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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?

#631

Post by linsomniac »

grayhatter wrote: post #581
linsomniac wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 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. I'm unwilling to write code^1 that's not correct, or at least as correct as I'm able to make it. The single most frustrating thing in my daily life is dealing with the PoC other devs cast into the world that has more bugs than features, because they can't t…

Have you tried asking LLMs to clean up your code, making it more obvious, adding test harnesses, adding type hints or argument documentation, then reviewing it and finding out what you can learn from what it is suggesting?

Last year I took a piece of code from Ansible that was extremely difficult to understand. It took me the better part of a day to do a simple bug fix in it. So I reimplemented it, using several passes of having it implement it, reviewing it, asking LLMs to make it simpler, more obvious code. For your review: https://github.com/linsomniac/symbolicmode/blob/main/src/sym...

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

#632

Post by linsomniac »

jenscow wrote: post #563
linsomniac wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think you're making my point for me. Isn't it "taking crazy pills" if you use it incorrectly, and then stand on that experience as proof that other devs are insane? :-)

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

#633

Post by linsomniac »

ookdatnog wrote: post #567
linsomniac wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

IMHO, still feels like a superpower in the editor when I type "def validate_session(sess" and it says "Are you wanting to type: `ion_data: dict[str, str]`?" Especially as the type annotations get more convoluted.

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

#634

Post by michaelt »

adastra22 wrote: post #608
michaelt wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interestingly large companies will often have a hiring pipeline that isn't specific to a single team and role.

In the past Google made a lot of hires where they first give people a phone screen, then five in-person whiteboard interviews, then the interviewers send a dossier to a committee, then that committee decides whether to hire or not, then "team matching" lets hiring managers see the resumes.

So the interviews are basically conducted by random people, who have no idea what team the candidate will end up on.

Of course if you look at the number of employees Google has, and the average tenure, you can see why they make hires like Ikea makes chairs.

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

#635

Post by yoyohello13 »

weebull wrote: post #487
yoyohello13 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See THIS is a usage that makes sense to me. Using AI to manipulate existing code like this is great. I save a ton of time by pasting in a json response and saying something like “turn this into Data classes” makes api work so fast. On the other hand I really don’t understand devs that say they are using AI for ALL their code.

So if you were to do a transformation like that you'd cut the code and paste it into a new function. Then you'd modify that function to make the abstraction work. An LLM will rewrite the code in the new form. It's not cut/paste/edit. It's a rewrite every time with the old code as reference. Each rewrite is a chance to add subtle bugs, so I take issue with the description of LLMs "working on existing code". They don't…

> It's a rewrite every time with the old code as reference.

As far as I'm aware, tools like Aider don't do this, it does targeted changes.

The way I do it "copy/paste into chat interface", I just have the relevant context and just change the parts required.

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

#636

Post by red-iron-pine »

freilanzer wrote: post #469
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…

> What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me? Simple, don't pick subjects, such as religion, sexuality, etc. It's not that deep.

and like you said it's not that deep. pick something light.

a candidate that pulls the religious thing now is one that's going to drag their crazy shit into the office later. or complete misread the room / culture now, and in the future.

like it's a technical job interview, talk about something vague technical, even if it's just how the convection settings work in your oven.

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

#637

Post by red-iron-pine »

sbarre wrote: post #552
jkaplowitz wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

one of my buddies was a navy psychologist assistant. was a corpsman (navy medic) who moved that way.

dude maintained a "me wall" of achievements, commendation medals, etc. plus a file full of other crap. he mentioned he got a lot of promotions because you have a section to fill out where you describe all the shit you did over the least year, and he always came with examples...

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

#638

Post by ninetyninenine »

swiftcoder wrote: post #604
ninetyninenine wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Yeah it’s not really career choices. The code should be properly done so that it can hit multiple automated test targets.

It’s a symptom less of the career choice and more of poor coding practices.

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

#639

Post by sdesol »

code_for_monkey wrote: post #620
sdesol wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLMs are much more eager to please and to write lots of code. My process right now when working LLMs is to do the following: - Create problem and solution statement - Create requirements and user stories - Create architecture - Create skeleton code - Map the skeleton code - Create the full code At every step, where I don't need the full code, the LLM will start coding and I need to stop it and add "Do not gener…

one of my biggest issues with the LLM is how it always wants to give me a mountain of code. A lot of the time Im using it for react, and it always gives me a full component no matter how much I specify I just want the method. It will not remember this for more than one message and will go back to giving me as much code as possible.

Yeah, it almost feels like you are talking to somebody with OCD. The frustrating part is, output tokens are usually a lot more expensive than input tokens, so they are wasting energy and money :-). Also, the more they generate, the greater the chance it will create attention issues as the conversation progresses.

This is why I built my chat app to let me manipulate LLM responses. If I feel it is not worth knowing, I'll just erase parts of it to ensure the conversation doesn't get side tracked. Or I will go back to the original user message and modify it to say

### IMPORTANT

- Do not generate more code than required.

The nice thing about LLM conversations are, every time you chat, the LLM treats it as a first time conversation, so this trick will work if the model is smart enough.

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

#640

Post by dahart »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #601
dahart wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not reality. Not all companies have 1000 candidates. Not all companies have even 30 candidates.
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