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

551–560 of 735 posts

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

#551

Post by sbarre »

roenxi wrote: post #536
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…

(3) is biasing the process strongly in favour of people who spin a good story. If you're looking for a certain team culture then OK but this is going to neatly screen out anyone who just wants to do their job well and doesn't particularly know how to sell the extra-curriculars they have.

That person can teach OP something about code then? They said it doesn't have to be work-related, but it can be.

I don't know that many programmer/developer jobs where you can just put your headphones on and code without ever talking to another person.

Being able to explain/teach your work is part of "doing the job well" for a developer (IMO).

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

#552

Post by sbarre »

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…

This is slightly tangential to your questions, but to address the "remembering details about your past work", I've long-encouraged the developers I mentor to keep a log/doc/diary of their work.

If nothing else, it's a useful tool when doing reviews with your manager, or when you're trying to evaluate your personal growth.

It comes in really handy when you're interviewing or looking for a new job.

Julia Evans calls it a "brag doc": https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

It doesn't have to be super detailed either. I tell people to write 50% about what the work was, and 50% about what the purpose/value of the work was.. That tends to be a good mix of details and context.

Writing in it once a month, or once a sprint, is enough. Even if it's just a paragraph or two..

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

#553

Post by linsomniac »

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…

>it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub.

That sounds like a lot of developers I've worked with.

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

#554

Post by wakawaka28 »

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.

A lot of these people also have a policy that even one person can fail you. So if you do 8 interviews with 2 people each, then there's up to 20 people in the process that can ruin it for you.

I think LLM performance on previously seen questions like interview questions is too good for it to be allowed. I wouldn't mind someone using an IDE or API docs, but you have to draw the line somewhere. It's like how you can't use a calculator that can do algebra on a calculus test. It just doesn't accomplish the goal of testing anything if you use too much tech, and using the current LLMs that all suck in general but can nail these questions that have a million examples online is bad. I would much rather see someone consult online references for information than to see them use an LLM.

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

#555

Post by the_snooze »

roenxi wrote: post #536
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…

(3) is biasing the process strongly in favour of people who spin a good story. If you're looking for a certain team culture then OK but this is going to neatly screen out anyone who just wants to do their job well and doesn't particularly know how to sell the extra-curriculars they have.

A big part of any engineering job is casual technical communication. This seems like it's entirely fair line of questioning. And the candidate gets to pick their strongest topic. What more do you want?

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

#556

Post by porridgeraisin »

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…

> vim > LLM

I use both :)

Vim has a way to run shell programs with your selection as standard input as you'd know, and it will replace the selection with stdout.

So I type in my prompt e.g "mock js object array with 10 items each having name age and address" do `V!ollama run whatever` for example and it will fill it in there.

Now this is blocking and I have a hacky way to run it async and fill it in based on marks later in my vimrc. Neovim really since I use jobstart().

This also works with lots of other stuff, like quick code/mock generation e.g sometimes instead of asking an LLM I just write javascript/python inline and `vap!node`/python on it.

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

#558

Post by neilv »

Stratoscope wrote: post #453
asalahli wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the 3rd point! I might start using that in my future interviews

Please report back when you do! I don't remember how I came up with the idea. Maybe I just like learning things. One candidate even wrote after their interview, "that was fun!" Have you ever had a candidate say that? This was the moment when I realized I might be on to something. :-) Interviews are too often an adversarial thing: "Are you good enough for us?" But the real question is would we enjoy working together a…

If this became popular, wouldn't people start rehearsing for it like they do Leetcode interviews, and it would be become another performance that people focus on and optimize for, rather than on the skills for the job?

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

#559

Post by linsomniac »

DustinBrett wrote: post #287
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 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.

>I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way.

Don't take this the wrong way, but maybe you are.

For example, this weekend I was working on something where I needed to decode a Rails v3 session cookie in Python. I know, roughly, nothing about Rails. In less than 5 minutes ChatGPT gave me some code that took me around 10 minutes to get working.

Without ChatGPT I could have easily spent a couple hours putzing around with tracking down old Rails documentation, possibly involving reading old Rails code and grepping around to find where sessions were generated, hunting for helper libraries, some deadends while I tried to intuit a solution ("Ok, this looks like it's base64 encoded, but base64 decoding kind of works but produces an error. It looks like there's some garbage at the end. Oh, that's a signature, I wonder how it's signed...")

Instead, I asked for an overview of Rails session cookies, a fairly simple question about decoding a Rails session cookie, guided it to Rails v3 when I realized it was producing the wrong code (it was encrypting the cookie, but my cookies were not encrypted). It gave me 75 lines of code that took me ~15 minutes to get working.

This is a "spare time" project that I've wanted to do for over 5 years. Quite simply, if I had to spend hours fiddling around with it, I probably wouldn't have done it; it's not at the top of my todo list (hence, spare time project).

I don't understand how people don't see that AI can give them "superpowers" by leveraging a developers least productive time into providing their highest value.

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

#560

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

_heimdall wrote: post #542

I went through a round of interviews the second half of last year. Interviewing felt the same as it had over the last 5 or 10 years honestly. I had a few coding challenges, all were preinterview and submitted online or shared in a private repo. One company had an online quiz that was actually really interesting to take, the questions were all multiple choice but done really well to tease out someone's experience in a…

I've had the same experience lately, though I think I might be getting lucky with a few of these interviews. The leetcode questions, in particular, have been softball. I do appreciate that...
Post reply on HN