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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?

#71

Post by htrp »

b112 wrote: post #47
ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I'd be fine with the GPT side of things, as long as I could somehow inject poor answers, and see if the interviewee notices and corrects.

the trick is to phrase the problem in a way that GPT4 will always give the incorrect answer (due to vagueness of your problem) and that multiple rounds of guiding/correcting are needed to solve.

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

#72

Post by random_walker »

ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I love these kind of interviews. This would very closely simulate real world on-job Performance.

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

#73

Post by hackable_sand »

b112 wrote: post #44
satvikpendem wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff. I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a…

This is called fraud, and it is a crime. People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past. If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse. People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time. So you create an interview process that can only be…

You want to coerce work through violence?

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

#74

Post by mvdtnz »

danielbln wrote: post #66
satvikpendem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with AI. We can no longer afford not to use LLMs for engineering, as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right, so candidates should show how they use LLMs. They need to be able to explain the code of course, and answer questions about it, but for us it's a negative mark of a candidate proclaims that they don't use LLMs. Do you state this upfront or is it s…

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.

Ah so you expect mind readers who can divine something from your brain that goes against 99.99% of interviewers' practices and would get them instantly disqualified from an overwhelming majority of interviews. Nice work good luck finding candidates.

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

#75

Post by ghaff »

vunderba wrote: post #4

I mentioned this in a different related post but there seems to be a pretty sad lack of basic integrity in the tech world where it's become a point of pride to develop and use apps which allow an applicant to blatantly cheat during interviews using LLMs. As a result, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on-site" interviews. The funny thing about this is that these ar…

Largely past COVID it seems like sheer laziness or cheapness not to conduct in-person interviews for a professional job other than a short-term project after essentially an initial screen for all sorts of reasons that have little to do with cheating. I don’t care if the job is largely remote.

As someone else noted, this used to be utterly standard. And frankly I’d probably just pass on someone who balked. Plenty of fish in the sea.

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

#76

Post by dakiol »

nouveaux wrote: post #62
lolinder wrote: post #52

The traditional tech interview was always designed to optimize for reliably finding someone who was willing to do what they were told even if it feels like busywork. As a rule someone who has the time and the motivation to brush up on an essentially useless skill in order to pass your job interview will likely fit nicely as a cog in your machine. AI doesn't just change the interviewing game by making it easy to cheat…

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…

My take is:

- “big” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft came up with these types of tech interviews. And there it seems pretty clear that for most of their positions they are looking for cogs

- The vast majority of tech companies have just copied what “big” tech is doing, including tech interviews. These companies may not be looking for cogs, but they are using an interview process that’s not suitable for them

- Very few companies have their own interview process suitable for them. These are usually small companies and therefore the number of engineers in such companies is negligible to be taken into account (most likely, less than 1% of the audience here work at such companies)

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

#77

Post by wccrawford »

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…

When I was interviewing entry level programmers at my last job, we gave them an assignment that should only take a few hours, but we basically didn't care about the code at all.

Instead, we were looking to see if they followed instructions, and if they left anything out.

I never had a chance to test it out, since we hadn't hired anyone new in so long, but ChatGPT/etc would almost always fail this exam because of how bad it is at making sure everything was included.

And bad programmers also failed it. It always left us with a few candidates that paid attention, and from there we figure if they can do that, they can learn the rest. It seemed to work quite well.

I was recently laid off from that company, and now I'm realizing that I really want to see what current-day candidates would turn in. Oh well.

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

#78

Post by staticautomatic »

ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I did this while hiring last year and the number of candidates who got stuff wrong because they were too proud to just look up the answer was shocking.

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

#80

Post by gtirloni »

htrp wrote: post #71
b112 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be fine with the GPT side of things, as long as I could somehow inject poor answers, and see if the interviewee notices and corrects.

the trick is to phrase the problem in a way that GPT4 will always give the incorrect answer (due to vagueness of your problem) and that multiple rounds of guiding/correcting are needed to solve.

That's pretty good because it can exhaust the context window quickly and then it starts spiraling out of control, which would require the candidate to act.
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