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

641–650 of 735 posts

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

#641

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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?

Of course. Campbell's law[1] applies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

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

#642

Post by descendant »

Aachen wrote: post #375
sweca wrote: post #142

My company actually encourages the use of AI. My interview process was one relatively complex take home, an explanation of my solutions and thinking, then a live "onsite" (via zoom) where I had to code in front of a senior engineer while thinking aloud. If I was incompetent, I could've shoved the problem into o1 on ChatGPT and probably solved the problems, but I wouldn't have been able to provide insight into why I m…

What does onsite mean if it was a video call?

Just a new term used during and after COVID. It comes after the initial 'tech screen' round. They call is 'virtual onsite' sometimes. It involves giving multiple interviews in a very short duration. A positive decision in these 2-3 rounds pushes you forward to the final round with the hiring manager.

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

#643

Post by jkaplowitz »

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…

Yeah, my resume does include a summary of what I did each job, but it sounds like the brag doc idea would involves much more detail.

Honestly, putting those details in writing in a way that I retrain after leaving might leave me vulnerable to claims of violating my corporate NDA. But legalities aside, yes, it would help with these kinds of interview issues - prospectively only of course, not retrospectively.

Annoyingly, it's also exactly the kind of doc that's difficult for people with ADHD to create and maintain rigorously, even though people with ADHD are more likely than average to need the reminders of those details. A lot of ADHD problems are that kind of frustrating catch-22, especially when interacting with a world that is largely designed around more typical brain types.

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

#644

Post by andrewflnr »

Gigachad wrote: post #366
johnnyanmac wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when was this? I can't remember the last time anyone had their phone number publicly displayed on LinkedIn. And now messaging recruiters is a paid feature. The market's only making it more difficult to reach a human.

This was last week. Perhaps the Australian market is different, but I often but not always see the option to physically call.

US here. When I've tried similar tactics in other contexts, I tend to get an answer along the lines of "cool, use the website", and politely trying to get me off the phone. But maybe it's worth a shot. :)

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

#645

Post by the_snooze »

shihab wrote: post #204
paxys wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads? Every alternative I can think of is either worse, or sounds nice but impractical to implement in practice at scale. I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class…

>But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads?

For students specifically, the strongest signal is if they've done research with a past collaborator of mine and my collaborator vouches for them. It's a great signal because it's very high barrier to entry and absolutely does not scale.

Realistically, being able to speak confidently about something they did/built during their education is a decent proxy. If they can handle open-ended follow-up questions like "what did you learn?" and "what trade-offs did you make?" and "how would you tweak it under X different requirements?" then that's a great signal too.

These aren't "gotcha" questions, but they insist on the candidate being reasonably competent and (most importantly) an actual human who can think on their feet.

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

#646

Post by Barrin92 »

fragmede wrote: post #459
Barrin92 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're doing this at least face to face over Zoom and you can't tell that someone is copying answers from their second monitor and throwing ChatGPT explanations at you, you honestly need a better interviewer. I've done a lot of interviews over Zoom, and whenever someone cheats, by passing someone else's work off as their own (the weirdest thing I've ever encountered was someone having a friend on trying to feed th…

If you believe your catch rate is 100%, just because you've managed to identify a couple of people who were really bad at it, you might want to check your priors.

I didn't say my catch rate is 100%. But catching the people who are bad at it is the entire point. I don't care about not catching someone proficient enough they can hold up even in a direct conversation where they have to explain what they did. That's someone who is likely just insecure but smart enough. They still shouldn't cheat, but they're at least clever. I had an old teacher who used to joke that you're allowed to cheat during the exam but you can only bring a small note card, point being that if you put enough effort into preparing your cheating that it fit on the card you were good enough to just take the actual test.

It's the people who have no idea what the hell they're doing and who try to pass of a solution they can't explain and by definition those people you will catch if you know how to interview.

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

#647

Post by jkaplowitz »

fhd2 wrote: post #500
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…

I can't say I've interviewed someone to which this applies - unfortunately! Probably just doesn't get surfaced by my channels. I would definitely not expect someone out of work for a while to have any meaningful side projects. I mean, if they do, that's cool, but I bet the sheer stress of not having a job kills a lot of creativity and productivity. Haven't been there, so I can only imagine. For such a candidate, I'd…

Thanks for being understanding and compassionate about the situation! I like your idea of a time limited freelance gig, though immigration obstacles do sometimes make that quite complicated (as in my current situation). It's way better than not considering that people might have a reason for a resume with gaps or other irregularities which is not being a bad employee.

