Security is treated as a critical priority in modern software organizations. It appears in roadmaps, compliance documents, architectural reviews, and post-incident reports. Yet there is one place where security is still largely invisible: the hiring pipeline.
Most engineering teams invest heavily in security tools, audits, and policies, yet devote little effort to evaluating whether new hires can write secure code. The assumption is simple and widespread. Secure coding can be taught later. What matters during hiring is speed, problem-solving ability, and technical breadth. Security, somehow, will follow. That assumption is wrong and increasingly dangerous.
In practice, hiring pipelines prioritize what is easiest to test and compare. Candidates are evaluated on syntax familiarity, algorithmic reasoning, framework usage, and high-level system design. These signals are convenient and scalable, but they reveal little about how developers reason about trust, failure, and misuse. Security understanding is treated as implicit knowledge, something candidates are expected to absorb over time. This gap is widening as AI-assisted development becomes the norm, shifting developers from writing code line by line to reviewing, adapting, and approving logic generated by AI tools.
Hiring is the first architectural decision a company makes. When secure coding ability is excluded from that decision, insecurity is embedded into the system before the first line of production code is written. The result is a growing disconnect between what organizations claim to value and what they actually select for during recruitment.
Secure Coding Is Hard to Test
Modern hiring pipelines are optimized for efficiency rather than signal quality. This is not the result of negligence or bad intent. It is a structural outcome of how hiring processes are designed to scale.
Secure coding ability does not fit neatly into standardized interviews. It is contextual and situational, and it is resistant to simple scoring. Evaluating it requires discussion, judgment, and a willingness to explore ambiguity. That makes it expensive in both time and attention, especially under pressure to hire quickly.
Secure coding becomes a secondary concern, as interviews prioritize what is easy to measure over what truly matters in production. Yet secure coding is not a checklist skill. It is a way of thinking.
Strong secure coding requires anticipating how code could be misused, understanding how data flows across trust boundaries, recognizing how errors propagate or fail silently, and reasoning carefully about defaults, assumptions, and edge cases.
These qualities do not surface in trivia questions, typical JavaScript interview questions, or time-boxed coding challenges. They appear when developers are asked to explain why something is safe rather than just how it works.
Because secure coding ability does not produce a single correct answer, it is often excluded from interviews entirely. Hiring teams prefer deterministic evaluation, even if it selects for the wrong attributes.
Security Cannot Be Added
A common justification for ignoring secure coding during hiring is the belief that security can be taught after onboarding. This view underestimates how strongly early development decisions shape a system.
Developers write foundational code at the start of a project, including authentication logic, authorization boundaries, or error-handling patterns. These decisions become implicit assumptions that future code builds on.
When security reasoning is missing at this stage, the problem is not a single vulnerability but a structural weakness. Retrofitting security later requires reworking core logic, not just fixing isolated bugs. That effort is costly, slow, and often resisted because it challenges existing design choices.
So, security debt begins as a mindset issue rather than a technical one. If developers are hired without the ability to reason about risk, those gaps propagate through the codebase. By the time security teams engage, insecurity is already embedded into the system.
Another reason secure coding is ignored in hiring is the belief that it is the domain of security specialists rather than developers. Security teams can guide and review, but they cannot write or maintain every critical code path.
Secure coding is not a separate role. It is a baseline engineering competency. When hiring pipelines fail to evaluate it, risk is pushed downstream, and security teams are left compensating for gaps that could have been avoided at the point of entry.
Finally, security tooling is essential, but it is not sufficient. SAST and DAST are effective at detecting known patterns, yet they cannot understand intent, context, or business logic. They cannot determine whether a trust boundary was correctly identified or whether a fallback behavior is actually safe.
That reasoning belongs to developers, even when the code itself is produced by AI systems. Secure coding depends on recognizing assumptions, understanding who controls inputs, and judging what happens when expected conditions break. No tool can perform this reasoning on a developer’s behalf. When organizations rely on security tools to compensate for missing reasoning skills, they create a false sense of safety.
What Secure Coding Ability Actually Looks Like
Secure coding ability is often mistaken for familiarity with vulnerability lists, standards, or security tooling. In practice, as I mentioned above, it is a reasoning skill. It reflects how a developer thinks about uncertainty, not how many security terms they recognize.
Developers with strong secure coding skills can articulate why a piece of code is safe. They can identify where trust changes within a system and explain the implications of those transitions. When reviewing logic, they naturally consider how the code might behave outside its intended use.
Just as important, they are comfortable making tradeoffs explicit. Rather than hiding uncertainty behind confidence or tooling, they surface assumptions and explain the risks those assumptions introduce. When something is unclear, they explore the consequences rather than guess. In AI-assisted workflows, this ability becomes even more critical because developers are often asked to approve, modify, or deploy logic they did not originally design.
Rethinking Hiring
Evaluating secure coding ability does not require turning interviews into security exams or asking candidates to enumerate vulnerabilities. The goal is not to test security knowledge in isolation, but to observe how candidates reason when correctness, risk, and uncertainty intersect.
One effective shift is moving interviews away from producing the right solution and toward examining imperfect ones. Presenting a small, flawed code sample and asking how a candidate would review it reveals far more than asking them to build something from scratch. What matters is not whether they immediately identify a specific issue, but how they reason about assumptions, trust boundaries, and failure paths. This mirrors the modern AI-assisted development, where the primary skill is not generation but judgment.
In practice, engineers who can be trusted with secure production code tend to demonstrate these behaviors:
- They can articulate why code behaves safely under certain conditions, not merely confirm that it works.
- Instead of treating defaults as safe, they question what the code assumes about inputs, users, and execution context.
- When something is unclear, they slow down, explore implications, and ask clarifying questions rather than guessing.
- They can describe what they would secure first, what they would defer, and why those choices make sense under real constraints.
From a business perspective, this approach scales better than security-heavy interviews. It does not require specialist interviewers or long assessments. It requires interviewers to listen for reasoning rather than speed or confidence. Over time, this aligns hiring with the realities of operating and protecting software and systems, rather than with abstract notions of technical brilliance.
Final Thoughts
Modern software systems fail less often due to missing tools than to misplaced confidence. When understanding is assumed instead of examined, risk becomes invisible. Hiring decisions quietly decide where that invisibility will surface.
Secure coding ability is ultimately about judgment: knowing when something is safe enough, when it is not, and when the right answer is to pause rather than proceed. That judgment cannot be automated, delegated to AI, or retrofitted. It only exists if it is present from the beginning.
Organizations that treat hiring as a throughput problem will continue to accumulate fragile systems. Those that treat it as a trust decision will build software that can withstand change, pressure, and uncertainty. Security does not begin with defenses. It begins with discernment.
