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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?

#381

Post by dahart »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #284
dahart wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not at the resume screening phase, but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company. Some people get lucky, sure, but the downside is that you have to get lucky, it’s wasting valuable time on low probability events. If you’re familiar with the statistical process of importance sampling, in my experience on both sides of the interview table, it’s eff…

>but it’s usually still obvious once the interviews start when people aren’t interested in your specific company. Can you really blame them? If you're not a houshold name, why would you expect someone to spend hours researching your specific company? On the other hand, it can come off as creepy if your a small company and suddenly someone nerds out about how your CEO said this one thing at a talk years ago and knows…

Naw I don’t blame them. I’m not suggesting anyone spend hours researching each company. And I don’t expect candidates to do anything, I’m saying the candidates who do are the ones that tend to land the job, but it’s entirely the candidate’s choice. All it takes is minutes, really.

You sound like you’ve been burned. That sucks and I’m sorry, I sympathize. I’m hearing that the job market is very tough right now. A big part of that is because it’s extremely competitive. Taking it personally and assuming it’s disrespect isn’t going to help get the job though (even if there was disrespect… but that’s not the only explanation, so it’s a dangerous assumption).

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

#382

Post by RomanPushkin »

One must not forget that cheaters are now everyone, and it's likely you gonna be interviewed by a cheater. I've seen this multiple times already, recent is Meta interview ~8 months ago. Very low quality interviewer - complained about bug in the code, while there was no bug. Can't keep the conversation going, the same for system design - poor guy didn't even want to listen, and was pretty much rude.

I would say that if it wasn't a pattern. So let's not pretend they're not cheaters. Call them out.

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

#383

Post by steelframe »

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.

> They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.

In any other professional field that would be grounds for termination for incompetence. It's so weird that we seem to shrug off that kind of behavior so readily in tech.

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

#385

Post by topkai22 »

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 haven’t been doing that much interviewing, but in the dozen or so candidates I’ve had I don’t think a single one has tried to use AI. I almost wish they would, as then at least I’d get past the first half of the question…

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

#386

Post by bodge5000 »

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…

> 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.

This is the job of a good interviewer. I've run the gauntlet from terrible to great answers to the exact same questions depending on the interviewer. If you literally just ask that question out of the blue, you'll either get a bad or rehearsed response. If you establish some rapport, and ask it in a more natural way, you'll get a more natural answer.

It's not easy, but neither is being on the other side of the interviewer, and that's never been accepted as an excuse

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

#387

Post by fooker »

alexjplant wrote: post #259
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…

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…

You are using it wrong.

Give examples and let it extrapolate.

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

#388

Post by topkai22 »

I’m trying something new on my next interview- I’ve had an LLM solve a coding problem and I’ve uploaded the output to github, I’m going to ask the candidate to evaluate the generated code adapt it to new technical and non functional requirements.

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

#389

Post by madduci »

Do people still insist on coding tasks? Why don't simply formulate questions that await a broader and deeper knowledge of things, which helps to know how far the candidate can go?

And for questions, I don't mean "it's better a list or a set?", but something like: "you have an application like this, how can you improve it to perform X?"

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

#390

Post by bluefirebrand »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #356
feoren wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would absolutely not be comfortable trusting current AI to work on this sort of codebase and make meaningful improvements
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