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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?

#221

Post by NotMichaelBay »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #187
wsintra2022 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?

If you are pretending to have knowledge and skills you don't have you are cheating. And if you have the required knowledge and skill AI is a hindrance, not a help. You can solve the problem easily without it. So "is using ai cheating"? IDK, but logically you wouldn't use AI unless you were cheating.

Knowledge and skill are two different things. Sometimes interviewers test that you know how to do something, when in practice it's irrelevant if you A) know how to retrieve that knowledge and B) know when to retrieve it.

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

#222

Post by Barrin92 »

fragmede wrote: post #7
crazygringo wrote: post #3

Not sure why interviews would change. Even if you're using ChatGPT heavily it's your job to ensure it's right. And you need to know what to ask it. So you still need all the same skills and conceptual understanding as before. I mean, I didn't observe interviews change after powerful IDE's replaced basic text editors.

Because there's a format of interview that's basically a brainteaser that takes 45 minutes to think through and whiteboard some code for, but which is trivially solvable by copy and pasting a screenshot of the prompt into ChatGPT. This amounts to candidates being given the answer and then pretending to struggle with understanding your question and then figuring out a solution to it when really they're just stalling f…

If you're doing this at least face to face over Zoom and you can't tell that someone is copying answers from their second monitor and throwing ChatGPT explanations at you, you honestly need a better interviewer.

I've done a lot of interviews over Zoom, and whenever someone cheats, by passing someone else's work off as their own (the weirdest thing I've ever encountered was someone having a friend on trying to feed them answers, which he admitted to later) it is so painfully obvious if you grill them a bit and throw a few curveballs.

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

#223

Post by blazing234 »

xyst wrote: post #133

If a problem can be “trivially” solved by GPT. The problem is with your interview process, not the tool. It’s wild to me that interviewers still ask candidates for senior positions leetcode type questions. Yet the actual job is for some front end or devops position. The gap between interview and actual on job duties is very wide at many — delusional - companies.

imagine trying to get a job doing CRUD and getting leetcode style questions.

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

#224

Post by ADeerAppeared »

kortilla wrote: post #128
ryandvm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

What you're missing here is that this is an individual's answer to a systemic problem. You don't apply when it's _one_ obnoxious employer.

When it's standard practice across the entire industry, we have a problem.

> submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.

This is already worryingly common practice because employers lie about the required qualifications.

Honesty gets your resume shredded before a human even looked at it. And employers refusing to address that situation is just making everything worse and worse.

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

#225

Post by blazing234 »

Xmd5a wrote: post #84

Shouldn't a portfolio of personal projects be enough ? In the past couple years I: - adapted Java's Regex engine to work on streams of characters - wrote a basic parametric geometry engine - wrote a debugger for an async framework - did innovative work with respect to whole-codebase transformation using macros Among other things. As for ChatGPT in the context of an interview, I'd only use it if I were asked to do cha…

most experienced developers don't have a portfolio because they code for a living lol

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

#226

Post by blazing234 »

nimish wrote: post #94

If your interview process is susceptible to AI then you don't need to hire for the job. Just use an AI and prompt it. The job you are therefore hiring for is now trivial. If it weren't, no amount of AI could pass your interview process.

lol what

this is implying interview process actually showcases someone would be good at a job when it isnt

when has leetcode ever translated to web dev... fuckin never lol.

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

#227

Post by blazing234 »

meter wrote: post #103

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 be…

for the first point you better provide a jira ticket with steps to get there (;

i would just look at stack overflow for your second point lol...

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

#228

Post by guywithahat »

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…

I mean they could be googling things; I’ve definitely googled stuff during an interview. I do think in-person interviews area important though, I did some remote final interviews with Amazon and they were all terrible

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

#229

Post by blazing234 »

iExploder wrote: post #50
jppope wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one

> hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one tightened market is one thing, the absolute insanity of the recruitment process in last couple years with now AI thrown into the mix is really something to behold, test these waters at your own peril

yeah the name of the game now is just to avoid any company that has shitty recruitment. you can tell in an instant if they are worth your time or not, which I'd say in Canada is about 90% a waste of time.

someone who actually wants to hire will want you and wants to do whatever they can to get a good candidate.

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

#230

Post by nsxwolf »

H8crilA wrote: post #160
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to be paid though. What do I care about the terms of the interview as long as they hire me? What is being suggested here is not participating in the mind numbing process that is called ‘applying for a job’.

Wanting to be paid under false pretenses is the definition of fraud.

That doesn’t make any sense. The best engineers I know can’t pass these interviews because they started working long before they became standard.
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