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Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
31–40 of 735 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#32I've been very curious about this and about how we should modify our hiring. Its obvious that an individual should be able to use AI companions to build better, faster, higher quality things... But the skillsets are sooo uneven now that its unfair to those who are with and without.
I think it ultimately comes back to impact (like always) which has remained largely unchanged.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with AI. We can no longer afford not to use LLMs for engineering, as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right, so candidates should show how they use LLMs. They need to be able to explain the code of course, and answer questions about it, but for us it's a negative mark of a candidate proclaims that they don't use LLMs. Do you state this upfront or is it s…
I would say as long as it is stated you can complete the coding exercise using any tool available it is fine. I do agree, no task should be a trick. I am personally of the view you should be able to use search engines, AI, anything you want, as the task should be representative of doing the task in person. The key focus has to be the programmer's knowledge and why they did what they did.
One client of mine has a couple repositories for non-mission critical things like their fork of an open source project, decommissioned microservices, a SVG generator for their web front-end, etc.
They also take this approach of "whatever tool works," but their coding test is "here's some symptoms of the SVG generator misbehaving, figure out what happened and fix it," which requires digging into the commit history, issues, actually looking at the SVG output, etc.
Once you've figured out how the system architecture works, and the most likely component to be causing the problem, you have to convert part of the code to use a newer, undocumented API exposed by a RPC server that speaks a serialization format that no LLM has ever seen before. Doing this is actually way faster and accurate using an AI, if you know how to centaur with it and make sure the output is tested to be correct.
This is a much more representative test of how someone's going to handle doing actual work knocking issues out.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#34Name of the game now is not to get fired at all costs and weather the storm until the dust settles...
hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#35My 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 don't care how you're good at it so long as I can watch.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#36Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate. Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful res…
This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.
Doesn't even have to be a project per se, if they can discuss some sort of technical topic in depth (i.e. the sort of discussion you might have when discussing potential solutions to a problem) then that's a great sign imo.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#37I haven't done any hiring in a while, but my feelings on the matter:
If they can talk through the technology and code fluently, honestly, I don't care how they do the work. Honestly I feel like the ability to communicate is a far more important skill than the precise technology.
This is of course presumes you have a clue about the technology you're hiring for.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#38I 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, but if you know you know.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with AI. We can no longer afford not to use LLMs for engineering, as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right, so candidates should show how they use LLMs. They need to be able to explain the code of course, and answer questions about it, but for us it's a negative mark of a candidate proclaims that they don't use LLMs. Do you state this upfront or is it s…
I would say as long as it is stated you can complete the coding exercise using any tool available it is fine. I do agree, no task should be a trick. I am personally of the view you should be able to use search engines, AI, anything you want, as the task should be representative of doing the task in person. The key focus has to be the programmer's knowledge and why they did what they did.
Reminds me of the old joke/story where the Caltech student asks, "Can we use Feynman in this open-book exam?"
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#40I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate.
The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.