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Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

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21–30 of 31 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#21
post #4

This would be like asking a carpenter to build you something without a hammer. At this point we need to realize LLM is a tool like everything else. Maybe give them a LLM challenge - how to do X. What is your prompt. Why?

LLM's are absolutely not a hammer. LLM's are an Ikea shelf in a box. You're not a carpenter because you can assemble one.

We'll leave aside the argument of whether or not a carpenter would rather buy a cheap Ikea shelf than build one in some situations, but it's also applicable to this analogy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#22
post #8

Just ask the candidate whether if they have contributed to relevant large open-source projects in the language you are looking for. If not, then give them a hard leetcode question. All you have to do for this hard Leetcode puzzle is to ask the candidate to complete it in Rust. ChatGPT will struggle to help the candidate as it generates garbage. After they have completed it then for the second technical interview, que…

Contribution to OS projects would allow us to bypass this screen altogether, but great point.

Haha we might have to switch to Rust just to ease our interviewing woes here - we're primarily a PHP/Laravel shop, and have tried to be as charitable as possible to candidates by allowing them to program in the language they're strongest in. Perhaps we need to change that.

The screen we're doing is meant to filter out the frauds/imposters and so far has a 100% success rate, but unfortunately we've caught three out of the last three people who have made it to that point. It's become a huge waste of time.

Maybe we just need to curate candidates from OS contributors to prevent this, or something of that nature.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#23
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screen we are performing here is a basic "can you program" type of evaluation. We've run into a number of people with seemingly-decent resumes (several positions as engineers at reputable albeit non-FAANG companies like insurers or e-commerce firms) who have struggled to complete basic tasks like the Pascal's Triangle question mentioned above. The intent here is to toss them a couple of softballs that they should…

Your questions are pointless. I have no interest in CS puzzles at all, I don't memorize or practice them, and that's what you're testing for. I write code to build stuff. Why not have a conversation with them about things they have built instead? Not form questions that say "tell us about a time you encountered a problem you had to solve" but an actual conversation. Like... an interview.

This screen is after the "walk us through your resume, explain what you've built" conversation, where we ask them about specific challenges, decisions they made, etc.

Everyone who has made it to this screen has already spoken to us about their previous work and at least seemed to have some skill in their general area of programming.

What we're testing for doesn't need to be memorized or practiced. Anyone who can program for money should be able to do things like FizzBuzz, repeat the pattern in Pascal's Triangle with a for loop, or come up with a basic strategy to eliminate non-primes.

Even if you blow the part of the interview where you need to identify prime/not-prime, as long as you show us that you have a process you're fine.

Maybe we just suck at or are too charitable when it comes to processing what candidates have claimed to have done - I'm unsure.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is generally what we do and what raised our suspicions in the first place - they both could "walk us through" their code, but had trouble explaining why they did certain things, how they could improve things, etc. We thought that the approach you've outlined would generally be good enough, and has led us to catch instances where people are leaning heavily on LLMs, but our issue now is that everyone appears to be…

You could try to give a challenge that has a few hidden gotchas, and discard candidates that do not spot them. How to do this depends on the role you are hiring for. For example, in our data scientist interviews we also candidates to analyze datasets with imbalanced classes, outliers, correlated samples, etc. Correctly dealing with these issues requires particular techniques, and most importantly the candidate has to…

I like this - a huge part of our engineering work is ETL pipelines so giving them some data to process makes things a lot harder to fake.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screen we are performing here is a basic "can you program" type of evaluation. We've run into a number of people with seemingly-decent resumes (several positions as engineers at reputable albeit non-FAANG companies like insurers or e-commerce firms) who have struggled to complete basic tasks like the Pascal's Triangle question mentioned above. The intent here is to toss them a couple of softballs that they should…

Your questions are pointless. I have no interest in CS puzzles at all, I don't memorize or practice them, and that's what you're testing for. I write code to build stuff. Why not have a conversation with them about things they have built instead? Not form questions that say "tell us about a time you encountered a problem you had to solve" but an actual conversation. Like... an interview.

Would you hire someone who can't solve fizz buzz without a LLM? Are we being for real here? Fizz Buzz tests the absolute basics of understanding control flow.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your questions are pointless. I have no interest in CS puzzles at all, I don't memorize or practice them, and that's what you're testing for. I write code to build stuff. Why not have a conversation with them about things they have built instead? Not form questions that say "tell us about a time you encountered a problem you had to solve" but an actual conversation. Like... an interview.

Would you hire someone who can't solve fizz buzz without a LLM? Are we being for real here? Fizz Buzz tests the absolute basics of understanding control flow.

No, I wouldn't waste either of our time asking that question.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your questions are pointless. I have no interest in CS puzzles at all, I don't memorize or practice them, and that's what you're testing for. I write code to build stuff. Why not have a conversation with them about things they have built instead? Not form questions that say "tell us about a time you encountered a problem you had to solve" but an actual conversation. Like... an interview.

Would you hire someone who can't solve fizz buzz without a LLM? Are we being for real here? Fizz Buzz tests the absolute basics of understanding control flow.

Here is the thing though. Solving "FizzBuzz" is trivial if you happen to know how to do it. Same with "Pascal's Triangle" or many LeetCode style interview questions.

Solving either, particularly the latter when you don't "know" the test and are under pressure is not trivial. I have been in interviews for Ph.D. candidates who when asked simple questions like "Why do you want a Ph.D?" suddenly can't even remember how to speak English let alone explain why they want the advanced degree.

FizzBuzz is kind of a trap. If you don't know it, it seems like it would be easy to try nested if statements as candidates want to write efficient code and can fall into the trap of not wanting to repeat a test for 3 or they try a test for 3 then 5 then 15 before realizing that the easiest solution is three properly ordered if statements and that there is no "elegant" way to solve this trivial problem.

In fact, i work every day with data scientists who write perfect classification code and generate complex statistical models who would likely struggle to write FizzBuzz on the whiteboard in front of the entire team.

I hate interview questions like these and struggle to connect them to performance. If one must test then give a small project (something that might take me 30 mins to an hour) and ask the candidate to complete it at their own pace and publish their work in progress to a git repo. Can they solve the problem (even if they used google and/or an LLM)? Are their commits in meaningful units of work? Can I read their code in a review? Did they ask for proper clarification when uncertain? Do they have tests?

I find this much more salient than FizzBuzz.

Re: Ask HN: How do you guard against ChatGPT use in technical interviews?

#30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you hire someone who can't solve fizz buzz without a LLM? Are we being for real here? Fizz Buzz tests the absolute basics of understanding control flow.

Here is the thing though. Solving "FizzBuzz" is trivial if you happen to know how to do it. Same with "Pascal's Triangle" or many LeetCode style interview questions. Solving either, particularly the latter when you don't "know" the test and are under pressure is not trivial. I have been in interviews for Ph.D. candidates who when asked simple questions like "Why do you want a Ph.D?" suddenly can't even remember how t…

The only prior knowledge FizzBuzz requires is the first few weeks of an introduction to programming.
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