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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?

#291

Post by lubujackson »

nkrisc wrote: post #264
rahimnathwani wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kids at my tiny high school football team did steroids to get an edge - no chance at a scholarship, either.

Different people have a different threshold for cheating no matter the stakes. I imagine some people vheat even if they know the answer - just to be sure.

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

#293

Post by johnnyanmac »

pdimitar wrote: post #64
vunderba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-1…

Iroincally I'd probably have more github projects if I didn't spend 20 months looking for a full-time job.

And tbh, at the senior level they rarely care about personal projects. I must have had 60+ interviews and I feel a lack of a github cost me maybe 2 positions. When you job is getting a job, you rarely have the time for passion.I'm doing contract work in the meantime; prevents gaps from showing, more appealing than a personal project, and I can talk about that to the extent of my NDA (plenty of tech to talk about without revealing the project)

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

#294

Post by sureIy »

alpha_squared wrote: post #91
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…

We do the same thing. It's perfectly fine for candidates to use AI-assistive tooling provided that they can edit/maintain the code and not just sit in a prompt the whole time. The heavier a candidate relies on LLMs, the worse they often do. It really comes down to discipline.

Discipline for what?

To me it's the lack of skill. If the LLM spits out junk you should be able to tell. ChatGPT-based interviews could work just as well to determine the ability to understand, review and fix code effectively.

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

#295

Post by sdesol »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #215
BowBun wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience as well. The ones that have most heavily relied on GPT not only didn't really know what to ask, but couldn't reason about the outputs at all since it was frequently new information to them. Good candidates use it like a search engine - filling known gaps.

I don't really can't imagine being it usefull in the way where it writes logical part of the code for you. If you are not being lousy you still need to think about all the edge cases when it generates the code which seems harder for me.

> you are not being lousy you still need to think about all the edge cases

This is honestly where I believe LLMs can really shine. I think we like to believe the problems we are solving are unique, but I strongly believe most of us are solving problems that have already been solved. What I've found is, if you provide the LLM with enough information, it will surface edge cases that you haven't thought of and implement logic in your code that you haven't thought of.

I'm currently using LLMs to build my file drag and drop component for my chat app. You can view the problem and solution statement at https://beta.gitsense.com/?chat=da8fcd73-6b99-43d6-8ec0-b1ce...

By chatting with the LLM, I created four user stories that I never thought of to improve user experience and security. I don't necessarily think it is about knowing the edge cases, but rather it is about knowing how to describe the problem and your solution. If you can do that, LLMs can really help you surface edge cases and help you write logic.

Obviously what I am working on, is really not novel, but I think a lot of the stuff we are doing isn't that novel, if we can properly break it down.

So for interviews that allow LLMs, I would honestly spend 5 minutes chatting with it to create a problem and solution statement. I'm sure if you can properly articulate the problem, the LLM can help you devise a solution and a plan.

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

#296

Post by codeyperson »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #192
CSMastermind wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've been doing the same. Have been pretty stunned at people's inability to use AI tools effectively.

What does effective use look like? I have attempted messing around with a couple of options, but was always disappointed with the output. How do you properly present a problem to a LLM? Requiring an ongoing conversation feels like a tech priest praying to the machine spirit.

High level - having a discussion with the LLM about different approaches and the tradeoffs between each

Low level - I'll write up the structure of what I want in the form of a set functions with defined inputs and outputs but without the implementation detail. If I care about any specifics with the functions I'll throw some comments in there. And sometimes I'll define the data structures in advance as well.

Once all this is set up it often spits out something that compiles and works first try. And all the context is established so iteration from that point becomes easier.

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

#297

Post by johnnyanmac »

shihab wrote: post #204
paxys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? Every alternative I can think of is either worse, or sounds nice but impractical to implement in practice at scale. I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class…

>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads?

They are juniors, I don't expect them to be experts, I expect eagerness and passion. They spent 4 or more years focusing on schooling, show me the results of your projects. Let them talk and see how well they understand what they did. Side projects are even better to stand out.

And you know... apparently people can still fail fizzbuzz in 2025. If you really question their ability to code, ask the basics, not if they can write a Sudoku verifier on the spot. If you aren't a sudoku game studio I don't see the application outside of "can they work with arrays?"

>I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with.

everyone has a different style. Personally I care a lot less about programming proficiency and a lot more about technical communication. If they only wrote 10 lines of code for a group project but can explain every aspect of the project as if they written it themselves, what am I really missing? The odds of that sort of technical reaspning being accompanied by poor coding is a lot rarer than the alternative of a Leetcode wizard who can't grasp architectural concept nor adjust to software tooling, in my experiences.

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

#298

Post by cuuupid »

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…

So far 3 of the 11 people we interviewed have been clearly using ChatGPT for the >>behavioralWe actually allow using AI in our in-person technical interviews, but our questions are worded to fail safety checks. We'll talk about smuggling nuclear weapons, violent uprising, staging a coup, manufacturing fentanyl, etc. (within the context of system design) and that gives us really good mileage on weeding out those who are just transcribing what we say into AI and reading the response.

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

#299

Post by jppope »

blazing234 wrote: post #229
iExploder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Realistically its just the blind leading the blind. People have forgotten that a interview process was designed to avoid false positives, and that the companies who were most selective were providing top 1% comp and had brands that could carry that weight. If you are google and you were handing $500K in RSUs on top of $300K+ in salary, you better damn pick the right candidate...

For some random SMB in shipping or something to be bashing people over the head with 10 step-leetcode-full-panel-10-hour-systems-design interviews they just don't get it. For starters they probably don't even have the talent to properly evaluate the prospect. So who are they helping?

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

#300

Post by Madmallard »

blazing234 wrote: post #225
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

I don't really think this is true? This might be true for developers that only work for companies and never in their own time maybe.

My portfolio site is just one of the sites on my personal website that also hosts many of my projects. It wasn't much work to setup, and it provides organization and sharing capability so there's motivation to make it anyways.

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