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

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

#601

Post by ninetyninenine »

dahart wrote: post #170
halfcat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you’re applying to hundreds, or thousands of jobs. Unless you know someone, it’s a quantity game.

I’ve screened a lot of resumes and given a lot of interviews over the years, and it’s usually obvious when people are trying the scattershot approach, they just don’t match. I feel like treating it like a quantity game is unlikely to improve your odds, and tbh spamming out hundreds or thousands of applications sounds like a miserable way to spend time. You could spend that time meeting and talking to people. I’ve nev…

You don’t understand reality. If all companies have 1000 candidates your only approach is scattershot.

The only time the bespoke approach works is if you have like 30 candidates only. But then there are still issues here because the candidate is still one in thirty so if he does a bespoke approach 30 times it takes an inordinate amount of time.

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

#602

Post by ninetyninenine »

dahart wrote: post #180
wsintra2022 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?

Interviews aren’t about solving problems. The interviewer isn’t interested in a problem’s solution, they’re interested in seeing how you get to the answer. They’re about trying to find out if you’ll be a good hire, which notably includes whether you’re willing and interested in spending effort learning. They already know how to use AI, they don’t need you for that. They want to know that you’ll contribute to the team…

Yeah everyone says that they are interested in how you got there but this isn’t true in reality from my experience. Your bias inevitably judges them on the solution because you have many other candidates who got the correct solution.

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

#604

Post by swiftcoder »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #586
swiftcoder wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hmm, that is interesting; reading is harder? Much, much harder. Sure, you can skim large volumes of code very quickly. But the type of close reading that is required to spot logic bugs in the small is quite taxing - which is the reason that we generally don't expect code review processes to catch trivial errors, and instead invest in testing.

You should use testing and a debugger for this. Don’t just read code, run it and step through it and observe code as it mutates state.

I think this is great advice for folks who work on software that is well enough contained enough that you can run the entire thing on your dev machine, and it happens to be written in the same language/runtime throughout.

Unfortunately I've made some career choices that mean I've very rarely been in that position - weird mobile hardware dependencies and/or massive clouds of micro services both render this technique pretty complicated to employ in practice.

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

#605

Post by fhd2 »

mnky9800n wrote: post #516
fhd2 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s cool. My main job is being a research scientist but i also work at a computational science consultancy that essentially builds numerical simulations for hire along with other software consultancy jobs. I occasionally have been asked to serve as an outside consultant for hiring data science positions. I’ve been wondering how to grow that a bit into more regular work because I enjoy it. Any thoughts on that?

Well, my contracts pretty much all came through my network, someone recommending me, and then clients recommending me, and so on. Not sure if I just got lucky or if this actually works, but my first step would be to tell some relevant folks you know that you're doing this now, see if they have any advice or know someone who might be interested. Another approach would be to ask the consultancy you work with if they want to add this service you can provide to their portfolio, see if it's something they could sell to existing or new clients.

However, these days, people seem barely OK with paying for a recruiter. They think just because more people than usually are looking, they get to just lean back and great candidates show up.

IMHO, if anything, it got more difficult to hire. More noise to work through, people in existing roles are more reluctant to switch, candidates hustle more because they need a job etc. I absolutely think it's a useful service. But I don't know if it's easy to market.

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

#606

Post by [deleted] »

lordhexd wrote: post #591

Unless it’s for a senior role, why not just find the candidate you and your team can work best with? Skim through CVs and drop the first 20 an email asking them about their last team/boss or their day or to tell you the last thing they learnt. Something personal, the goal is to note their communication style. Pick 10 you feel matches the energy you want. From those 10 get 2 in the office every day for 2 weeks to see…

[deleted]

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

#607

Post by silverlake »

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…

If they pass step 2, the first technical interview is to extend the solution to add/modify features.

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

#608

Post by adastra22 »

michaelt wrote: post #532
adastra22 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When you're operating a small furniture company, your master craftsmen can hand-fit every part. Match up the hole that's slightly too big with the dowel that's slightly too big, which they put to one side the other day. When you're operating a huge furniture company, you want every dowel and every hole the same size. Then any fool can assemble it, and you don't have to waste time and space on a collection of slightly…

That's a nice story, and completely irrelevant. Different orgs scale different ways, and ultimately hiring is done at the team level. You have a vacancy or need on a team to fill. Big org or small org, the situation is the same.

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

#609

Post by [deleted] »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #599
ryandvm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I kind of feel like leetcode interviews are a situation where the employer is cheating. I mean, you're admittedly filtering out a great number of acceptable candidates knowing that if you just find 1 in a 1000, that'll be good enough. It is patently unfair to the individuals that are smart enough to do your work, but poor at some farcical representation of the work. That is cheating. In my opinion, if a…

It’s unfair but it meets their objective of finding a high in candidate. Google admits they do this. The companies that do this only do it because they can. They have to have hundreds of people applying. The companies that don’t do this basically don’t have many people applying.

[deleted]

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

#610

Post by danesparza »

neilv wrote: post #558
Stratoscope wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Rehearsing how to teach something is not a bad thing.

And I'm sure you're going to get different questions about different aspects of the things you're trying to teach from different interviewers. The wonderful thing about this is that it models trying to teach a concept to a fellow coworker. How you handle the questions during the teaching time says a lot about the candidate.

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