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?

#421

Post by consp » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

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…

> It is already being used A LOT

Which is an argument for quality why? Bad coders are not going to produce better code that way. Just more with less effort.

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

#422

Post by VPenkov » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

My employer sends a take-home test. It is relatively easy and not very time-consuming. Its main purpose is to act as a basic filter and to provide some material to base an interview on.

In the recent couple of years I have seen a lot more people ace the test and not do very well during the actual interview. Take-home exams feel like they would always be ineffective now.

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

#423

Post by lnsru » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 7:51 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #125

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #13

Changed enormously. Both resumes and interviews are effectively useless now. If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for then you aren't ever going to hear from us. If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

> a portfolio of original work I'm too busy doing actual paid work for companies for that.

That’s the reality for most people. Creating many things under NDA with tools watching for IP theft. So no single line of code can leave the company. I know a guy who has a portfolio, but he’s freelance web designer.

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

#424

Post by fhd2 » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 7:53 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #416

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…

To add: I can very well imagine this process isn't suitable for FAANG, so I can understand their university exam style approach to a degree. It's easy to arm chair criticise, but I don't know if I could come up with something better at their scale. These days, I'm mostly engaged by startups to help them build an initial team, I acknowledge that's different from what a lot of other folks hire for.

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

#425

Post by fergie » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 7:59 AM UTC

In my experience the real objective of the take home exercise is to gauge how compliant the candidate is, and how many obligations they have outside of work. Otherwise it always makes more sense to conduct simple, in-person assessments.

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

#426

Post by mnky9800n » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 8:02 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #424

fhd2 wrote: post #416

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…

To add: I can very well imagine this process isn't suitable for FAANG, so I can understand their university exam style approach to a degree. It's easy to arm chair criticise, but I don't know if I could come up with something better at their scale. These days, I'm mostly engaged by startups to help them build an initial team, I acknowledge that's different from what a lot of other folks hire for.

Is your job consulting for hiring technical positions?

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

#427

Post by pineaux » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 8:03 AM UTC

dagss wrote: post #417

anonzzzies wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You mean like a blueprint of a machine? Because that is exactly how machines are usually presented in official documentation. To me the skill of understanding how "2d/code" translates to "3d/program execution" is exactly the skill that sets amateurs apart from pros, saying that, I consider myself an amateur in code and a professional in mechanical design.

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

#428

Post by 59nadir » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 8:04 AM UTC

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…

I stopped using AI for code a little over a year ago and at that point I'd used Copilot for 8-12 months. I tried Cursor out a couple of weeks ago for very small autocomplete snippets and it was about the same or slightly worse than Copilot, in my opinion.

The integration with the editor was neat but the quality of the suggestions were no different than what I'd had with Copilot much earlier, and the pathological cases where it just spun off into some useless corner of its behavior (recommending code that was already in the very same file, recommending code that didn't make any sense, etc.) seemed to happen more than with Copilot.

This was a ridiculously simple project for it to work on, to be clear, just a parser for a language I started working on, and the general structure was already there for it to work with when I started trying Cursor out. From prior experience I know the base is pretty easy to work with for people who aren't even familiar with it (or even parsing in general), so I think given the difficulties that Cursor had even putting together pretty basic things it might be that a user of Cursor would see minimal gains in velocity and end up having less understanding in the medium to long term, at least in this particular case.

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

#429

Post by concordDance » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 8:13 AM UTC

feoren wrote: post #348

codeyperson wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High level - having a discussion with the LLM about different approaches and the tradeoffs between each Low level - I'll write up the structure of what I want in the form of a set functions with defined inputs and outputs but without the implementation detail. If I care about any specifics with the functions I'll throw some comments in there. And sometimes I'll define the data structures in advance as well. Once all…

> High level - having a discussion with the LLM about different approaches and the tradeoffs between each I honestly can't imagine this. If the AI says "However, a downside of approach B is that it takes O(n^2) time instead of the optimal O(n log(n))", what do you think the odds are that it literally made up both of those facts? Because I'd be surprised if they were any lower than 30%. It's an extremely confident bul…

It can list tradeoffs and approaches you might have forgotten. Thats the big use case for me.

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

#430

Post by anonzzzies » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 8:19 AM UTC

dagss wrote: post #417

anonzzzies wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Running code in your head is another issue that AI won't solve (yet); we had different people/scientists working on this; the most famous person there being Brett Victor, but also Jonathan Edwards [0] and Chris Granger (lighttable). I find the example in [0] the best; you are sitting there with your very logically weak brain trying to think wtf will this code do while there is a very powerful computer next to you that can tell you. But doesn't. And yet, we are mostly restricted to first think out the code to at least some extent before we can see it in action, same for the AI.

[0] https://vimeo.com/140738254