Not everyone is using AI; and speaking as one such developer, interviewing is not fun.
Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
561–570 of 735 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yes, they are! You just need a small file, like a point file. Any gasheads remember those? And a single edge razor blade or the like to lift the reed. To raise the pitch, you file the end of the reed, making it lighter so it vibrates faster. To lower the pitch, you file near the attached end of the reed. I am not sure on the physics of this and would appreciate anyone's insight. The specific tuning I've done many…
Re: lower pitch, I'd hazard a guess that you're basically reducing the restoring force, so the resonant frequency goes down. Think of the attachment point as a bunch of springs in parallel; you snip a few of them and the overall spring constant is reduced. Or another way to think of it: Imagine you had a reed of a given width and then added mass to the end by making it wider at the non-attached end. You'd expect the…
I'm sometimes tuning accordions, which is rather similar, but if you want to lower the tone by a lot, you can plop some solder close to the tip of the reed.
It's pretty clear why that's the opposite of filing off material close to the tip, so obviously the tone goes lower.
In my mental image, filing close to the base of the reed gives the reed a similar shape as putting extra material next to the tip (thinner at the base, thicker next to the tip), and that's why it behaves the same.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#563Earlier 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.
>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 cou…
> took me ~15 minutes to get working
You didn't blindly use it, you still used your expertise. You gave it a high quality prompt and you understood the reply enough to adjust it.
In other words, you used it correctly. It complimented your expertise, rather than replace it.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#564The 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…
I immediately want to learn about all these cool things you listed.
I work as a developer and as an interviewer (both freelance). Now I want to integrate your point 3. into my interviews, but not to choose better candidates, just to learn new stuff I never thought about before.
It is your fault that I see now this risk in my professional life, coming at me. I could get addicted to "teach me something". 'Hey candidate, we have 90 minutes. Just forget about that programming nonsense and teach me cool stuff'
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#565I do not understand the obsession with proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that an interviewer can code.
Not being able to code is by far the easiest failure mode to deal with and I can deal with it more quickly by looking at resumes and firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly.
What is much harder to detect is the person who gives up at the first sign of trouble. Or someone who likes to over abstract everything. Or someone who likes to spend all day nitpicking PRs.
The absolute most damaging employee is the technical tornado midlevel who has prolific output and is good at figuring out how to get PRs through the code review process.
I can only bring to begin imagine the kind of damage a person like that could do with an LLM, an inattentive manager, and a buddy willing to rubber stamp PRs.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#566Earlier 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.
I don't think this approach favors the talkers / story spinners too much. It is the other way around!
It is a nerd test. You can get every nerd talking if you ask them to tell you about a special skill or project they really care about.
I remember quite a lot of these lunch conversations:
Me: Hey, what's up? Do you like the salad?
Introvert Nerd: Mmmm-Hmmm.
Me: Great weather outside!
Introvert Nerd: Mmmm-Hmmm.
Me: I was hiking last weekend in the mountains and got caught in a storm.
Introvert Nerd: Mmmm-Hmmm.
Me: Does your work project proceed well?
Introvert Nerd: Mmmm-Hmmm.
Me: I've heard that you regularly cook medieval dishes and you created a food medievality detector using a Raspberry Pi and a horseshoe?
Introvert Nerd: Oh, yes! You know, measuring the medievality of a dish is not as simple as it sounds! Obviously, there are no American foods like tomatoes or potatoes allowed, but did you ever think which spices were common in Europe in the High Middle Ages and why that changed in the Late Middle Ages... ...
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#567Earlier 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.
>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 cou…
I agree with your assessment in the situation you describe: greenfielding a project with tools you are unfamiliar with. For me LLMs have worked best when my progress is hindered primarily by a lack of knowledge or familiarity. If I'm working on a project where I'm comfortable with my tools and APIs, they can still be useful from time to time but I wouldn't call it a "superpower", more like a regular productivity tool (less impactful than an IDE, I would say). Of course this comment could be outdated in a few months, but that's what it feels like to me in the here and now.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#568Earlier 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.
In my experience the lack of correctness and accuracy (I have seen a lot of calls to hallucinated apis), is made up from the "eagerness" to fill out boilerplate.
It's indeed like having a super junior, drunk intern working for you if we are using the gps analogy.
Some work is done but you have to go over it and fix a bunch of things.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I think the better word is tradeoff since there are no perfect data structures for each job. The hasmap has the advantage of O(1) access time but the drawback of memory usage, an unsorted nature and the depends on a good hashing function to minimize collisions. A vector is also O(1), but it has an upfront memory cost that cannot be avoided. A map has a O(Log(n)) access cost, but has less memory usage, is sorted by nature and the comparison function is easier to implement.
Three similar data structures, but each with its own tradeoffs.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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. The biggest problem with the take home tests are not people who don't show up due to not being able to finish the assignment, B…
We did a lot of these assignments and no one assumed that they will be hired if they complete it. Its about how you communicate your intent. I always told the candidates, that the goal of the task is 1. to see some code and if some really basic stuff is on point and 2. that you can argue with someone about his or her code.
If I have a public portfolio of existing projects on GitHub, couldn't that replace an assignment? Choose one of my projects (or let me choose one), and let's discuss about it during the review interview.