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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?

#461

Post by biztos »

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…

As someone with a pretty long career already, and who's comfortable talking about it, I was a bit surprised that in three interviews last year nobody asked a single thing about any of my previous work. One was live coding and tech trivia, the other two were extensive take-home challenges.

To their credit, I think they would have hired "the old guy" if I'd aced their take-homes, but I was a bit rusty and not super thrilled about their problem areas anyway so we didn't get that far. And honestly it seems like a decent system for hiring well-paid cogs in your well-oiled machine for the short term.

Your method sounds like what we were trying to do ten years ago, and it worked pretty well until our pipeline dried up. I wish you, and your candidates, continued success with it: a little humanity goes a long way these days.

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

#462

Post by radium_raven »

Stratoscope wrote: post #435
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…

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there. What I added: 1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion. 2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the pr…

> In my email I encouraged the candidate to teach me something unrelated to our work, or programming related if they preferred that.

What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me?

Perhaps this is just urban legend but from the stories I've heard hiring for FAANG-type companies there are people out there interviewing with their only goal being baiting you into a topic they can sue you over.

Worst instance I have heard of is when an interviewer asked about the books the candidate liked to read (since the candidate said they're an avid reader in their resume) and he just said that he liked to read the Bible. After not getting hired for failing the interviews he accused the company of religious discrimination.

I'm by no means an expert in US law and don't know the people this happened to directly so maybe it's just one big fantasy story but it doesn't seem that far fetched that

- If you are a rich corporation then people will look to bait you into a lawsuit

- If you give software engineers (or any non-lawyers) free rein on how to conduct interviews then some of them can be baited into a situation that the company could be sued over way more easily than a rigid leetcode interview

I think nothing came of the fellow who liked reading the Bible but I would imagine the legal department has a say in what kind of interview process a rich company can and can not use.

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

#463

Post by biztos »

Stratoscope wrote: post #435
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…

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there. What I added: 1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion. 2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the pr…

What, what? Harmonicas are tunable? TIL...

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

#464

Post by dmoy »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #460
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…

> Put the candidate at ease - nervous people don't interview well This is great advice. I have great success with it. I give the same 60 second speech at the start of each interview. I tell candidates that I realise that tech interviews are stressful -- "In 202X, the 'tech universe' is infinitely wide and deep. We can always find something that you don't know. If you don't have experience in a topic that we raise, le…

Putting candidate at ease is definitely important.

Another reason:

If you're only say one of four interviewers, and you're maybe not the last interviewer, you really want the candidate to come out of your interview feeling like they did well or at least ok enough, so that they don't get tilted for the next interview. Because even if they did really poorly in your interview, maybe it's a fluke and they won't fail the rest of the loop.

Which is then a really difficult skill as an interviewer - how do you make sure someone thinks they do well even if they do very poorly? Ain't easy if there's any technical guts in the interview.

I sure as shit didn't get any good at that until I'd conducted like 100+ interviews, but maybe I'm just a slow learner haha

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

#465

Post by vanceism7_ »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #297
shihab wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? Every alternative I can think of is either worse, or sounds nice but impractical to implement in practice at scale. I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class…

>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? They are juniors, I don't expect them to be experts, I expect eagerness and passion. They spent 4 or more years focusing on schooling, show me the results of your projects. Let them talk and see how well they understand what they did. Side projects are even better to stand out. And you know... apparently people can still fail fizzbuzz in 2025. If y…

Yea I totally agree. During one of my interviews, the interviewers asked me to write "snake game" in react. I had spent the last week studying their open source project and learning how things were structured, and then the two part interview consisted of parsing json and outputting it as markdown, and writing snake game. They're weren't a game ship, so it really didn't make any sense that they would've asked about that... It was really lame

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

#466

Post by baoluofu »

radium_raven wrote: post #462
Stratoscope wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there. What I added: 1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion. 2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the pr…

> In my email I encouraged the candidate to teach me something unrelated to our work, or programming related if they preferred that. What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me? Perhaps this is just urban legend but from the stories I've heard hiring for FAANG-type companies there are people out there interviewing with their only goal being baiting you into a topic they can sue you o…

I have found that if you tighten the parameters a bit, you can still get all the benefit of what this question is asking for. For example, teach me the rules of a sport, board game etc. You still get to see if they can present a coherent explanation of something relatively complex, but you can avoid these potentially dangerous topics.

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

#467

Post by alok-g »

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…

This is the best way to go.

I would love to go through mock interviews for myself with this approach just to have some interview-specific experience.

>> 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.

Thanks for sharing your experience! Makes sense actually.

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

#468

Post by throwaway2037 »

axegon_ wrote: post #444
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…

I feel like take home tests are meaningless and I always have. Even more so now with LLMs, though 9/10 times you can tell if it's an LLM-people don't normally put trivial comments in the code such as > // This line prevents X from happening I've seen a number of those. The issue here is that you've already wasted a lot of time with a candidate. So being firmly against take home tests or even leetcode, I think the onl…

    > I feel like take home tests are meaningless and I always have. Even more so now with LLMs
This has been discussed many times already here. You need to set an "LLM trap" (like an SSH honey trap) by asking the candidate to explain the code they wrote. Also, you can wait until the code review to ask them how they would unit test the code. Most cheaters will fall apart in the first 60 seconds. It is such an obvious tell. And if they used an LLM, but they can very well explain the code, well, then, they will be a good programmer on your team, where an LLM is simply one more tool in their arsenal.

I am starting to think that we need two types of technical interview questions: Old school (no LLMs allowed) vs new school (LLMs strongly encouraged). Someone under 25 (30?) is probably already making great use of LLMs to teach themselves new things about programming. This reminds me of when young people (late 2000s/early 2010s) began to move away from "O'Reilly-class" (heh, like a naval destroyer class) 500 page printed technical books to reading technical blogs. At first, I was suspicious -- essentially, I was gatekeeping on the blog writers. Over time, I came to appreciate that technical learning was changing. I see the same with LLMs. And don't worry about the shitty programmers who try to skate by only using LLMs. Their true colours will show very quickly.

Can I ask a dumb question? What are some drawbacks of using a hash map? Honestly, I am nearly neck-bearded at this point, and I would be surprised by this question in an interview. Mostly, people ask how do they work (impl details, etc.) and what are some benefits over using linear (non-binary) search in an array.

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

#469

Post by freilanzer »

radium_raven wrote: post #462
Stratoscope wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there. What I added: 1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion. 2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the pr…

> In my email I encouraged the candidate to teach me something unrelated to our work, or programming related if they preferred that. What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me? Perhaps this is just urban legend but from the stories I've heard hiring for FAANG-type companies there are people out there interviewing with their only goal being baiting you into a topic they can sue you o…

> What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me?

Simple, don't pick subjects, such as religion, sexuality, etc. It's not that deep.

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

#470

Post by biztos »

radium_raven wrote: post #462
Stratoscope wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there. What I added: 1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion. 2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the pr…

> In my email I encouraged the candidate to teach me something unrelated to our work, or programming related if they preferred that. What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me? Perhaps this is just urban legend but from the stories I've heard hiring for FAANG-type companies there are people out there interviewing with their only goal being baiting you into a topic they can sue you o…

Or, you can choose to not live in fear.
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