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’.
If you lie about your qualifications to a degree that can be considered fraud, employers can and will sue you for their money back and damages. Wait till you discover how mind-numbing the American legal system is!
Not if you’re applying to hundreds, or thousands of jobs. Unless you know someone, it’s a quantity game.
I’ve screened a lot of resumes and given a lot of interviews over the years, and it’s usually obvious when people are trying the scattershot approach, they just don’t match. I feel like treating it like a quantity game is unlikely to improve your odds, and tbh spamming out hundreds or thousands of applications sounds like a miserable way to spend time. You could spend that time meeting and talking to people. I’ve nev…
It wouldn’t be obvious they’re using a scattershot approach when they’re a good match, though. I don’t see the downside.
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…
> what you need now is someone with high creative potential and great teamwork skills. That’s exactly what we always needed, long before LLMs arrived. That’s why all the interviews I’ve seen or give already were designed to have conversations. I’m agreeing with you, but I’ve never seen these ‘interchangeable cog’ interviews you’re talking about.
Right, I agree. The leetcode interviews are a bad fit for almost every company—they only made sense in the Googles and Microsofts that invented them and actually did want to optimize for cogs.
Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?
Interviews aren’t about solving problems. The interviewer isn’t interested in a problem’s solution, they’re interested in seeing how you get to the answer. They’re about trying to find out if you’ll be a good hire, which notably includes whether you’re willing and interested in spending effort learning. They already know how to use AI, they don’t need you for that. They want to know that you’ll contribute to the team…
Isnt one of the ways of solving the problem using all the tools at your disposal? If at the end of the day, isnt having working code the fundamental goal?
I guess you could argue that the code needs to be efficient, stable, and secure. But if you could use "AI" to get part way there, then use smarts to finish it off. Isnt that reasonable? (Devils advocate)
The other big question is the legality of using code from an AI in a final commercial product.
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…
It took a while for googling during interviews to be accepted
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.
If that were true we would never hear of top level athletes using performance enhancing drugs.
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.
> Wanting to be paid under false pretenses is the definition of fraud.
What? No, it isn't.
Regardless, if the job requirements state "X years of XYZ experience" and you have to have >X years of experience, then using AI to look up how to do a leetcode problem for some algorithm you haven't used since your university days is absolutely not "false pretenses" nor fraud.
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.
I don't approve of cheating but I think you're underestimating how hard some interview questions can be. Even competent people don't know everything and could draw a blank, in which case they would benefit from cheating despite being competent.
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, t…
I’ve screened a lot of resumes and given a lot of interviews over the years, and it’s usually obvious when people are trying the scattershot approach, they just don’t match. I feel like treating it like a quantity game is unlikely to improve your odds, and tbh spamming out hundreds or thousands of applications sounds like a miserable way to spend time. You could spend that time meeting and talking to people. I’ve nev…
It wouldn’t be obvious they’re using a scattershot approach when they’re a good match, though. I don’t see the downside.
Maybe not at the resume screening phase, but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company. Some people get lucky, sure, but the downside is that you have to get lucky, it’s wasting valuable time on low probability events. If you’re familiar with the statistical process of importance sampling, in my experience on both sides of the interview table, it’s effective and worthwhile to spend more time curating higher quality samples than to scatter and hope.