AI Broke Data Engineering Interviews. Nobody Knows What's Next.

I've been on both sides of the data engineering hiring table for years. I've written interview loops, failed interview loops, and watched candidates ace screens that told me absolutely nothing about whether they could debug a silent data loss bug at 2am. The signal was always thin. Now it's basically noise. Here's the situation in 2026: 64% of companies ban AI in interviews. Candidates use it anyway. One company measured 80% of candidates using LLMs on take-home tests despite explicit prohibitio