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

Have you spent a lot of time trying to hire people? I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees. This perspective smells completely like "If I were in charge, things would be so much better." Guess what? If you were to take your idea and try to lead this change across a 100 people engineering org, there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your ideas and cause dissent. At that point, guess what? You're going to figure out how to hire compliant people who will execute on your strategy.

"talk about their past projects, their past teams, how they learn, how they collaborate"

You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-19 gigs).

If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away.

I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years).

I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc.

And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it.

If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description).

I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.

Well, the challenge involves using a python LLM framework to build a simple RAG system for recipes.

It's not a hidden requirement per se to use LLM assistance, but the candidate should have a good answer ready why they didn't use an LLM to solve the challenge.

I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job.

It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried asking ChatGPT the problem straight up, even though I clarified up front "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."

After just the initial batch of candidates it became clear it was muddying things too much, so I simply forbade using it for the rest of the candidates, and those interviews went much smoother.

My company, a very very large company, is transitioning back to only in-person interviews due to the rampant amount of cheating happening during interviews.

As an interviewer, it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it, when you can very obviously hear them typing, then watching their eyes move as they read an answer from another screen. And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect anyway. I'm happy that we won't have to waste our time on those candidates anymore.