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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?

#311

Post by johnnyanmac »

buggy6257 wrote: post #41
acwan93 wrote: post #40

I 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.

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way. This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response. ...Christ.

I don't even understand why you want an AI responding to emails from an interviewer. I have 2-3 template answers I can access with a keystroke.

But yes, I read it the same way. Pretty funny way to respond to a recruiter after they say "no AI please".

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

#313

Post by Aeolun »

no-reply wrote: post #214
Aeolun wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you supposed to ask chatGPT if you can’t just ask it the answer? That’d confuse me too.

Some part of the problem statement you want help with (rather than a complete answer)?

I mean, that’s obvious, but also incredibly silly if I know it can give me both the answer and the reasoning behind it.

The challenge should be in determining if ChatGPT is correct.

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

#314

Post by Gigachad »

andrewflnr wrote: post #189
Gigachad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What worked for me is just ignoring the job listing websites, and calling recruiters directly on the phone. Don’t bother hitting “easy apply” just scroll to the bottom and call the number. I’ve also been asked for the first time in ages to come to the companies office to do interviews.

What do you tell them on the phone? Are they prepared for just "Hi I want to apply for the $job position"? And do they have an answer besides "cool, use the website"?

They put their phone number there because they want you to call it. I say "I saw this position advertised on LinkedIn and I'm interested, is this still available?"

Last time I did this they told me it is but that they are at late stages of interviewing so I shouldn't bother applying for that one, but they got down my details and had other jobs that matched what I was looking for. Recruiters are sales people and you just reversed cold called them making their job easier. The majority of applications are AI bots and people who don't live in the country the job is listed in. By making a phone call you are up the top of the list of "most likely to be a legitimate applicant".

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

#315

Post by johnnyanmac »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #13

Changed enormously. Both resumes and interviews are effectively useless now. If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for then you aren't ever going to hear from us. If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

>If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for

that'd be a huge issue for most candidates (and basically all top candidates) because "exactly what you want to hire you for" is probably not open source code to begin with.

>If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

That has not been my experience at all in 2023/2024.

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

#316

Post by johnnyanmac »

Gigachad wrote: post #314
andrewflnr wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you tell them on the phone? Are they prepared for just "Hi I want to apply for the $job position"? And do they have an answer besides "cool, use the website"?

They put their phone number there because they want you to call it. I say "I saw this position advertised on LinkedIn and I'm interested, is this still available?" Last time I did this they told me it is but that they are at late stages of interviewing so I shouldn't bother applying for that one, but they got down my details and had other jobs that matched what I was looking for. Recruiters are sales people and you j…

And when was this? I can't remember the last time anyone had their phone number publicly displayed on LinkedIn. And now messaging recruiters is a paid feature. The market's only making it more difficult to reach a human.

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

#318

Post by ethin »

bdangubic wrote: post #177
datavirtue wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's because AI shifted power over to the applicant.

this is very strange statement. in what world did AI possibly shift power to the applicant?? applicants have almost never been in shittier position than they are now and things are getting much, much worse by the day

Yeah I don't get this either. I've been looking for a job for like 3-4 years, even an entry-level one, since I graduated college in May of 22 and I still haven't found one. I'm probably doing something wrong (and that's a different discussion), but it's getting harder and harder to know if it's me or the AI applicants or the AI ATS system. And then we have the AI job seekers which are AI-created accounts trying to find employment -- I've already started to see a few of these pop up on Linked In. They were banned, but still, the fact it's happening all is a bit worrying if not predictable.

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

#319

Post by yoyohello13 »

doix wrote: post #305
DustinBrett wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See THIS is a usage that makes sense to me. Using AI to manipulate existing code like this is great. I save a ton of time by pasting in a json response and saying something like “turn this into Data classes” makes api work so fast. On the other hand I really don’t understand devs that say they are using AI for ALL their code.

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

#320

Post by neonsunset »

CSMastermind wrote: post #280
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Candidates generally use it in one of two ways: either as an advanced autocomplete or like a search engine. They'll type in things like, "C# read JSON from file" As opposed to something like: > I'm working on a software system where ... are represented as arrays of JSON objects with the following properties: > ... > I have a file called ... that contains an array of these objects ... > I have ... installed locally wi…

GitHub Copilot Edit can do the second version of this. It is pretty good at it too. It sometimes gets things wrong but for your average code (and candidates typing in "C# read JSON from file" are way below average unless they never written in C#), if you give all the files for a specific self-contained part of the program, it can extend/modify/test/etc. it impressively well for an LLM.

The difference compared to where we were just 1-2 years ago is staggering.

Edit: the above is with Claude-3.5-Sonnet

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