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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?

#341

Post by piloto_ciego »

BowBun wrote: post #184
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…

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.

This makes me feel good because it’s exactly how I use it.

I’m basically pair programming with a wizard all day who periodically does very stupid things.

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

#342

Post by lolinder »

nouveaux wrote: post #62
lolinder wrote: post #52

The traditional tech interview was always designed to optimize for reliably finding someone who was willing to do what they were told even if it feels like busywork. As a rule someone who has the time and the motivation to brush up on an essentially useless skill in order to pass your job interview will likely fit nicely as a cog in your machine. AI doesn't just change the interviewing game by making it easy to cheat…

Have you spent a lot of time trying to hire people? I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees. This perspective smells completely like "If I were in charge, things would be so much better." Guess what? If you were to take your idea and try to lead this change across a 100 people engineering org, there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your…

> I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

I didn't say that. I said that this style of interview was designed to hire pluggable cogs. As others have noted, that was the correct move for Big Tech and was cargo culted into a bunch of other companies that didn't know why their interviews were shaped the way they were.

> there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your ideas and cause dissent. At that point, guess what? You're going to figure out how to hire compliant people who will execute on your strategy.

In answer to your original question: yes, I'm actively involved in hiring at a 100+ person engineering org that hires this way. And no, we're not looking to figure out how to hire compliant people, we're hiring engineers who will push back and do what works well, not just act because an executive says so.

> You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

Only if you suck at making people comfortable and at understanding different (potentially awkward) communication styles. You don't have to discriminate against people for being awkward, that's a choice you can make. You can instead give them enough space to find their train of thought and pursue it, and it does work—I recently sat in on an interview like that with someone who fits your description exactly, and we strongly recommended him.

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

#343

Post by deadbabe »

We now consider the employees that we hired prior to the arrival of AI to be the equivalent of “low background steel”. They have much stronger job security.

Everyone hired after that is more suspect, and if they screw up too much or don’t perform well we just fire them quickly during the probation period, whereas previously it was rare for people to get fired during the probation period.

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

#344

Post by feoren »

fenomas wrote: post #340
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.

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.

The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%.

The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "understanding everything that is happening all the time" becomes rather easy if all of your code is as simple as you can possibly make it, using clear interfaces, heavily leveraging the type system, keeping things immutable, dependency inversion, and aggressively attacking any unclear parts until you're satisfied with them. So debuggers are generally not involved. It's probably a couple times per week that I enter debug mode at all.

It sounds a little like saying "imagine the driving superpowers you could have if your car could perfectly avoid obstacles for you!" Okay, sure, that'd be life-saving sometimes, but the vast majority of the time, I'm not just randomly dodging obstacles. Planning ahead and paying attention kinda makes that moot.

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

#345

Post by skeeter2020 »

>> now when problems are trivially solvable by GPT.

Only the trivial problems. We don't use AI during interviews but many try and it's always obvious. Delay after any question problem; textbook perfect initial answer; absolutely nothing when asked to go deeper on a specific dimension.

It's nice because interviews that are scheduled for an hour are only lasting ~20 minutes in these situations, and we can cut them short.

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

#346

Post by RajT88 »

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…

> AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing.

If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.

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

#347

Post by skeeter2020 »

sureIy wrote: post #294
alpha_squared wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> If the LLM spits out junk you should be able to tell.

Reading existing code and ensuring correctness is way harder than writing it yourself. How would someone who can't do it in the first place tell if it was incorrect?

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

#348

Post by feoren »

codeyperson wrote: post #296
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.

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…

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

I honestly can't imagine this. If the AI says "However, a downside of approach B is that it takes O(n^2) time instead of the optimal O(nlog(n))", what do you think the odds are that it literally made up both of those facts? Because I'd be surprised if they were any lower than 30%. It's an extremely confident bullshitter, and you're going to use it to talk about engineering tradeoffs!?

> Once all this is set up it often spits out something that compiles and works first try

I'm sorry, but I'm extremely* doubtful that it actually works in any real sense. The fact that you even use "compiles and works first try" as some sort of metric that the code it's producing shows how easily it could slip in awful braindead bugs without you ever knowing. You run it and it appears to work!? The way to know whether something works -- not first try, but every try -- is to understand every character in the code. If that is your standard -- and it must be -- then isn't the AI just slowing you down?

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

#349

Post by zx8080 »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #273
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…

I'm using AI for interview screeners for nontechnical roles that require knowledge work. The AI interviewing app is very very basic, its just a wrapper put together by an eng, with enough features to prevent cheating. Start with recording the session and blocking right-click, and you are halfway there. Its not hard. The AI app has helped me surface top candidates. I don't even look at resumes anymore. There's no poin…

If there's no independent verification, how do you know it's really top 10? (not middle 10, or random 10?)

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

#350

Post by adrianN »

feoren wrote: post #344
fenomas wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best debugger in the world would make me about 5% more efficient. That's about the percentage of my development time I spend going "WTF? Why is that happening?" That's the best possible improvement from the best possible debugger: about 5%. The reason is that I almost always have a complete understanding of everything that is happening in all code that I write. Not because I have a mega-brain; only because "under…

It’s different if you work on a large legacy codebase where you have maybe a rough understanding of the high level architecture but nobody at the company has seen the code you’re working on in the last five years. There a debugger is often very helpful.
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