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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?

#191
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#192

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…

Yeah I've been doing the same. Have been pretty stunned at people's inability to use AI tools effectively.

What does effective use look like? I have attempted messing around with a couple of options, but was always disappointed with the output. How do you properly present a problem to a LLM? Requiring an ongoing conversation feels like a tech priest praying to the machine spirit.

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

#193

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.

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 commu…

Well, cheaters only cheat because they suck and they know it. Otherwise cheat would not be a rational approach.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools. If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating. If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.

> If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff. I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a…

My POV comes from someone who's indexed on what works for gauging technical signal at startups, so take it for what it's worth. But a lot of what I gauge for is a blend of not just technical capability, but the ability to translate that into prudent decisions with product instincts around business outcomes. AI is getting better at solving technical problems it's seen before in a black box, but it struggles to tailor that to any kind of context you give it to pre-existing constraints around user behavior, existing infrastructure/architecture, business domain and resource constraints.

To be fair, many humans do too, but many promising candidates even at the mid-level band of experience who thrive at organizations I've approved them into are able to eventually get to a good enough balance of many tradeoffs (technical and otherwise) with a pretty clean and compact amount of back and forth that demonstrates thoughtfulness, curiosity and efficacy.

If someone can get to that level of capability in a technical interviewing process using AI without it being noticeable, I'd be really excited about the world. I'm not holding my breath for that, though (and having done LOTS of interviews over the past few quarters, it would be a great problem to have).

My solution, if I were to have the luxury of having that problem, would be a pretty blunt instrument -- I'd instead change my process to actually have AI use of tools be part of the interviewing process -- I'd give them a problem to solve, a tuned in-house AI to use in solving the problem, and have their ability to prompt it well, integrate its results, and pressure check its assumptions (and correct its mistakes or artifacts) be part of the interview itself. I'd press to see how creatively they used the tool -- did they figure out a clever way to use it for leverage that I wouldn't have considered before? Extra points for that. Can they use it fluidly and in the heat of a back and forth of an architectural or prototyping session as an extension of how they problem solve? That will likely become a material precondition of being a senior engineer in the future.

I think we're still a few quarters (to a few years) away from that, but it will be an exciting place to get to. But ultimately, whether they're using a tool or not, it's an augment to how they solve problems and not a replacement. If it ever gets to be the latter, I wouldn't worry too much -- you probably won't need to do much hiring because then you'll truly be able to use agentic AI to pre-empt the need for it! But something tells me that day (which people keep telling me will come) will never actually come, and we will always need good engineers as thought partners, and instead it will just raise the bar and differentiation between truly excellent engineers and middle of the pack ones.

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

#198
post #164

To get an idea of just how advanced cheating tools has become, take a look here: https://leetcodewizard.io/ I think every interviewer, hiring manager ought to know or be trained on these tools, your intuition about candidate's behaviour isn't enough. Otherwise, we will soon reach a tipping point where honest candidates will be at a severe disadvantage.

Glad this exists and big +1 to the creator.

"Cheating" on leetcode is a net positive for society. Unironically.

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

#199
post #171
post #164

To get an idea of just how advanced cheating tools has become, take a look here: https://leetcodewizard.io/ I think every interviewer, hiring manager ought to know or be trained on these tools, your intuition about candidate's behaviour isn't enough. Otherwise, we will soon reach a tipping point where honest candidates will be at a severe disadvantage.

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

Yeah, it's just a pity that human stupidity perpetuated leetcode as an interviewing tool to the point that AI had to kill it....

Im really happy it's finally broken though. Dumbest fad our industry ever had.

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

#200
Here where I live, home assignments with the follow-up tech discussion are way more common than the leetcode-like interviews. Therefore, I can't say that the process has already changed dramatically. Yes, I did review a couple of home assignments that had all the signs of being completely AI-generated. But it all became clear during the presentation of the solution, "why"-like questions, and extending the scope of the task to discuss the improvements. If the candidate could answer that, then AI was just a supplementary tool, which is great, as we also use Copilot, ChatGPT, and friends at work. If not, well, it's an obvious rejection.

It happened twice, that the candidate on the other side was clearly typing during the interview, taking a pause for a second or two, and then reading from the screen. That's very obvious as of today, but I can see how it will become a problem one day with the future AI development in terms of the speed of responses, and better voice recognition techniques (so, no typing needed).

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