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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?

#351

Post by fenomas »

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…

Please read things in context - my comment was about what people mean when they talk about a thing giving developers superpowers. I was not making a claim about how much you, personally, benefit from debuggers.

Also: I don't use debuggers much either. Is Superman's heat vision not a superpower because he rarely needs to melt things? :P

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

#352

Post by WalterBright »

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…

> AI gives super powers because it saves you an insane amount of typing.

I must be very different, as very little of my coding time is spent typing.

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

#353

Post by mewpmewp2 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #319
doix wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copilot kind of auto completes exactly what I want most of the time. When I want something bigger I will ask Claude to give me that, but I always know what I am going to get, and I could have written it myself, it would have just taken tons of typing. I feel like I am kind of an orchestrator of sorts.

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

#354

Post by maxwellg »

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…

You've never had to debug code that someone else wrote?

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

#355

Post by EGreg »

I mean, it could be really bad

Online, you don't know if the person you're interviewing is an AI or not.

They could have an AI resume, AI persona, AI profile, and then someone shows up who looks like that and it could be a deepfake, then they do the coding challenges, and then you hire the person remotely, and they continue to do great work with the AI, but actually this person doesn't exist, they just created 100 such people and they're just AI agents.

It sucks if you want to hire humans. And it sucks for the humans. But the work gets done for the same price and more reliably. So dunno

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

#356

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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…

Now imagine working on a 10+ years old codebase that 100s of developer hands have gone over. And several dependencies not being possible to even run locally because of being so out of date. Why work on that in the first place? Sometimes it pays really well.

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

#357

Post by hibikir »

datavirtue wrote: post #156
emseetech wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry (all industries really) might want to reconsider online applications, or at least privilege in-person resume drop-offs because the escalating ai application/evaluation war that's happening doesn't seem to be helping anyone.

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

Did it? What I see instead is total mistrust of the open resume pool, because the percentage of outright lies, from resume to behavioral to everything else is just that high. So I see companies raise their hands and going back to maximum prioritization of in-network candidates, where we have someone vouching that the candidate is not a total waste of everyone's time.

The one who loses all power is the new junior straight out of school, which used to already be difficult to distinguish from many other candidates with similar resumes: Now they compete with thousands upon thousands of total fakes which claim more experience anyway.

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

#358

Post by worthless-trash »

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.

I understand exactly what you mean, feel like there are buckets of people who are just trying to gas light every reader.

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

#359

Post by fsloth »

Trick problems and whiteboarding was always “jump through the hoops” bs IMHO.

In-person dialogue with multiple team members and sufficiently complex take-home assignment remains a pretty good method. LLM are excellent API docs and should not be avoided.

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

#360

Post by polishdude20 »

ktallett wrote: post #10
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…

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.

My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.
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