Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by buggy6257 » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:54 PM UTC

acwan93 wrote: post #40

I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate. The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way.

This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response.

...Christ.

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

#42

Post by pizzalife » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:55 PM UTC

Pooge wrote: post #22

vrosas wrote: post #5

As someone currently job searching it hasn’t changed much, besides companies adding DO NOT USE AI warnings before every section. Even Anthropic forces you to write a little “why do you want to work here DO NOT USE AI” paragraph. The irony.

They will very happily use AI to evaluate your profile, though :)

Applying at Anthropic was a bad experience for me. I was invited to do a timed set of leetcode exercises on some website. I didn't feel like doing that, and focused on my other applications.

Then they emailed me a month later after my "invitation" expired. It looked like it was written by a human: "Hey, we're really interested in your profile, here's a new invite link, please complete this automated pre-screen thingie".

So I swallowed my pride and went through with that humiliating exercise. Ended up spending two hours doing algorithmic leetcode problems. This was for a product security position. Maybe we could have talked about vulnerabilities that I have found instead.

I was too slow to solve them and received some canned response.

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

#43

Post by sshine » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

I can't speak for job interviewing, but having recently completed 3rd-semester trade-school oral exams in Java programming:

It is really important to watch people code.

Anyone can fake an abstract overview.

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

#44

Post by b112 » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #28

yowlingcat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools. If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating. If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.

> If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff. I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a…

This is called fraud, and it is a crime.

People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past.

If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse.

People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time.

So you create an interview process that can only be passed by a skilled dev, including them signing a doc saying the code is entirely their work, only referencing a language manual/manpages.

And if they show up to work incapable of doing the same, it's time to call the cops.

That's probably the only way to deal with scam artists and scum, going forward.

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

#45

Post by j-scott » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:56 PM UTC

In my most recent cycle, I didn’t ask to use AI and I was only warned once about using AI when I had the official language plugin for an IDE annotate some struct fields with json tags. I explained the plugin functionality and we moved on.

When I was part of interviews on the other side for my former employer, I encountered multiple candidates who appeared to be using AI assistance without notifying the interviewers ahead of time or at all.

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

#46

Post by brianstrimp » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:57 PM UTC

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…

Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to join your company because they know that their coworkers will have been chosen by a subpar process.

That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist?

Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?

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

#47

Post by b112 » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 8:58 PM UTC

ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I'd be fine with the GPT side of things, as long as I could somehow inject poor answers, and see if the interviewee notices and corrects.

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

#48

Post by satvikpendem » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

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.

Also because most people are busy with actual work and don't have the time to have passion projects. Some people do, and that's great, but most people are simply not passionate about labor, regardless of what kind of labor it is.

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

#49

Post by NomDePlum » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

It can be weird. Seen some decent resumes for people that in the actual interview the candidate obviously has zero demonstrable knowledge of.

Ask even the shallowest question and they are lost and just start regurgitating what feels like very bad prompt based responses.

At that point it's just about closing down the interview without being unprofessional.

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

#50

Post by iExploder » Sun, Feb 02, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

jppope wrote: post #34

iExploder wrote: post #2

Name of the game now is not to get fired at all costs and weather the storm until the dust settles...

hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one

> hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one

tightened market is one thing, the absolute insanity of the recruitment process in last couple years with now AI thrown into the mix is really something to behold, test these waters at your own peril