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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?

#261

Post by ehnto »

t-writescode wrote: post #168
sergioisidoro wrote: post #63

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…

I imagine most of the things that would be good uses for seniors in AI aren't great uses for a coding interview anyway. "Oh, I don't remember how to do parameterized testing in junit, okay, I'll just copy-paste like crazy, or make a big for-loop in this single test case" "Oh, I don't remember the API call for this one thing, okay, I'll just chat with the interviewer, maybe they remember - or I'll just say 'this funct…

> Things more complicated than that that need exact answers shouldn't exist in an interview.

Agreed, testing for arcane knowledge is pointless in a world where information lookup is instant, and we now have AI librarians at our fingertips.

Critical thinking, capacity to ingest and process new information, fast logic processing, software fundamentals and ability to communicate are attributes I would test for.

An exception though is proving their claimed experience, you can usually tease that out with specifics about the tools.

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

#262

Post by locusofself »

blazing234 wrote: post #223
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.

That is the world we live in from my experience. This is one of the reasons I decide to switch to management at 40 years old earlier this year - If I lose my job I don't really want to be grinding leetcode.

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

#263

Post by alexjplant »

csense wrote: post #260
alexjplant wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier this past week I asked Copilot to generate some Golang tests and it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub. I had to explicitly ask it to generate idiomatic tests and even then it still didn't test all of the parameters that it should have. At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with m…

> an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday That's...oddly specific.

I'm only 33 and I've worked with at least two of 'em. They're a type :-D

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

#264

Post by nkrisc »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #236
dkga wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's different. These candidates are not trying to get an edge on qualifying for the top dev position in the entire world.

Top athletes do it because they're essentially at the limits of human performance and those drugs are the only edge they can reasonably get.

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

#265

Post by locusofself »

kittikitti wrote: post #38

I tell everyone to share their entire screen, have their video on, and start coding. It's not that different. Even as an interviewer, I experimented with the usual cheating techniques so I know what to look out for. The best are the AI teleprompters. If you can do the work with your own AI then I see no need to care as the business will not care either. The story is completely different for airgapped dark room jobs,…

I'm curious what you mean by this as someone who has worked in a SCIF for years. What I've found (and I personally benefited from this) is that interviews are far more forgiving for people who have security clearances, because of the comparatively tiny available talent pool. AWS, Azure etc allow people to join as "SRE" (a bastardized term at this point) or "Cloud Engineer" and later switch to SWE pretty easily.

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

#267

Post by nkrisc »

ryandvm wrote: post #114
mr_00ff00 wrote: post #99

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.

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…

> 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.

On the other hand, if you have 1,000 candidates, and you only need 1, why not do it if the top candidate selected by this method can do well on the test and your work?

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

#268

Post by yieldcrv »

ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

> I would have no problem with them using GPT/Copilot in addition to all that, as long as it's clear how they're solving it.

Too many people are the opposite that I would literally never tell you

And this works.

what can we do to help that?

I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged as well.

but so many casual tirades against it dont make me want to ever try being forthcoming. most organizations are realistically going to be 10 years behind the curve on this

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

#269

Post by titanomachy »

hnisoss wrote: post #245
chowells wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yea but I also suck in 95% of FAANG like interviews since I'm very bad at leetcode medium/hard type of questions. It's just something that I never practiced. It's very tempting at this point to trow in my towel and just use some aid. No one cares about my intense career and the millions I helped my clients earn, all that matters (and sometimes directly affects comp rate) is how I do on the "coding task".

> I suck in FAANG interviews... it's just something I never practiced.

Well, sounds like you know the solution. Or set your sights on a job that interviews a different way.

I think it's mostly leetcode "easy", anyway. Maybe some medium. Never seen a hard, except maybe from one smartass at Google (they were not expecting a perfect answer). Out of a dozen technical interviews, I don't think I've ever needed to know a data structure more exotic than a hash map or binary search tree.

The amount of deliberate practice required to stand out is probably not more than 10-20 hours, assuming you do actually have the programming and CS skills expected for a FAANG job. It's unlikely you need to do months of grinding.

If 20 hours of work was all that stood between me and half a million dollars a year, I'd consider myself pretty lucky.

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