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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?

#301

Post by nimish »

blazing234 wrote: post #226
nimish wrote: post #94

If your interview process is susceptible to AI then you don't need to hire for the job. Just use an AI and prompt it. The job you are therefore hiring for is now trivial. If it weren't, no amount of AI could pass your interview process.

lol what this is implying interview process actually showcases someone would be good at a job when it isnt when has leetcode ever translated to web dev... fuckin never lol.

My point exactly.

Why do you let your interview process for web devs use leetcode?

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

#302

Post by johnnyanmac »

trelliscoded wrote: post #33
ktallett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, is…

That's interesting and effective. But I do feel like "undocumented API" is an unnecessary trick in an interview setting.

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

#303

Post by johnnyanmac »

danielbln wrote: post #66
satvikpendem wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

Well, the challenge involves using a python LLM framework to build a simple RAG system for recipes. It's not a hidden requirement per se to use LLM assistance, but the candidate should have a good answer ready why they didn't use an LLM to solve the challenge.

>but the candidate should have a good answer ready why they didn't use an LLM to solve the challenge.

"LLM-esque AI, especially in my industry, is under heavy scrutiny and I want to wait for the dust to settle before exploring options with such tools."

I was never asked as such, but I do have an answer to that.

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

#304

Post by trevor-e »

DustinBrett wrote: post #287
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…

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.

Because there are plenty of devs who take the output, actually read if it makes sense, do a code review, iterate back and forth with it a few times, and then finally check in the result. It's just a tool. Shitty devs will make shitty code regardless of the tool. And good devs are insanely productive with good tools. In your example what's the difference with that dev just copy/pasting from StackOverflow?

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

#305

Post by doix »

DustinBrett wrote: post #287
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…

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.

AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing. I used to be a vim fanatic, I was very efficient but whenever I changed language there was a period where I had to spend getting efficient. Setup some new snippets for boilerplate, maybe tweak some LSP settings, save some new macros.

Now in cursor I just write "extract this block of code into its own function and set up the unit tests" and it does it, with no configuration from my part. Before I'd have a snippet for the unit test boilerplate for that specific project, I'd have to figure out the mocks mysel, etc.

Yes, if you use AI to just generate new code blindly and check it in without no understanding, you end up with garbage. But those people were most likely copy pasting from SO before AI, AI just made them faster.

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

#306

Post by yosito »

explorigin wrote: post #6

Part 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…

> If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate

So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?

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

#307

Post by johnnyanmac »

nouveaux wrote: post #243
dakiol wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is: - “big” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft came up with these types of tech interviews. And there it seems pretty clear that for most of their positions they are looking for cogs - The vast majority of tech companies have just copied what “big” tech is doing, including tech interviews. These companies may not be looking for cogs, but they are using an interview process that’s not suitable for t…

And what is wrong with being a cog? Not everyone is going to invent the next ai innovation and not everyone is cut out to build the next hot programming language. Bugs need to be fixed. Features need to be implemented. If it weren't for cogs, you'd have people just throwing new projects over the fence and dropped 6 months after release. Don't want to be another cog? Join a startup. Plenty of those hiring. The reality…

>And what is wrong with being a cog?

The interview process being a circus of how many hoops you'll jump through. Which in this case is upwards of 3 months of trivia, beauracracy, and politics. And these days they don't even give you the grace of a response; they may just ghost you.

But being a cog itself is personally fine. Work to live, not live to work. But leading people on to drop them on the tip of a hat is disrespectful of everyone's time. At least a 1-2 stage interview for a dishwasher or table busser is only wasting a few hours per role applied. Time is the most valuable resource we have, of course people want to use it carefully.

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

#308

Post by xarope »

cuuupid wrote: post #298
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 >>behavioral We 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…

what actually happens to the interviewee? Do they suddenly go blank when they realise the LLM has replied "I'm sorry I cannot assist you with this", or they try to make something up?

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

#309

Post by politician »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #255

I've only done a few interviews the past couple years, but I've asked people to turn off coding assistants and not use an LLM on my coding screen. I want to know how _they_ think and solve problems, not how the LLM does. And generally, the more junior people are just completely lost without it. They've become so dependent on it, they can't even google anything anymore. Their search queries are very weirdly conversati…

It was obvious from the moment ChatGPT went live that this was going to intellectually stunt junior developers.

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

#310

Post by dmazzoni »

cuuupid wrote: post #298
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 >>behavioral We 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…

Ha ha, that's a great idea!

I love the idea of embedding sensitive topics that ChatGPT and other LLMs will steer clear of, within the context of a coding question.

Have you ever had any candidate laugh?

Any candidates find it offensive?

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