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

491–500 of 735 posts

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

#491

Post by ktallett »

polishdude20 wrote: post #360
ktallett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.

My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.

My suggestion was in an ideal world which sadly this isn't. Your issue suggests they aren't tailored for each application, which could potentially be a reason. It is better to show why one project makes you a great fit as opposed to how many projects you have done. Sometimes the person in charge of hiring may not fully have all the expertise in the area they are hiring for.

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

#492

Post by z3t4 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #393
dahart wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw I don’t blame them. I’m not suggesting anyone spend hours researching each company. And I don’t expect candidates to do anything, I’m saying the candidates who do are the ones that tend to land the job, but it’s entirely the candidate’s choice. All it takes is minutes, really. You sound like you’ve been burned. That sucks and I’m sorry, I sympathize. I’m hearing that the job market is very tough right now. A big…

>I’m saying the candidates who do are the ones that tend to land the job, but it’s entirely the candidate’s choice. All it takes is minutes, really. Well, everyone has different experiences. I never felt like knowing about a company put me ahead in my early days. I guess I have a dump stat in Charisma (not surprised). Like you said, the market is competitive. No one's going to take the nice guy over the one who blitz…

My experience is that I've applied to companies where I was a perfect fit, but did not get an interview, and then I've applied to companies where I had not used any of the tech stack and still got an interview... There's a lot of wierd reason, one common is that they want to hire a specific person, maybe even in the company already, but they still need to post a job ad due to company policy. Or one where I got an interview even though I had no experience in their tech stack they explained they need to make at least 5 interviews before they hire and they had already found their guy so they interviewed other non qualified so that their candidate/friend would stand out as the most qualified... So never take hiring personally. It's just random. Do enough work to get an interview, many employers are very good at judging if you will fit in or not, so just leave it for them to figure that out, and be yourself. And don't take it personally when you get rejected. There's still a shortage of experienced software engineers, and lots of jobs to apply to Also if you get a bad feeling, just back out. It's when you've started turning down offers you have become good enough at searching/interviewing, and that's when you will find something great. Try to have at least 3 offers before you accept one.

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

#493

Post by fhd2 »

mnky9800n wrote: post #426
fhd2 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have a consultancy - we mostly do development, but I also do quite a bit of "consulting CTO" work. Quite often, that means helping with hiring.

But hiring is nowhere near my full time job, thankfully :D

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

#494

Post by fhd2 »

adastra22 wrote: post #436
fhd2 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not? Plenty of large organizations hire this way. My first employer is bigger than any FAANG company by head count, and they hired this way. Why is big tech different?

Well, I respect the scale and speed. My process was still working fine at ~5 per month. I have doubts it'd work with orders of magnitude more. There's a lot of intuition and finesse in there, that is probably difficult to blindly delegate. Plus, big companies have very strong internal forces to eliminate intuition in favour of repeatable, measurable processes.

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

#495

Post by notpushkin »

hibikir wrote: post #367
b112 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be fine with the GPT side of things, as long as I could somehow inject poor answers, and see if the interviewee notices and corrects.

There's more than one possible AI on the other end, so crafting something that will not annoy a typical candidate, but will lead every AI astray seems pretty difficult.

Maybe you could allow using AI, but only through the interviewer-provided interface. That interface would allow using any model the candidate likes, but before sending the response it will inject errors into the code (either randomly or through another AI prompt).

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

#496

Post by dalmo3 »

random_walker wrote: post #72
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 love these kind of interviews. This would very closely simulate real world on-job Performance.

If I had to do real world on-job coding while someone looks over my shoulder at all times (i.e. screensharing), I'd be flipping burgers.

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

#498

Post by doix »

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.

For me, getting what's in my head out onto the screen as fast as possible increases my productivity immensely.

Maybe it's because I'm used to working with constant interruptions, but until what I want is on the screen, I can't start thinking about the next thing. E.g. if I'm making a new class, I'm not thinking about the implementation of the inner functions until I've got the skeleton of the class in place. The faster I get each stage done, the faster I work.

It's why I devoted a lot of time getting efficient at vim, setting up snippets for my languages, etc. AI is the next stage of that in my mind.

Maybe you can keep thinking about next steps while stuff is "solved" in your head but not on the screen. It also depends on the type of work you're doing. I've spent many hours to delete a few lines and change one, obviously AI doesn't help there.

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

#500

Post by fhd2 »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #474
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…

How does that process handle people who have been out of work for a few years and can pass a take-home technical challenge (without a LLM) but cannot remember a convincing level of detail on the specifics of their past work? I’ve been experiencing your style of interview a lot and running up against this obstacle, even though I genuinely did the work I’m claiming to have done. Especially people with ADHD don’t rememb…

I can't say I've interviewed someone to which this applies - unfortunately! Probably just doesn't get surfaced by my channels.

I would definitely not expect someone out of work for a while to have any meaningful side projects. I mean, if they do, that's cool, but I bet the sheer stress of not having a job kills a lot of creativity and productivity. Haven't been there, so I can only imagine.

For such a candidate, I'd probably want to offer them a time limited freelance gig rather quickly, so I can just see what they work like. For people who are already in a job, it's more important to ensure fit before they quit there, but your scenario opens the door to not putting that much pressure on the interview process.

Post reply on HN