Beyond immigration types of obstacles, somehow recruiters and hiring managers rarely consider how many bad managers, bad executives, and bad companies there are when evaluating gaps and short tenures in an employee's resume. But equally, discussing those matters during an interview risks being seen as unprofessional and unreasonably negative. "Why did you leave this company?" "Oh, the warnings I got about the leadership from a former employee before I joined turned out to be true, and they didn't want to hear professionally presented necessary feedback about emotional safety in an emergency incident response situation, so they fired me without a single meaningful 1:1 discussion other than trying to assign blame." / "Oh, the CEO was enough of a problem that the investors eventually replaced him in a subsequent funding round despite him being the majority shareholder, but that was long after I had resigned or been fired due to that CEO's particular problems." / "Oh, they communicated in a very idiosyncratic way which didn't work for me and which I haven't seen at any company before or since." / etc. Most of that doesn't fly in an interview, but equally, even if it did, saying too much of that sounds like making up excuses for oneself even when it's 100% true. Same thing for why a job search doesn't succeed quickly.

Ours is a messy and imperfect industry, and it sucks that interview candidates have to pretend otherwise to seem like they'll be reasonable employees. Meanwhile the companies and executives that act in those ways get to present whatever positive and successful image they want, and they get to praise each other for firing fast or cutting costs with attrition or layoffs.

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

#648

Post by jpc0 »

dheera wrote: post #576
axegon_ wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like take home tests are meaningless and I always have. Even more so now with LLMs, though 9/10 times you can tell if it's an LLM-people don't normally put trivial comments in the code such as > // This line prevents X from happening I've seen a number of those. The issue here is that you've already wasted a lot of time with a candidate. So being firmly against take home tests or even leetcode, I think the onl…

If you are evaluating how well people code without LLMs you are likely filtering for the wrong people and you are way behind the times. For most companies, the better strategy would be to explicitly LET them use LLMs and see whether they can accomplish 10X what a coder 3 years ago could accomplish, in the same time. If they accomplish only 1X, that's a bad sign that they haven't learned anything in 3 years about how…

> ... LET them use LLMs and see whether they can accomplish 10X what a coder 3 years ago could accomplish...

Do you seriously expect a 10x improvement with the use of LLMs vs no LLMs? Have you seen this personally, are you 1 10th the developer without an LLM? Or is the coding interview questions you ask or get asked, how to implement quicksort, or something?

Let's make it concrete, do you feel like you could implement a correct concurrent http server in 1/10th the time with an LLM than what you could do it without? Because if you jut let the LLM do the work I could probably find some issue in that code or alternatively completely stump you with an architectural question unless you are already familiar with it, and you should not be having an LLM implement something you couldn't have written yourself.

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

#649

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

zx8080 wrote: post #349
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using AI for interview screeners for nontechnical roles that require knowledge work. The AI interviewing app is very very basic, its just a wrapper put together by an eng, with enough features to prevent cheating. Start with recording the session and blocking right-click, and you are halfway there. Its not hard. The AI app has helped me surface top candidates. I don't even look at resumes anymore. There's no poin…

If there's no independent verification, how do you know it's really top 10? (not middle 10, or random 10?)

because there's scores, and the interview is highly customized and has an answer key that has been tested beforehand by the test creators.

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

#650

Post by titanomachy »

moorow wrote: post #486
titanomachy wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suck in FAANG interviews... it's just something I never practiced. Well, sounds like you know the solution. Or set your sights on a job that interviews a different way. I think it's mostly leetcode "easy", anyway. Maybe some medium. Never seen a hard, except maybe from one smartass at Google (they were not expecting a perfect answer). Out of a dozen technical interviews, I don't think I've ever needed to know a d…

On the other hand, if 20 hours of leetcode practice is all that stands between you and half a million dollars a year, isn't that a pretty good indicator that the interview process isn't hiring based on your skills, talent and education, and instead on something you basically won't encounter in the workplace?

10-20 hours is assuming you’re qualified for the job and just bad at leetcode. I think many qualified people could pass without studying, especially if they’re experienced in presenting or teaching.

If you’re totally unqualified, 20 hours of leetcoding won’t get you a job at Meta.

Post reply on HN