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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?

#681

Post by kamaal »

sage76 wrote: post #546
kamaal wrote: post #432

Earlier 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…

Most of the time, those take home tests cannot be done in 2 hours. I remember one where I wasn't even done with the basic setup in 2 hours, installing various software/libraries and debugging issues with them.

People mostly fix some issue, or implement a feature at work. And then somebody outside can do the same in the same time.

In reality they need to look at this like onboarding a new team member.

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

#682

Post by jpc0 »

dheera wrote: post #670
jpc0 wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 implemen…

> implement a correct concurrent http server in 1/10th the time with an LLM than what you could do it without Absolutely fucking yes.

In that case, could you begin proving that point by having it write an http request parser. Let's make it easy and have it require content length header and no support for chunked encoding at first. Csn pick any language you like but since thats such critical infrastructure it must export a C API. Let's also restrict it to HTTP 1/1.1 for the sake of time.

Concidering this would probably at most take a days work to get at least a workable prototype done if not a full implementation, using an AI you should be able to do it in a lunch break.

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

#683

Post by eastbound »

cuuupid wrote: post #298
twoparachute45 wrote: post #70

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 an…

So far 3 of the 11 people we interviewed have been clearly using ChatGPT for the >>behavioral We actually allow using AI in our in-person technical interviews, but our questions are worded to fail safety checks. We'll talk about smuggling nuclear weapons, violent uprising, staging a coup, manufacturing fentanyl, etc. (within the context of system design) and that gives us really good mileage on weeding out those who…

> if you cannot hold a basic conversation about your life without using AI then something is terribly wrong.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of Google Docs and Gmail forcing full AI, is a generation of people who can’t even talk about themselves, and can’t articulate even a single email.

Is it necessary? Perhaps. Will it make the world boring? Yes.

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

#684

Post by randomNumber7 »

bilekas wrote: post #419
randomNumber7 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are. Only noobs do this, experts using a llm are way more efficient. (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years)

> (Unless you work like with the same language and libraries for years) I'm not sure what you mean here? Are you saying that if you work with the same language for years that you're some how not proficient with using LLMs?

The advantage of LLMs is smaller if you know everything by heart.

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

#685

Post by meigwilym »

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?

I think the point is to remove the adversarial aspect and therefore see how they react when not under pressure. I wouldn't be surprised if OP does warn their candidates about it.

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

#686

Post by feoren »

arthens wrote: post #663
feoren wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High level - having a discussion with the LLM about different approaches and the tradeoffs between each I honestly can't imagine this. If the AI says "However, a downside of approach B is that it takes O(n^2) time instead of the optimal O(n log(n))", what do you think the odds are that it literally made up both of those facts? Because I'd be surprised if they were any lower than 30%. It's an extremely confident bul…

> I honestly can't imagine this. If the AI says "However, a downside of approach B is that it takes O(n^2) time instead of the optimal O(nlog(n))", what do you think the odds are that it literally made up both of those facts? Because I'd be surprised if they were any lower than 30%. It's an extremely confident bullshitter, and you're going to use it to talk about engineering tradeoffs!? Being confidently incorrect is…

But if I have a coworker who bullshits 30% of the time, I get them off my project. Because they too are just slowing everything down.

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

#687

Post by swiftcoder »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #638
swiftcoder wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, we have automated tests out the wazoo. Mostly unit tests, or single-service tests with mocked dependencies.

Due to unfortunate constraints of operating in the real world, one can only run integration tests in-situ, as it were (on real hardware, with real dependencies).

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

#688

Post by bdangubic »

datavirtue wrote: post #673
bdangubic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is very strange statement. in what world did AI possibly shift power to the applicant?? applicants have almost never been in shittier position than they are now and things are getting much, much worse by the day

The applicant can use AI to build CVs, tailor them and submit more, faster. Negating a lot of the automated algorithms that were being used to filter (torture) applicants.

and what exactly do you think is processing those AI-built CVs…? it is like sex, more and faster does not in any way imply better :)

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

#689

Post by hyperdimension »

csense wrote: post #260
alexjplant wrote: post #259

Earlier 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…

> an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday That's...oddly specific.

I thought it was nicely poetic.
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