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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?

#371

Post by lubujackson »

RevEng wrote: post #98
gibbonsrcool wrote: post #26

Panel interviews seem to be more common. Curious if others have seen the same? I personally feel very uncomfortable coding in front of a group. First one of these I tried had like 5 people watching and I lost my nerve and bailed. :|

Panels and live programming assignments are such an awful idea. Is that what the workplace is like? Doo they want people who can work under those conditions? I've been a working professional for 18 years who gives public talks regularly and I can still see myself clamming up in that situation. Everyone knows it's hard to think and type when you are being watched.

Worse, how little does the company value developer time? If you get hired there, how many brainnumbing panels will you need to be a part of? Stinks of a lack of focus, trust and quality.

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

#372

Post by colonial »

yosito wrote: post #306
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?

You'd be surprised at how good you can get at sniffing out slop, especially when it's the type prompted by fools who think it'll get them an easy win. Often the actual content doesn't even factor in - what triggers my mental heuristics is usually meta stuff like tone and structure.

I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.

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

#373

Post by soheil »

ktallett wrote: post #11

The key is having interviewers that know what they are talking about so in-depth meandering discussions can be had regarding personal and work projects which usually makes it clear whether the applicant knows what they are talking about. Leetcode was only ever a temporary interview technique, and this 'AI' prominence in the public domain has simply sped up it's demise.

its demise

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

#374

Post by girvo »

WalterBright wrote: post #352
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…

> 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.

That's certainly the case for myself, too, though I've got roughly two fewer decades in this than yourself!

But typing throughput has never been my major bottleneck. Refactoring is basically never just straight code transforms, and most of my time is spent thinking, exploring or teaching these days

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

#375

Post by Aachen »

sweca wrote: post #142

My company actually encourages the use of AI. My interview process was one relatively complex take home, an explanation of my solutions and thinking, then a live "onsite" (via zoom) where I had to code in front of a senior engineer while thinking aloud. If I was incompetent, I could've shoved the problem into o1 on ChatGPT and probably solved the problems, but I wouldn't have been able to provide insight into why I m…

What does onsite mean if it was a video call?

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

#376

Post by Aachen »

yieldcrv wrote: post #266

I recently did an interview that that involved making pull requests for code updates across a time period That seemed to thwart AI use, at least thwart one-shotting, and require understanding and experience with working in an organization I liked that

What does that even mean? Trickling in changes you want to make via multiple pull requests, spaced across days or months or whatever, instead of submitting it at once?

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

#377

Post by sdesol »

eru wrote: post #328
blobbers wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were one of them... 8 years ago?

(Not the OP.) The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. When I was younger, I would get distracted and play computer games (or comment on HN..), rather than churn out mountains of mediocre code all the time.

> The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code.

My process right now when working LLMs is to do the following:

- Create problem and solution statement

- Create requirements and user stories

- Create architecture

- Create skeleton code

- Map the skeleton code

- Create the full code

At every step, where I don't need the full code, the LLM will start coding and I need to stop it and add "Do not generate code. The focus is still design".

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

#378

Post by bodge5000 »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #238
dkga wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, cheaters only cheat because they suck and they know it. Otherwise cheat would not be a rational approach.

I don't approve of cheating but I think you're underestimating how hard some interview questions can be. Even competent people don't know everything and could draw a blank, in which case they would benefit from cheating despite being competent.

Not just difficult, but there's just so many of them (for the same company ofc). You could ace 3 interviews and not even be half way through the process. You have to be continually on top form for days/weeks on end.

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

#379

Post by AlgebraFox »

vunderba wrote: post #24
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…

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

I really hate those who ask for GitHub profiles. Mine is psuedo anonymous and I don't want to share it with my employer or anyone I don't want to. Besides privacy, I do not understand why a company would even expect the candidate to have free contribution in the first place. Can't the candidate have other hobbies to enjoy or learn?

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

#380

Post by JoshuaDavid »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #347
sureIy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Make the model write annotated tests too, verify that the annotations plausibly could match the test code, run the tests, feed the failures back in, and iterate until all tests are green?
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