>- What are interviews like these days?

Big tech is pretty standard. You have to be impressive enough for a callback, then a possible tech screen where you write code in coderpad or something, then some combination of coding, behavioral, and architectural interviews almost always done virtually.

lots of people practice on leetcode, I recommend everyone at least practice the common easier questions and solving them quickly. The medium and hard ones are worth the investment if you're going for big tech, but maybe less important for startups that all have their own style of interviews (that vary quite a bit).

Startups and no name medium sized companies can be random. Some have collaborative coding, some copy big tech, some just talk to you, some look at portfolio projects or give take home assignments, anything and everything here.

> How important is it to have a visable portfolio of working projects?

Much less important than having recognizable names on the resume, and also less important than having contributions to known Open Source projects.

I highly recommend putting time into existing well known projects (Apache, anything done from Meta/facebook/Google etc), and trying to get a PR accepted, than hacking away on your own project.

Every senior in college has an extensive portfolio of projects on their github, it's very hard to tell how much was copied or how good it is.

A much better signal is someone who can deal with the intricacies of an existing gargantuan codebase, go back and forth in PR comments, follow a style guide, work with maintainers, take criticism, have clear communication, and see something through (That may take a while!).

> How much of the AI hype is HN nerds nerding out about AI versus actually implementing AI, versus gluing AI apis together?

Eh, for me, AI has been amazing at teaching me a new PL, and porting small bits of code.

It's been helpful for writing unit tests, getting scaffolding going, etc. but sometimes incomplete.

It's been on rare occasions able to solve a bug for me.

that's about it. YMMV.

Source - no degree, senior engineer at Google. Also spent 10+ years working at shit companies and doing open source before getting a chance at bigger more well known companies, then doing that for ~8 until I could work my way into getting FAANG interviews.