There's still plenty of engineers that can't code their way out of a paper bag
Well they're not really engineers then are they?
Neither are most programmers
Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
331–340 of 735 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#332I mentioned this in a different related post but there seems to be a pretty sad lack of basic integrity in the tech world where it's become a point of pride to develop and use apps which allow an applicant to blatantly cheat during interviews using LLMs. As a result, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on-site" interviews. The funny thing about this is that these ar…
The crushingly long and disrespectful interview process cut the bridge off first. If the job market becomes a problem of scale, people (especially programmers) will scale up as such. As the interviewers have with ATC.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
> Iroincally I'd probably have more github projects if I didn't spend 20 months looking for a full-time job.
Same. I could afford not working throughout most of 2023 but I had to deal with ruined health + my leeway didn't last as long as I hoped so I was back on the treadmill just when I was starting to enjoy some freedom and a peace of mind.
> 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.
I have no idea how much it costed me but I was told in no uncertain terms 10+ times that having a GitHub portfolio would have meant no take-home assignment, and skipping parts of the interview I already attended. So it definitely carries weight _and_ can help shorten hiring processes.
So I don't feel it was a deal-breaker for the people who interviewed me either but I think it would have netted me more points, so to speak.
Assuming you are graded and are the same person:
Without portfolio: 7/10
With portfolio: 8/10
...for example.
> I'm doing contract work in the meantime
Same x2, but it's mentally draining. No stability. That removes future bandwidth that would have been used for those passion projects.
TL;DR a lot of things conspire to rob you of your creative potential. :(
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> share their entire screen That would be a bit awkward with my 32:9 primary monitor.
I have my dual 4K Dells for day to day work but I unplug one and scale it to something reasonable for interviews because having consideration is part of the signal that I'm sending (and empathy, because I hate trying to read purple text on a black background myself when trying to view other people's setups)
Nah, I have a triple monitor setup. I'll share my primary screen and work on it. If they can't trust me enough to do that, then we're already on a tumultuous relationship.
Not like I'd do anything. I use one screen to work, one for video, and one for work visuals. Seeing one screen would show if I had any hidden windows anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#335Earlier 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?
Yeah, it's just a pity that human stupidity perpetuated leetcode as an interviewing tool to the point that AI had to kill it.... Im really happy it's finally broken though. Dumbest fad our industry ever had.
I dunno... estimating how many golf balls fit in a bus or explaining why manhole cover are round make leetcode look almost... useful by comparison.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#336I'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 don't follow this take. ChatGPT outputted a bug subtle enough to be overlooked by you and your colleague and your test suite, and that means it's not ready for prime time?
The day when generative AI might hope to completely handle a coding task isn't here yet - it doesn't know your full requirements, it can't run your integration tests, etc. For now it's a tool, like a linter or a debugger - useful sometimes and not useful other times, but the responsibility to keep bugs out of prod still rests with the coder, not the tools.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#337Earlier 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…
I do agree with the filling in of text, but only when the patterns are clear. Any kind of thinking on logic or using libraries I find it still leads me astray every time.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#338Earlier 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.
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?
Because on SO someone real wrote it with a real reason and logic. With AI we still need to double check that what we are giving ever made any sense. And SO also has votes to show the validty.
I agree if devs iterated over the results it could be good, but that has not been what I have been seeing.
It is not a traditional tool because tools we had in the past had expected results.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#339Earlier 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?
Human cogs are going to be phased out. I'm not an AI doomer who thinks engineers are going to be replaced across the board, but the need for a human being who functions like a robot is going away fast. We need humans to do what humans do well, and humans don't do well as cogs in a machine—machines are better at that role.
The days of leetcode interviews are numbered not because they're too easy to cheat at, but because they were always optimizing for the wrong traits in most companies that cargo culted them, and even the companies that used them correctly (Big Tech) are going to rapidly need a different type of interview for the new types of hires they need.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#340Earlier 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.
Devs who don't feel that way aren't talking about the stuff you're talking about.
Look at it this way - a powerful debugger gives you superpowers. That doesn't mean it turns bad devs into good devs, or that devs with a powerful debugger never write bad code! If somebody says a powerful debugger gives them superpowers they're not claiming those things; they're claiming that it makes good devs even better.