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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?

#411

Post by dinkumthinkum »

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.

I strongly disagree. This is nothing. You can sort out if someone is using something like this to cheat. You have a conversation. You can ask conceptual questions about algorithms and time complexity and figure out their level and see how their sophistication matches their solution on the LeetCode problem or whatever. Now, if you have really bad intuition or understanding of human behavior then yeah it would probably be hard but in that case being a good interviewer is probably hopeless anyway.

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

#412

Post by steve_taylor »

crooked-v wrote: post #123
_puk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This completely.. You ask a rote question and you'll get a rote answer while the interviewee is busy looking at a fixed point on the screen. You then ask a pointed question about something they know or care about, and suddenly their face lights up, they're animated, and they are looking around. It's a huge tell.

You know, this makes me wonder if a viable remote interview technique, at least until real-time deepfaking gets better, would be to have people close their eyes while talking to them. For somebody who knows their stuff it'll have zero impact; for someone relying entirely on GPT, it will completely derail them.

A filter could probably do it already. There are already filters to make you appear to be looking at the camera no matter where your eyes are pointing.

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

#413

Post by raincole »

shaneoh wrote: post #68
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 recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job. It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried…

> "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."

No, it's not "obvious" whatsoever. Actually it's obviously confusing: why you are allowing them to use ChatGPT but forbidding them from asking the questions directly? Do you want an employee who is productive at solving problems, or someone who guess your intentions better?

If AI is an issue for you then just ban it. Don't try to make the interview a game of who outsmart who.

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

#414

Post by bboygravity »

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 can't tell us that LLM's aren't ready for prime time in 2025 after you tried Copilot twice last year.

New better models are coming out almost daily now and it's almost common knowledge that Copilot was and is one of the worst. Especially right now, it doesn't even come close to what better models have to offer.

Also the way to use them is to ask for small chunks of code or questions about code after you gave them tons of context (like in Claude projects for example).

"Not ready for prime time" is also just factually incorrect. It is already being used A LOT. To the point that there are rumors that Cursor is buying so much compute from Anthropic that they are making their product unstable, because nvidia can't supply them hardware fast enough.

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

#416

Post by fhd2 »

The last time I've used a leet code style interview was in 2012, and it resulted in a bad hire (who just happened to have trained on the questions we used). I've hired something like 150 developers so far, and what I ended up with after a few years of trial and error:

1. Use recruiters and network: Wading through the sheer volume of applications was even nasty before COVID, I don't even want to imagine what it's like now. A good recruiter or a recommendation can save a lot of time.

2. Do either no take home test, or one that takes at most two hours. I do discuss the solution candidates came up with, so as long as they can demonstrate they know what they did there, I don't care too much how they did it. If I do this part, it's just to establish some base line competency.

3. Put the candidate at ease - nervous people don't interview well, another problem with non-trivial tasks in technical interviews. I rarely do any live coding, if I do, it's pairing and for management roles, to e.g. probe how they manage disagreement and such. But for developers, they mostly shine when not under pressure, I try to see that side of them.

4. Talk through past and current challenges, technical and otherwise. This is by far the most powerful part of the interview IMHO. Had a bad manager? Cool, what did you do about it? I'm not looking for them having resolved whatever issue we talk about, I'm trying to understand who they are and how they'd fit into the team.

I've been using this process for almost a decade now, and currently don't think I need to change anything about it with respect to LLMs.

I kinda wish it was more merit based, but I haven't found a way to do that well yet. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's just not feasible. The work I tend to be involved in seems way too multi faceted to have a single standard test that will seriously predict how well a candidate will do on the job. My workaround is to rely on intuition for the most part.

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

#417

Post by dagss »

anonzzzies wrote: post #404
abenga wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Depends ofc on the complexity of the area, but... reading someones code to me feels a bit like being given a 2D picture of a machine, then having to piece together a 3D model in my head from a single 2D photo from one projection of the machine. Then figuring out if the machine will work.

When I write code, the hard part is already done -- the mental model behind the program is already in my head and and I simply dump it to keyboard. (At least for me typing speed has never been relevant as a limiting factor)

But I read code I have to reassemble the mental model "behind" it in my head from the output artifact of the thought processes.

Of course one needs to read code of co-workers and libraries -- but it is more draining, at least for me. Skimming it is fast but reading it thoroughly enough to find bugs by reading requires making the full mental model of the code which takes more mental effort for me at least.

There is a huge difference in how I read code from trusted experienced coworkers and juniors though. AI falls in the latter category.

(AI is still saving me a lot of time. Just saying I agree a lot that writing is easier than reading still.)

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

#418

Post by KeplerBoy »

bboygravity wrote: post #414
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 can't tell us that LLM's aren't ready for prime time in 2025 after you tried Copilot twice last year. New better models are coming out almost daily now and it's almost common knowledge that Copilot was and is one of the worst. Especially right now, it doesn't even come close to what better models have to offer. Also the way to use them is to ask for small chunks of code or questions about code after you gave them…

Copilot isn't a single model. Copilot is merely a brand and uses openAI and anthropics newest models.

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

#419

Post by bilekas »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #409
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.

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)

> (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years)

I'm not sure what you mean here? Are you saying that if you work with the same language for years that you're some how not proficient with using LLMs?

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

#420

Post by bilekas »

I've given a few interviews with take home screening small projects that I have been able to identify very quickly were majority generated, I usually don't mind it too much but when I asked why they chose certain patterns or why they went with their approach they couldnt give any "true" answer a week later.

I feel that smaller things like syntax etc make perfect sense. But for larger things that involve a slightly higher complexity it becomes a bit grey. I likenit personally to writing. When I write things down as I'm trying to work things out or even trying to learn something I find I retain the data so much better and have a better picture in my mind of what's going on. That might just be personal preference for learning but if I copy straight from claud I know 100% I'm not going to remember anything about it the next day.

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