Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 735 posts

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

#481

Post by alok-g »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #253
paxys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

> Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails? 100% of all job interviews are a proxy. It is not possible to perform an interview in ~4 hours such that someone sufficiently engages in what the job “actually entails”. A leetcode interview either is or not a meaningful proxy. AI tools either do or not invalidate the validity of that proxy. Personally I think leetcode interview ar…

>> It is not possible to perform an interview in ~4 hours such that someone sufficiently engages in what the job “actually entails”.

>> ... leetcode interview are an imperfect but relatively decent proxy.

I think all this is just the status quo that should be challenged instead of being justified.

When I conduct interviews (environment: a FAANG company), I focus on (a) fundamental understanding and (b) practical problems. None of the coding problems I pose are more than O[N] in complexity. Yet, my hiring decisions have never gone wrong.

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

#482

Post by swiftcoder »

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 think you may have misunderstood the guidance from your legal team on this.

There is literally no way to prevent a candidate from disclosing a protected characteristic during an interview. Some obvious examples: they might show up to the interview in a wheelchair, they might be wearing a religious garment, they might be visibly pregnant, and so on...

What legal doesn't want, is you asking questions directly intended to elicit that kind information when the candidate didn't volunteer it. Asking the candidate a direct question like "are you planning to have kids?" makes it sound like that information will be used in the hiring decision.

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

#483

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> Hmm, that is interesting; reading is harder?

Much, much harder. Sure, you can skim large volumes of code very quickly. But the type of close reading that is required to spot logic bugs in the small is quite taxing - which is the reason that we generally don't expect code review processes to catch trivial errors, and instead invest in testing.

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

#484

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #468
axegon_ wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tel…

If you really need to test them / check that they haven't used an LLM or hired someone else to do it for them (which was how people "cheated" on take-home tests before), ask them to implement a feature live; it's their code, it should be straightforward if they wrote it themselves.

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

#485

Post by swiftcoder »

doix wrote: post #305
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.

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 feel like I'm going a little bit more insane whenever folks say this, because one of the primary roles of a software engineer is to develop tools and abstractions to reduce or eliminate boilerplate.

What kind of software are you writing, where generating boilerplate is the limiting factor (and why haven't you fixed that)?

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

#486

Post by moorow »

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…

On the other hand, if 20 hours of leetcode practice is all that stands between you and half a million dollars a year, isn't that a pretty good indicator that the interview process isn't hiring based on your skills, talent and education, and instead on something you basically won't encounter in the workplace?

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

#487

Post by weebull »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #319
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…

See THIS is a usage that makes sense to me. Using AI to manipulate existing code like this is great. I save a ton of time by pasting in a json response and saying something like “turn this into Data classes” makes api work so fast. On the other hand I really don’t understand devs that say they are using AI for ALL their code.

So if you were to do a transformation like that you'd cut the code and paste it into a new function. Then you'd modify that function to make the abstraction work. An LLM will rewrite the code in the new form. It's not cut/paste/edit. It's a rewrite every time with the old code as reference.

Each rewrite is a chance to add subtle bugs, so I take issue with the description of LLMs "working on existing code". They don't use text editors to manipulate code like we do (although it might be interesting if they did) and so will have different issues.

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

#488

Post by entropi »

bodge5000 wrote: post #378
wakawaka28 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't approve of cheating but I think you're underestimating how hard some interview questions can be. Even competent people don't know everything and could draw a blank, in which case they would benefit from cheating despite being competent.

Not just difficult, but there's just so many of them (for the same company ofc). You could ace 3 interviews and not even be half way through the process. You have to be continually on top form for days/weeks on end.

Right, last offer I got required 7 (non-HR) steps over a 4-month period, where around a dozen technical people got involved.

I don't/won't cheat, as I am a rather anxious person who can't really handle "covert ops". But at this point I totally understand those who do.

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

#489

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

Is that the LLM's fault or SQLAlchemy for having that API in the first place? Or was that a gap in your testing strategy, as (if I'm reading it right), flush() doesn't write anything to the database but is only intended as an intermediate step (and commit() calls flush() under water).

I think we're in a period similar to self-driving cars, where the LLMs are pretty good, but not perfect; it's those last few percent that break it.

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

#490

Post by littlestymaar »

The coding interview I designed back in 2022 is still out of reach of all LLMs on the market while still being good at selecting people (I hired 6 people with it, all of them where great fit, out of 30ish applications so it doesn't seem to have a high false-negative rate either).

The main takeaway is that if you make design your interview questions to match the actual skill you're looking for, AI won't be an issue because it doesn't have those skills yet. In short: ask questions that are straightforward in surface but deep beneath with trade-offs that must be weighted by asking questions to in interviewer.

Post reply on HN