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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?

#401

Post by sampullman »

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.

It's the same for me if I'm working on something unique or interesting, or a new technology.

Some kinds of coding require very little thinking, though. Converting a design to frontend interface or implementing a CRUD backend are mostly typing.

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

#402

Post by sramam »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #323
sramam wrote: post #258

I recently completed a take-home assignment with the following instructions: This project is designed to evaluate your ability to: - Deconstruct complex problems into actionable steps. - Quickly explore and adopt new frameworks. - Implement a small but impactful proof of concept (PoC). - Demonstrate coding craftsmanship through clean, well-architected code. We estimate this project will take approximately 5–7 hours.…

5-7 hour interview take homes is already a nightmare. LLM assistance or not, I would absolutely not bother with such an assignment unless I was far into the process. Meanwhile, I'm given such tasks half the time before I speak to any human.

That is a fair point.

This was the final technical screen so definitely something worth doing in my case.

The reason I posted a reply was there is a lot of negativity around AI in the hiring process. This was an excellent example of using AI to the benefit of all parties.

Instead of nit-picking on stylistic things from a smaller code-sample, one can nit-pick on the implemented complexity. I think it is a higher quality signal.

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

#403

Post by b112 »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #279
b112 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I won't name names, but there are a lot of Consulting companies that feed off Government contracts that are literally this. "Experience" means a little or a lot, depending on your background. I've met plenty of people with "years of experience" tha…

Yet said poor programmers would never pass the test I specified, without committing fraud. That, and the other conditions I specified, ensure so.

If the AI premise is true, then it's this or good programmers, and good companies will never meet.

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

#404

Post by anonzzzies »

abenga wrote: post #391
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 saves you an insane amount of typing, but adds an insane amount of reading, which is strictly harder than typing (at least for me).

Hmm, that is interesting; reading is harder? You have to read a lot of code anyway right? From team members, examples, 3rd party code/libraries? Through the decades of programming at least I became very proficient and rapidly spotting 'fishy' code and generally understanding code written by others. AI coding is nice because it is, for me, the opposite of what you have; reading the code it generates is much faster than writing it myself even though I am fast at writing it; not that fast.

I have said it here before, because I would love to see some videos of HNers who complain AI gives them crap as we are getting amazing results on large and complex projects... We treat AI code the same as human code, we read it and recommend or implement fixes.

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

#405

Post by lionkor »

fooker wrote: post #387
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…

You are using it wrong. Give examples and let it extrapolate.

"You're holding it wrong" doesn't make a small, too light, crooked, and backwards hammer any better.

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

#406

Post by anonzzzies »

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…

That is your own code and only your libs then, no imports? Or you work in a language where imports are small (embedded?) so you know them all and maintain them all? Or maybe vanilla js/c without libs? Because import 1 npm and you have 100gb of crap deps you really don't understand which happens to work at moment t0 but at t1, when 1 npm updated, nothing works anymore and can't claim to understand it all as many/most people don't write 'simple code'.

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

#407

Post by dinkumthinkum »

I don’t really see why it’s so hard to interview someone remotely because of AI or speech to text. I’m not aware of any system that is so advanced or fast enough that having a video call and decent conversation skills and carefully listening to the candidate can’t identify 99.99% of people using AI. Even without video, it’s no hard to have a conversation and guage their skill level and ask questions and listen to the answers carefully. You can tell when the conversation is not fluid or the answe given is at a level that is a mismatch with their apparent sophistication. You can ask an unreasonably obscure or difficult question and see if you get an LLM answer. You can suss it out. You don’t have to do in-person interviews.

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

#408

Post by rramadass »

titanomachy wrote: post #269
hnisoss wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but I also suck in 95% of FAANG like interviews since I'm very bad at leetcode medium/hard type of questions. It's just something that I never practiced. It's very tempting at this point to trow in my towel and just use some aid. No one cares about my intense career and the millions I helped my clients earn, all that matters (and sometimes directly affects comp rate) is how I do on the "coding task".

> I suck in FAANG interviews... it's just something I never practiced. Well, sounds like you know the solution. Or set your sights on a job that interviews a different way. I think it's mostly leetcode "easy", anyway. Maybe some medium. Never seen a hard, except maybe from one smartass at Google (they were not expecting a perfect answer). Out of a dozen technical interviews, I don't think I've ever needed to know a d…

Right. Almost any time somebody fails an interview it is not because of "very hard questions" but because they did not prepare properly in a sensible manner. People don't want whiteboarding, no programming questions, no mathematical questions, no fermi problems etc. which is plain silly and not realistic. One just needs to know the basics and simple applications of the above which is more than enough to get through most interviews. The key is not to feel overawed/overwhelmed with unknown notations/jargons which is what the actual problem is when people run away from big-O, DS/Algo, Recursion, application of Set Theory/Logic to Programming etc.

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

#409

Post by randomNumber7 »

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.

You are. Only noobs do this, experts using a llm are way more efficient. (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years)

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

#410

Post by anonzzzies »

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.

Nah, already had multiple cases of that; one with a lawyer at a big corp and some others; the story is not straight up 'ai said so' but more like: 'we use different online and offline tools to aid us in our work, sometimes the results are less than satisfactory, and we try to correct those cases'. It is the same response, just showing vulnerability; we are only human, even with our tools.
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