With AI making traditional coding problems trivial, tech interviews are shifting toward practical, real-world challenges, system design, and debugging exercises rather than pure algorithm puzzles. Some companies are revisiting in-person whiteboarding to assess thought processes, while others embrace AI, evaluating how candidates integrate it into their workflow. There's also a greater focus on explaining decisions, trade-offs, and collaboration. Instead of banning AI, many employers now test how effectively candidates use it while ensuring they have foundational skills. The trend favors assessing problem-solving in real work scenarios rather than just coding ability under artificial constraints.
Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
141–150 of 735 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#142My company actually encourages the use of AI. My interview process was one relatively complex take home, an explanation of my solutions and thinking, then a live "onsite" (via zoom) where I had to code in front of a senior engineer while thinking aloud.
If I was incompetent, I could've shoved the problem into o1 on ChatGPT and probably solved the problems, but I wouldn't have been able to provide insight into why I made the design choices I made and how I optimized my solutions, and that would've ultimately gotten me thrown out of the candidate pool.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#143This conversation feels bizarrely tone deaf. The skill of being able to recall specific knowledge on demand is going away. How LLMs will evaluate a skill they are making obsolete is a question I am not sure I understand.
That is exactly what this thread is discussing.
(You hardly needed a throwaway for this comment, though)
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#144My 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.
Here's the thing: 95% of cheaters still suck, even when cheating. Its hard to imagine how people can perform so badly while cheating, yet they consistently do. All you need to do to stand out is not be utterly awful. Worrying about what other people are doing is more detrimental to your performance than anything else is. Just focus on yourself: being broadly competent, knowing your niche well, and being good at communicating how you learn when you hit the edges of your knowledge. Those are the skills that always stand out.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#145Earlier 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…
I dunno why there is always the assumption in these threads that leetcode is being used. My company has never used leetcode-style questions, and likely never will.
I work in security, and our questions are pretty basic stuff. "What is cross-site scripting, and how would you protect against it?", "You're tasked with parsing a log file to return the IP addresses that appear at least 10 times, how would you approach this?" Stuff like that. And then a follow-up or two customized to the candidate's response.
I really don't know how we could possibly make it easier for candidates to pass these interviews. We aren't trying to trick people, or weed people out. We're trying to find people that have the foundational experience required to do the job they're being hired for. Even when people do answer them incorrectly, we try to help them out and give them guidance, because it's really about trying to evaluate how a person thinks rather than making sure they get the right answer.
I mean hell, it's not like I'm spending hours interviewing people because I get my rocks off by asking people lame questions or rejecting people; I want to hire people! I will go out of my way to advocate for hiring someone that's honest and upfront about being incorrect or not knowing an answer, but wants to think through it with me.
But cheating? That's a show stopper. If you've been asked to not use ChatGPT, but you use it anyway, you're not getting the benefit of the doubt. You're getting rejected and blacklisted.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#146My 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…
Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you’re spending the time applying and submitting something then you might as well spend the extra 30 minutes or so to do it right, no?
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#148I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate. The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.
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.
A friend of mine works with industrial machines, and once was tasked with translating machine's user's manual, even though he doesn't speak English. I do, and I had some free time, so I helped him. As an example, I was given user manual for a different, but similar machine.
1. The manual was mostly a bunch of phrases that were grammatically correct, but didn't really convey much meaning
2. The second half of the manual talked about a different machine than the first half
3. It was full of exceptionally bad mistranslations, and to this day "trained signaturee of the employee" is our inside joke
Imagine asking ChatGPT to write a manual except ChatGPT has down syndrome and a heart attack so it gives you five pages of complete bullshit. That was real manual that got shipped a 100 000€ or so machine. And nobody bothered to proofread it even once.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#149My 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…
Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?
I guess its more of a question if you can solve the problem without AI.
In most interview tasks you are not solving the task “with” ai.
Its AI who solves the task while you watch it do it.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-hi…
I agree that there's nothing fraudulent with using a tool you would use on the job when you are interviewing. But in no way are LLMs equivalent to calculators. Calculators actually give the correct answer reliably, unlike LLMs. A sporadically reliable tool is worse than no tool at all.