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?

#521

Post by anonzzzies » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:10 AM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #509

anonzzzies wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we are not talking about large volumes of code here; we are talking about; LLM generates something, you check it and close read it to spot logic bugs and either fix yourself, ask the LLM or approve. It is very puzzling to me how this is more work/taxing than writing it yourself unless for very specific examples; Examples from every day reality in my company; writing 1000s of lines of react frontend code is all LL…

> writing 1000s of lines of react frontend code Maybe we just located the actual problem in this scenario.

Shame we cannot combine the two threads we are talking about, but our company/clients structure do not allow us to do this differently (quickly; our clients have existing systems with different frontend tech; they are all large corps with many external and internal devs which built some 'framework' on top of whatever frontend they are using; we cannot abstract/library-fy to re-use across clients). I would if I could. And this is actually not a problem (outside it being a waste to which I agree) as we have never delivered more for happier clients in our existence (which is around 25 years now) than in 2024 because of that. Clients see the frontend and being able to over-deliver there is excellent.

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

#522

Post by neilv » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:10 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…

> 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.

You need to do this to establish some baseline competency... for junior hires with no track record?

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

#523

Post by shafkathullah » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

it makes sense, because interview questions often lack novelty, it's usually very repeated, and almost all AI is very good at these, i think asking to switch of AI and doing a live coding or thinking outloud is the way forward. or else just give them a sample story point and see how well they respond, if they can do it well means they can work well in the company.

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

#524

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:17 AM UTC

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 gave candidates the option to teach me something, if they wanted to.

As you can see from the examples I gave, what they taught me was completely up to them.

It was just a fun exercise that I and every candidate enjoyed.

Forgive me, but I just don't see the problem here.

If you did decide to teach you something about the Quran, that would be great!

I don't know enough about these holy books, and I always welcome a chance to learn more.

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

#525

Post by krageon » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:21 AM UTC

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…

This is outrage bait you have fallen prey to. Now you're spreading it. You're better than this.

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

#526

Post by axegon_ » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:23 AM UTC

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…

"Drawbacks" was the wrong word to use here, "potential problems" is what I meant - collisions. Normally a follow up question: how do you solve those. But drawbacks too: memory usage - us developers are pretty used to having astronomical amounts of computational resources at our disposals but more often than not, people don't work on workstations with 246gb of ram.

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

#527

Post by Stratoscope » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

rvba wrote: post #472

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…

This post is some unintentional satire how IBM operates (nobody invents anything in IBM anymore). The opening question is a copy of what was done before (probably by someone who doenst work at IBM anymore) and all the new stuff is stolen from outsiders.

Seriously? I can assure you with 100% certainty that the most important point - "teach me something" - was entirely my own innovation.

I am tempted to take some offense at your comment. But I have to assume that you mean well.

You are correct that I don't work for IBM any more. What does that have to do with anything?

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

#528

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:27 AM UTC

krageon wrote: post #525

radium_raven wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is outrage bait you have fallen prey to. Now you're spreading it. You're better than this.

[deleted]

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

#529

Post by jaggederest » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:27 AM UTC

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…

Companies with armies of attack lawyers riding helicopter gunships don't make great targets for this kind of thing, in general. I shudder to think about trying to take Apple or Disney to court.

It's somewhat overblown - obviously anyone can try to submit a demand letter about anything. My experience with legal in the hiring process is they want to avoid obvious own goals, and document the process so that clear reasoning can be expressed. Then, unless you really do something obviously discriminatory, you can tell people who claim they've been discriminated against to go pound sand.

There are lots of good tactical reasons to settle claims like that, so lawyers may advise you to settle, but if you're of the "we don't negotiate" mindset, in my experience most lawyers are quite happy to gear up for a fight with the right groundwork in place.

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

#530

Post by Sammi » Mon, Feb 03, 2025, 11:38 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #336

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…

I don't follow this take. ChatGPT outputted a bug subtle enough to be overlooked by you and your colleague and your test suite, and that means it's not ready for prime time? The day when generative AI might hope to completely handle a coding task isn't here yet - it doesn't know your full requirements, it can't run your integration tests, etc. For now it's a tool, like a linter or a debugger - useful sometimes and no…

Yes and this means it doesn't replace anyone or make someone who isn't able to code able to code. It just means it's a tool for people who already know how to code.