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Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#101

Post by gray_-_wolf »

acwan93 wrote: post #83
buggy6257 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way. This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response. ...Christ.

Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates. Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eye…

> typeface change

Long live plain text email.

    ()  ascii ribbon campaign - against HTML e-mail 
    /\  www.asciiribbon.org   - against proprietary attachments

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#102

Post by themanmaran »

On our side we've transitioned to only in person interviews.

The biggest thing I've noticed is take home challenges have lost all value. Since GPT can plausibly solve almost anything you throw at it, and it doesn't give you any indication of how the candidate thinks.

And to be fair, I want a candidate that uses GPT / Cursor / whatever tools get the job done. But reading the same AI solution to a coding challenge doesn't tell me anything about how they think or approach problems.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#103

Post by meter »

For the time being, I’ve banned LLMs in my interviews.

I want to see how the candidate reasons about code. So I try to ask practical questions and treat them like pairing sessions.

- Given a broke piece of code, can you find the bug and get it working?

- Implement a basic password generator, similar to 1Password (with optional characters and symbols)

If you can reason about code without an LLM, then you’ll do even better with an LLM. At least, that’s my theory.

I never ask trick questions. I never pull from Leetcode. I hardly care about time complexity. Just show me you can reason about code. And if you make some mistakes, I won’t judge you.

I’m trying to be as fair as possible.

I do understand that LLMs are part of our lives now. So I’m trying to explore ways to integrate them into the interview. But I need more time to ponder.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#104

Post by z3t4 »

wccrawford wrote: post #77
twoparachute45 wrote: post #70

My company, a very very large company, is transitioning back to only in-person interviews due to the rampant amount of cheating happening during interviews. As an interviewer, it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it, when you can very obviously hear them typing, then watching their eyes move as they read an answer from another screen. And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect an…

When I was interviewing entry level programmers at my last job, we gave them an assignment that should only take a few hours, but we basically didn't care about the code at all. Instead, we were looking to see if they followed instructions, and if they left anything out. I never had a chance to test it out, since we hadn't hired anyone new in so long, but ChatGPT/etc would almost always fail this exam because of how…

For those tests I never follow the rules, I just make something quick and dirty because I refuse to spend unpaid hours. In the interview the first question is why I didnt follow the instructions, and they think my reason is fair.

Companies seem to think that we program just for fun and ask to make a full blown app... also underestimating the time candidates actually spend making it.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#105

Post by b112 »

le-mark wrote: post #56
b112 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called fraud, and it is a crime. People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past. If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse. People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time. So you create an interview process that can only be…

Can you cite case law around where some one misrepresented their capabilities in a job interview and were criminally prosecuted? Like what criminal statute specifically was charged? You won’t find it, because at worst this would fall under a contract dispute and hence civil law. Screeching “fraud is a crime” hysterically serves no one.

Fraud can be described as deceit to profit in some way. You may note the rigidity of the process above, where I indicated a defined set of conditions.

It costs employers money to on board someone, not just in pay, but in other employees training that person. Obviously the case must be clear cut, but I've personally hired someone who clearly cheated during the remote phone interview, and literally couldn't even code a function in any language in person.

There are people with absolutely no background as a coder, applying to jobs with 5 years experience, then fraudulently misrepresenting the work of others at their own, to get the job.

That's fraud.

As I said, it's not being prosecuted as such now. But if this keeps up?

You can bet it will be.

Because it is fraud.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#106

Post by sonofhans »

gray_-_wolf wrote: post #101
acwan93 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates. Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eye…

> typeface change Long live plain text email. () ascii ribbon campaign - against HTML e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments

Preach it.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#107

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

nouveaux wrote: post #62
lolinder wrote: post #52

The traditional tech interview was always designed to optimize for reliably finding someone who was willing to do what they were told even if it feels like busywork. As a rule someone who has the time and the motivation to brush up on an essentially useless skill in order to pass your job interview will likely fit nicely as a cog in your machine. AI doesn't just change the interviewing game by making it easy to cheat…

Have you spent a lot of time trying to hire people? I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees. This perspective smells completely like "If I were in charge, things would be so much better." Guess what? If you were to take your idea and try to lead this change across a 100 people engineering org, there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your…

> I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

The council itself is made of "busywork" worker bees. Slave hiring slaves - the vast majority of IT interviewers and candidates are idiot savants - they know very little outside of IT, or even realize that there is more to life than IT.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#108

Post by ghaff »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #99
twoparachute45 wrote: post #70

My company, a very very large company, is transitioning back to only in-person interviews due to the rampant amount of cheating happening during interviews. As an interviewer, it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it, when you can very obviously hear them typing, then watching their eyes move as they read an answer from another screen. And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect an…

So depressing to hear that “because of rampant cheating” As a person looking for a job, I’m really not sure what to do. If people are lying on their resumes and cheating in interviews, it feels like there’s nothing I can do except do the same. Otherwise I’ll remain jobless. But to this day I haven’t done either.

Note also "And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect anyway."

I haven't looked for development-related jobs this millennium, but it's unclear to me how effective a crutch AI is for interviews--at least for well-designed and run interviews. Maybe in some narrow domains for junior people.

As a few of us have written elsewhere, I consider not having in-person interviews past an initial screen sheer laziness and companies generally deserve whoever they end up with.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#109

Post by _lvbh »

Run competitions. If you're hiring fresh grads, this is probably the best way to filter by skill. If you can use AI to beat all the other candidates that's a skill by itself. In practice, those that use AI rarely ever make it into the top 10. Add a presentation/demo as part of the criteria to filter out those with bad communication skills.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#110

Post by zitterbewegung »

I listened in to someone interviewing people since many people used AI. It's the same with googling the answer it is very obvious that someone is taking too long to get to the answer and or you can't see a separate screen. Mitigation is literally looking at the text window and seeing if they are not typing / taking too long to even make a bad implementation. There is now a problem if you allow for google since google will autogen a gemini query to solve it.
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