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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?

#281

Post by johnnyanmac »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #147
z3t4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those tests I never follow the rules, I just make something quick and dirty because I refuse to spend unpaid hours. In the interview the first question is why I didnt follow the instructions, and they think my reason is fair. Companies seem to think that we program just for fun and ask to make a full blown app... also underestimating the time candidates actually spend making it.

If you’re spending the time applying and submitting something then you might as well spend the extra 30 minutes or so to do it right, no?

It's never been 30 minutes for me. Even leetcode timed exams tended to be 60-90 minutes.

recently I spent a good 10 hours making a crossword solver. Hiring freeze a few days after I turned it in. I completely get GP's mentality.

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

#282

Post by strken »

ADeerAppeared wrote: post #224
kortilla wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Honesty gets your resume shredded before a human even looked at it

Does it? Mine is honest, fairly normal, and gets me through to interviews fine. What are common lies and why are they necessary?

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

#283

Post by 1attice »

alexjplant wrote: post #263
csense wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No this all tracks. Matches my own experience.

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

#284

Post by johnnyanmac »

dahart wrote: post #240
nsxwolf wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eff…

>but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company.

Can you really blame them? If you're not a houshold name, why would you expect someone to spend hours researching your specific company?

On the other hand, it can come off as creepy if your a small company and suddenly someone nerds out about how your CEO said this one thing at a talk years ago and knows your lead has cancer based on his personal blog. I'd rather just treat it as a transaction of my skills and services for money. We are not a family (multiple layoffs have taught me so)

> it’s effective and worthwhile to spend more time curating higher quality samples than to scatter and hope.

Not in this market. Too many ghost jobs, too many people ghosting after multiple rounds. Too many hiring freezes when you spend a month talking with a company. If you want respect from candidates, don't disrespect them.

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

#285

Post by johnnyanmac »

paxys wrote: post #175
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…

> it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it Remember that you are only catching the candidates who are bad at cheating.

That's fine. The ones who are "good cheaters" are probably smarter than many honest people. Think about those school days where your smartest peers were cheating anyway, despite teaching you organically earlier on. Those kinds of cheaters do it to turn an A into an A+, not because they don't understand the material.

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

#286

Post by _sword »

Even before LLMs were popularized, the shift to remote work made hiring awful in my experience. In finance roles, I had candidates who aced their tests and projects but then showed up to the job unable to competently use excel or write coherent sentences in English. Phone / zoom interviews all went fine, but clearly there was rampant cheating during remote projects.

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

#287

Post by DustinBrett »

alexjplant wrote: post #259
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…

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…

I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR's with AI code are so obvious and when you ask the devs why, they don't even know. They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.

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

#288

Post by johnnyanmac »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #271
dahart wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 I admire this worldview, and wish for it to be true, but I can't help but see it in conflict with much of what floats around these parts. There's a recent thread on Aider where the authors' proudly proclaim that ~80% of code is written by Aider itself. I've no idea what…

>I admire this worldview, and wish for it to be true, but I can't help but see it in conflict with much of what floats around these parts.

Honest interviewers may not realize how dishonest other interviewers became in such recent times (2-3 years ago). Interviewing today compared to COVID times is night and day. Let alone the 10's Gold Rush.

The respect is long gone.

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

#289

Post by DustinBrett »

"when problems are trivially solvable by GPT" only the fake leet code ones that were never really what you'd do at work anyway. Sadly that is what people are giving devs in interviews.

Screen share to avoid cheating via AI, same as we were doing before AI when people could get friends or Google to help them cheat.

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

#290

Post by tzury »

Google. StackOverflow. ChatGPT/Claude et al. Those are all tools. Tools of the craft, so a professional candidate should be using it proficiently.

How good one is in understanding a problem (the scope and source), and how good are they at designing a solution that is simple, yet will tackle other "upcoming" problems (configurable vs hard coded, etc).

This is what one should care about.

* StackOverflow early days raised the same question, and so were Google. trust me. I am old enough to remember this.

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