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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?

#121

Post by northern-lights »

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…

> You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

This was the norm until perhaps for about the last 10-15 years of Software Engineering.

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

#122

Post by randall »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #63

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc. So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So…

i like this. it seems like a good and honest use of time.

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

#123

Post by crooked-v »

_puk wrote: post #65
ktallett wrote: post #11

The key is having interviewers that know what they are talking about so in-depth meandering discussions can be had regarding personal and work projects which usually makes it clear whether the applicant knows what they are talking about. Leetcode was only ever a temporary interview technique, and this 'AI' prominence in the public domain has simply sped up it's demise.

This completely.. You ask a rote question and you'll get a rote answer while the interviewee is busy looking at a fixed point on the screen. You then ask a pointed question about something they know or care about, and suddenly their face lights up, they're animated, and they are looking around. It's a huge tell.

You know, this makes me wonder if a viable remote interview technique, at least until real-time deepfaking gets better, would be to have people close their eyes while talking to them. For somebody who knows their stuff it'll have zero impact; for someone relying entirely on GPT, it will completely derail them.

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

#124

Post by OutOfHere »

evilduck wrote: post #69
OutOfHere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's pretty obvious when someone's input focus changes to nothing or when their mouse leaves the screen entirely, or you could just ask to see the display settings to begin. Doesn't solve for multiple computers but it's pretty obvious in real time when someone's actual attention drifts or they suddenly have abilities they didn't have before. Either way, screen sharing beats whiteboards. Even if we throw our hands up…

There is nothing fraudulent about using LLMs. If people can use them on the job, it's okay to use them on the interview. They're the calculators of tomorrow if not of today.

Interviewing just needs to adapt such as by assessing one's open source projects and contributions. Not much more is needed. And if the candidate completely misrepresents their open source profile, this can be handled by an initial contract-to-hire period.

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

#125

Post by crooked-v »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #13

Changed enormously. Both resumes and interviews are effectively useless now. If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for then you aren't ever going to hear from us. If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

> a portfolio of original work

I'm too busy doing actual paid work for companies for that.

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

#126

Post by Keyframe »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #63

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc. So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So…

same thing here. Interview is basically a representative thing of what we do, but also depends on the level of seniority. I ask people just to share the screen with me and use whatever you want / fell comfortable with. Google, ChatGPT, call your mom, I don't care as long as you walk me through how you're approaching the thing at hand. We've all googled tar xvcxfgzxfzcsadc, what's that permission for .pem is it 400, etc.. no shame in anything and we all use all of the things through day. Let's simulate a small task at hand and see where we end up at. Similarly, there is a bias where people leaning more on LLMs doing worse than those just googling or, gasp, opening documentation.

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

#127

Post by layer8 »

shaneoh wrote: post #68
ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job. It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried…

Did you tell them that you “want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job”? Just curious.

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

#128

Post by kortilla »

ryandvm wrote: post #114
mr_00ff00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, I kind of feel like leetcode interviews are a situation where the employer is cheating. I mean, you're admittedly filtering out a great number of acceptable candidates knowing that if you just find 1 in a 1000, that'll be good enough. It is patently unfair to the individuals that are smart enough to do your work, but poor at some farcical representation of the work. That is cheating. In my opinion, if a…

The employer sets the terms of the interview. If you don’t like them, don’t apply.

What you’re suggesting here isn’t any different than submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.

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

#129

Post by rachofsunshine »

We haven't seen major issues with AI with candidates on camera. The couple that have tried to cheat have done so rather obviously, and the problem we use is more about problem-solving than it is about reverse-a-linked-list.

This is borne out by results downstream with clients. No client we've sent more than a couple of people has ever had concerns about quality, so we're fairly confident that we are in fact detecting the cheating that is happening with reasonable consistency.

I actually just looked at our data a few days ago to see how candidates who listed LLMs or related terms on their resume did on our interview. On average, they did much worse (about half the pass rate, and double the hard-fail rate). I suspect this is a general "corporate BS factor" and not anything about LLMs specifically, but it's certainly relevant.

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

#130

Post by crooked-v »

danielbln wrote: post #15
ktallett wrote: post #11

The key is having interviewers that know what they are talking about so in-depth meandering discussions can be had regarding personal and work projects which usually makes it clear whether the applicant knows what they are talking about. Leetcode was only ever a temporary interview technique, and this 'AI' prominence in the public domain has simply sped up it's demise.

This is the way. We do an intro call, an engineering chat (exactly as you describe), a coding challenge and 2 team chat sessions in person. At the end of that, we usually have a good feeling about how sharp the candidate is, of they like to learn and discover new things, what their work ethic is. It's not bullet proof, but it removes a lot of noise from the signal. The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with A…

> as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right

Frankly, if an interviewer told me this, I would genuinely wonder why what they're building is such a simple toy product that an LLM can understand it well enough to be productive.

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