Interviews Learning from the Process

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With chatbots, the tech job interview is now open book. Not everyone is happy.

• Startups and Big Tech companies are divided on using chatbots in technical job interviews.
• Startups are likelier to allow them, while Big Tech companies are fine with the status quo.
• Big Tech's reluctance to change interview processes could influence industry norms.

Two months ago, when my startup-founder husband, Kyle, decided to exit his startup , he started hunting for a product-manager role. Fearing the dreaded technical interview, Kyle hit the books harder than a high-school junior studying for the SAT.

In the world of recruiting software engineers, product managers, and other tech talent, the technical interview is a candidate's first step. It's a coding test done in person or at home using a shared screen designed to test a candidate's grasp of the fundamentals.

Kyle borrowed a friend's copy of "Cracking the Coding Interview" — required reading for tech job hoppers. He spent hours daily leafing through test-prep websites like LeetCode and working through sample questions on ChatGPT. The chatbot served as a tutor, helping him get unstuck on confusing algorithms.

I wondered if candidates could use chatbots in technical interviews, as Kyle had practiced. Software developers are already using these tools to ship better products faster. Was it so taboo for candidates to speed through a test with an assist from ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot?

Being a tech reporter, I asked around. It turns out Silicon Valley is engaged in a raucous debate over the use of artificial intelligence in technical interviews. A survey of two dozen founders, executives, recruiters, and venture capitalists points to wildly different approaches from company to company and a growing divide between early adopters and keepers of the status quo.

"Despite the increased adoption of AI within companies," said Tammy Han, the head of talent at Emergence Capital, "the sentiment around using AI as a tool in technical interviews has not caught up yet."

Those in favor say banning chatbots in technical interviews is like prohibiting calculators in math tests. If employees are permitted to use these tools to write and review their code, the interview should allow chatbots and test a candidate's handling of them.

"You want to see how a candidate operates if they were actually sitting inside your organization," said Santosh Sankar, a managing partner of Dynamo Ventures, a supply-chain and mobility investor. "Would you not want to avail them with all the tools in your organization to test their ability to efficiently and creatively problem solve?"

Depends on who you ask.

Linear, a startup that creates tools for software developers, allows employees to use these tools freely but asks candidates to disable them in their job interviews. "We want to understand what are your skills and capabilities," said Cristina Cordova, Linear's chief operating officer, "without the tool helping you."

Ram Sriharsha, the chief technical officer of Pinecone, an early leader in the vector-database race , says that while it doesn't expressly ban chatbots, it needs to be sure that candidates can solve problems end to end on their own. Zeta, a finance app for couples and families, is decidedly ambivalent. "I actually don't care if they use Copilot," Zeta's cofounder Kevin Hopkins said, "and the reason for that is because I use the same tech every day to do a job I get paid for."

Still, almost everyone I spoke with agreed that the technical-interview process was broken.

Typically an interviewer asks a candidate to write code that solves a puzzle, such as "find the median of two sorted arrays" or "given a phone number, return all possible letter combinations on a keypad that the number could represent."

The problem with these questions is that they can be easily gamed , said Aline Lerner, whose company, Interviewing.io, provides mock interviews with engineers from top companies. "The thing they test for is how much you've memorized more than how much you know," she said.

The internet is awash in forums about the most commonly asked questions. Engineers turn to websites like LeetCode or HackerRank to study the data structures and algorithms they'll be quizzed on.

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The question now is whether chatbots will change the technical interview for better or worse.

The technical interview is open book

People close to the interview process say companies are already changing their tests to prevent cheating. Codility, an app for screening and testing technical talent, created a question bank of chatbot-resistant tasks, while the testing company CoderPad has features that let the interviewer disable copying and pasting and set timers on tasks.

"If you decide to make your technical phone screen open book, the burden is higher on you to come up with a fantastic question," Lerner said.

Yossi Kahlon was a software engineer at Google who conducted hundreds of technical interviews. Now that he's hiring for his own startup, Squid Cloud, he likes to use a brainteaser and an open-ended question to test a candidate's skill in designing real-world software systems. Kahlon said he doesn't mind if a person uses a chatbot so long as they're up front about it.

He also warns candidates he'll go deeper to get at their understanding. For a question asking them to design a software subsystem, he might ask how to balance network traffic across connected servers around the world or which steps to take when the system fails. He expects a quick reply, watching their eyes to discern whether they're reading from a different screen.

Founders are moving in Kahlon's direction. Anvil, an early-stage startup whose software streamlines paperwork , gives candidates a take-home test to design a software system.

"If they are able to use AI to augment their development capabilities, that's great," Anvil's chief executive, Mang-Git Ng, said. "But they still need to be able to explain what the code is doing, which helps us weed out the people that just rely on ChatGPT to write code for them."

Big Tech's reluctance

In Big Tech, companies are so far opting out of chatbots in technical interviews.

The technical interview has long been a way for companies like Meta and Google, which attract millions of job applications a year, to filter candidates early in the process. Lerner said the method caught on because it scaled. Employers with hundreds of engineers, or even tens of thousands, could train them on the same set of questions and assign anyone to conduct an interview.

Plus, it was easy for companies to benchmark results against past candidates, said Amanda Richardson, the chief executive of CoderPad. In the past 12 months, it hosted 1.5 million technical interviews on its platform across companies such as Spotify, LinkedIn, Snowflake, and Shopify.

Richardson said the biggest employers are less likely to shake up their recruiting processes because it's difficult to roll out a change across an entire organization. "The other concern companies have is anytime you change your recruiting process, you lose the predictability of outcomes," she added.

A year ago, CoderPad, which creates a virtual environment where interviewers and candidates can code live together, added a chatbot to its interface. Richardson said only 20% of enterprise customers had enabled the feature, while half of self-serve customers, which include individuals and smaller startups, had turned it on.

Founders take their cues on the design of the interview process from Big Tech. So the industry isn't likely to see the startup masses make the switch until companies like Meta and Google do.

For that to happen, these big companies would have to first update their job descriptions, said Tigran Sloyan, the chief executive of CodeSignal, a testing company with a built-in chatbot for writing code and debugging solutions. "Hiring is a highly regulated space, and you cannot expect somebody to demonstrate a skill unless it's part of the job requirement," Sloyan said.

Fear of missing out

Natan Fisher runs a search firm, SingleSprout, that specializes in hiring technical talent. In the past year, he's seen candidates drop out after learning that a company prohibits using chatbots in interviews.

These anecdotes highlight a growing concern for tech companies. If the interview is emblematic of a company's culture, candidates will rightly or wrongly infer that a ban on chatbots means the company is slow to embrace these tools in day-to-day work.

This seems untrue after speaking to startups. The email app Superhuman doesn't allow chatbots in its technical interview. "Of course, once folks start, we do expect them to use AI to move faster and be more productive," its chief executive, Rahul Vohra, said in an email. Pinecone and Linear are also deeply entrenched in the AI landscape and want to see candidates solve a problem without a chatbot's help.

But the stereotype remains, and some companies will shift their stance on chatbots in interviews to show candidates they're on the cutting edge.

"For the companies that don't adapt, you are going to hurt not only your ability to vet candidates," Fisher said, "but I think the companies that do allow it, they're going to get better talent."

Watch: What is ChatGPT, and should we be afraid of AI chatbots?

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