If your interview process can be solved by AI - it only means your interview process sucks.
Which is the case for >90% of the companies I interviewed with (big and small)
Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
721–730 of 735 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#722The 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…
Are you hiring now?
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
Projects are personal projects, or at least projects in which you did a distinguishable effort. They don't have to be public to the whole world, you can have links that are only in your resume. But if they're on GitHub, they have to be public, since there aren't unlisted repositories.
Github does allow private repositories.
Yes, but you'd have to invite each interviewer by their GitHub handle.
An unlisted repository would be one that is public to those who know the URL.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#724[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#725[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It is not possible to perform an interview in ~4 hours such that someone sufficiently engages in what the job “actually entails”. >> ... leetcode interview are an imperfect but relatively decent proxy. I think all this is just the status quo that should be challenged instead of being justified. When I conduct interviews (environment: a FAANG company), I focus on (a) fundamental understanding and (b) practical prob…
> never gone wrong How do you know? Every interview you conduct is for your team? And you’re a manager who participates in their annual review? No one bats 1000%. > I focus on (a) fundamental understanding and (b) practical problems. What do you ask? If you want to challenge the status quo you have to offer a replicable alternative. Not hand waive.
>> How do you know? Every interview you conduct is for your team?
My apologies. I should have been more careful in making the claim. You are right in challenging me**.
>> What do you ask? If you want to challenge the status quo you have to offer a replicable alternative
I cannot share the specific problems publicly as then those become available for candidates to practice out, whereas the idea is to give them a fresh problem to think about. Further, the list of interviewers is often made available to the candidates ahead of the time, which can create a loophole as interviewers tend to have a relatively small set of problems they keep repeating for different candidates***.
In general however, I always use real-life problems. Similar examples from text books may perhaps be: (a) Find the day of the week for a given date, (b) Output a given number in textual form (e.g., 14630 -> Fourteen thousand, six hundred and thirty), (c) etc. Most of the problems I pose are motivated from actual use cases, while the remaining are taken from my own prior interviews as a candidate. As I noted before, each one is at best Big-O[N] in time complexity, just like the Fizz Buzz problem. I have brought in more complex ones only when testing for specialized skills for specialized positions.
I also focus a lot on fundamentals. There have been candidates hired for my own teams which could not fully solve the problem I posed, but who however were unambiguously going in the right direction and would not say anything wrong or stupid during their reasoning towards it. I chose to go ahead with them with some risks in my mind, however, these people proved to be stellar in performance. When fundamentals are understood well, gaps can be picked up on the job as well.
I still do stand by my original assertion that proxy problems can be avoided for interviewing. In general, the best method to solve a problem is to solve that problem itself and not another.
** Appendix: Here're the actual data points:
- For interviews within my own team where I have been an interviewer, my claim likely holds. However, this is a small number of hires (say around six-eight) so the error margins would be large. Also, I would not have information about false-rejects, hence '100% accuracy' cannot be claimed even in theory.
- I have been a interview 'bar raiser' at Amazon. Bar Raisers at Amazon are people highly trusted for interview outcome decisions and process control.
*** I have even had cases where (a) someone interviewed a candidate for a second time after a time gap and posed exactly the same problem, (b) a recruiter leaked out questions an interviewer asked frequently to the candidate.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. In-person interviews, second round comes with a plane ticket. This used to be the norm.
Yes, that's eventually what will happen, but it becomes quite expensive, especially for smaller companies, and well, they might not even have an office to conduct the interview in if they're a remote company. It's simply best to hire slow and fire fast, you save more money that way over bringing in every viable candidate to an in-person interview.
If you're a small company you can't afford to fire people. The cost in lost productivity is immense, so termination is a last resort.
Likewise with hiring; at a small company you're looking to fill an immediate need and are losing money every day the role isn't filled. You wouldn't bring in every viable candidate, you'd bring in the first viable candidate.
FAANG hiring practices assume a budget far past any exit point in your mind.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's eventually what will happen, but it becomes quite expensive, especially for smaller companies, and well, they might not even have an office to conduct the interview in if they're a remote company. It's simply best to hire slow and fire fast, you save more money that way over bringing in every viable candidate to an in-person interview.
If you're a small company you can't afford to fire people. The cost in lost productivity is immense, so termination is a last resort. Likewise with hiring; at a small company you're looking to fill an immediate need and are losing money every day the role isn't filled. You wouldn't bring in every viable candidate, you'd bring in the first viable candidate. FAANG hiring practices assume a budget far past any exit poin…
Indeed, so what's the solution? How can a startup afford to hire anyone these days with essentially AI + employee fraud?
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a small company you can't afford to fire people. The cost in lost productivity is immense, so termination is a last resort. Likewise with hiring; at a small company you're looking to fill an immediate need and are losing money every day the role isn't filled. You wouldn't bring in every viable candidate, you'd bring in the first viable candidate. FAANG hiring practices assume a budget far past any exit poin…
Indeed, so what's the solution? How can a startup afford to hire anyone these days with essentially AI + employee fraud?
They'd check their network for a seed engineer who can recognize talented people by talking to them.
To put the whole concern in a nutshell: If AI was good enough to fool a seasoned engineer in an interview, that engineer would already be using the AI themselves for work and not need to hire an actual body.
Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, so what's the solution? How can a startup afford to hire anyone these days with essentially AI + employee fraud?
They'd check their network for a seed engineer who can recognize talented people by talking to them. To put the whole concern in a nutshell: If AI was good enough to fool a seasoned engineer in an interview, that engineer would already be using the AI themselves for work and not need to hire an actual body.
Not exactly because AI can excel at rote Leetcode problems by being dismal at actual work. This is in fact exactly the state of today's LLMs.