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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?

#391

Post by abenga »

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 saves you an insane amount of typing, but adds an insane amount of reading, which is strictly harder than typing (at least for me).

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

#392

Post by bluefirebrand »

steelframe wrote: post #383
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.

> 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.

I think what you're saying is a bit idealistic. We like to think that people get terminated for incompetence but the reality is more complicated than that

I suspect people get away with saying "I don't know why that didn't work, I did what the computer told me to do" a lot more frequently than they get fired for it. "I did what the AI said" will be the natural extension of this

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

#393

Post by johnnyanmac »

dahart wrote: post #381
johnnyanmac wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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.

Well, everyone has different experiences. I never felt like knowing about a company put me ahead in my early days. I guess I have a dump stat in Charisma (not surprised).

Like you said, the market is competitive. No one's going to take the nice guy over the one who blitz's an interview unless that nice guy has connections. Those few minutes of thousands of applications adds up to days of research. I just lack that time and energy these days.

>You sound like you’ve been burned. That sucks and I’m sorry, I sympathize.

several times, yes. It's honestly worse than my first job search out of college 10 years ago.

>Taking it personally and assuming it’s disrespect isn’t going to help get the job though

I only ask for basic decency. Keep a candidate in the loop, don't drag the process on for the sake of it, any take home should warrant a response (even if it's a template rejection letter). i.e. respect people's time.

I haven't been burned in a lot of my interviews, I'm not talking about bummers like the several times I was interviewing before a hiring freeze. I don't even treat non-responses as an interview process. But several of them just end with absolutely no communication nor closure after speaking for weeks with recruiters and hiring managers.

I don't know what to call that in a day and age where AI is supposedly increasing efficiency, other than disrespect. This has never happened before 2023, which makes the times all the more weirder.

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

#394

Post by listenallyall »

nkrisc wrote: post #264
rahimnathwani wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true we would never hear of top level athletes using performance enhancing drugs.

That's different. These candidates are not trying to get an edge on qualifying for the top dev position in the entire world. Top athletes do it because they're essentially at the limits of human performance and those drugs are the only edge they can reasonably get.

It's much more widespread. Minor league player uses PEDs to make the major leagues. Middling major leaguer uses them to be an all-star. All-star uses them to make the hall of fame. In the context of programming, if some kind of cheating is what's necessary to nab a $150k job, a whole lot of people are going to cheat.

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

#395

Post by edanm »

madduci wrote: post #389

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?"

Because most people who've been involved in tech interviewing have arrived at the same conclusion - these kinds of questions are too easy for candidates to answer in ways that make them appear great, while they can't actually program.

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

#397

Post by johnnyanmac »

Gigachad wrote: post #366
johnnyanmac wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when was this? I can't remember the last time anyone had their phone number publicly displayed on LinkedIn. And now messaging recruiters is a paid feature. The market's only making it more difficult to reach a human.

This was last week. Perhaps the Australian market is different, but I often but not always see the option to physically call.

Yeah, it may be a cultural difference. The US has a huge fear of doxxing in the modern world. Can be traced back to decades when a crazed fan murdered a celebrity in their home. Easily accessible firearms definitely doesn't help.

This even applies to businesses in some cases. You trying to walk in and talk to someone is a security threat compared to the times where you could do that and walk out with a job offer. US companies absolutely hate unsolicited calls from non-businesses.

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

#398

Post by low_tech_punk »

shihab wrote: post #164

To get an idea of just how advanced cheating tools has become, take a look here: https://leetcodewizard.io/ I think every interviewer, hiring manager ought to know or be trained on these tools, your intuition about candidate's behaviour isn't enough. Otherwise, we will soon reach a tipping point where honest candidates will be at a severe disadvantage.

We are approaching a singularity where we actually want to hire the cheating tool, not the cheater.

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

#399

Post by edanm »

datavirtue wrote: post #157
Aeolun wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you supposed to ask chatGPT if you can’t just ask it the answer? That’d confuse me too.

Just another interview methodology pulled out of someone's ass. They don't know.

As opposed to all other interviewing methodologies which are rigourously tested?

Unfortunately in our industry it's pretty much all personal anecdotes on what works better and what doesn't.

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