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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?

#81

Post by x0x0 »

Pooge wrote: post #22
vrosas wrote: post #5

As someone currently job searching it hasn’t changed much, besides companies adding DO NOT USE AI warnings before every section. Even Anthropic forces you to write a little “why do you want to work here DO NOT USE AI” paragraph. The irony.

They will very happily use AI to evaluate your profile, though :)

fyi, that's because (from experience) the last job req I publicly posted generated almost 450 responses, and (quite generously) over a third were simply not relevant. It was for a full-stack rails eng. Here, I'm not even including people whose experience was django or even React; I mean people with no web experience at all, or were not in the time zone requested. Another 20% or so were nowhere near the experience level (senior) requested either.

The price of people bulk applying with no thought is I have to bulk filter.

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

#82

Post by kmoser »

brianstrimp wrote: post #46
explorigin wrote: post #6

Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate. Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful res…

Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to…

That might be good for newbie developers but for the rest of us it'll end up being the Clippy of AI assistants. If I want to know more about an API I'm using, I'll Google (or ask ChatGPT) for details; I don't need an assistant trying to be helpful and either treating me like a child, or giving me info that maybe right but which I don't need at the moment.

The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.

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

#83

Post by acwan93 »

buggy6257 wrote: post #41
acwan93 wrote: post #40

I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate. The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way. This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response. ...Christ.

Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates.

Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eyebrows and very quickly leads to a rejection. There’s other cases where your written English is flawless but your phone interview indicates you don’t understand the English language compared to when we correspond over email/Indeed/etc.

Mind you, this is all before we even get to the technical knowledge part of any interview.

On a related hire, I am also in the unfortunate position where we may have to let a new CS grad go because it seemed like every code change and task we gave him was fully copy/pasted through ChatGPT. When presented with a simple code performance and optimization bug, he was completely lost on general debugging practices which led our team to question his previous work while onboarding. Using AI isn’t against company policy (see: small team with limited resources), but personally I see over reliance on ChatGPT as much, much worse than blindly following Stack Overflow.

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

#84

Post by Xmd5a »

Shouldn't a portfolio of personal projects be enough ? In the past couple years I:

- adapted Java's Regex engine to work on streams of characters

- wrote a basic parametric geometry engine

- wrote a debugger for an async framework

- did innovative work with respect to whole-codebase transformation using macros

Among other things.

As for ChatGPT in the context of an interview, I'd only use it if I were asked to do changes on a codebase I don't know in limited time.

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

#85

Post by Pooge »

x0x0 wrote: post #81
Pooge wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will very happily use AI to evaluate your profile, though :)

fyi, that's because (from experience) the last job req I publicly posted generated almost 450 responses, and (quite generously) over a third were simply not relevant. It was for a full-stack rails eng. Here, I'm not even including people whose experience was django or even React; I mean people with no web experience at all, or were not in the time zone requested. Another 20% or so were nowhere near the experience lev…

So you allow yourself to use AI in order to save time, but we have to put up with the shit[1] companies make up? That's good, it's for the best if I don't work for a company that thinks so lowly of its potential candidates.

[1]: Including but not limited to: having to manually fill a web form because the system couldn't correctly parse a CV; take-home coding challenges; studying for LeetCode interviews; sending a perfectly worded, boot-licking cover letter.

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

#86

Post by nyrikki »

vunderba wrote: post #24
explorigin wrote: post #6

Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate. Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful res…

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

To add to this, lots of senior people in the consultanting world are brought in under escalations. They often have to hide the fact they are an external resource.

Also if you have a novel or disclosure sensitive passion project, GitHub may be avoided even as a very conservative bright line.

As stated above I think it can be good to find common points to enhance the interview process, but make sure to not use it as a filter.

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

#87

Post by emseetech »

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…

The industry (all industries really) might want to reconsider online applications, or at least privilege in-person resume drop-offs because the escalating ai application/evaluation war that's happening doesn't seem to be helping anyone.

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

#88

Post by acwan93 »

john-radio wrote: post #58
buggy6257 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way. This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response. ...Christ.

Yeah I don't know about this specific situation, but as someone who is on the job market, is a good developer, but can come off as a little odd sometimes, I often wonder how often I roll a natural 1 on my Cha check and get perceived as an AI imposter.

If anything, coming across as “a little odd” can be a sign I’m actually talking to a human.

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

#89

Post by what »

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.

Why is it a negative that the candidate can solve the challenge without using an LLM? I don’t really understand this.

Also, what is a good answer for not using one? Will you provide access to one during the course of the interview? Or I am just expected to be paying for one?

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

#90

Post by emseetech »

staticautomatic wrote: post #78
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.

Is it pride or is it hard to shake the (reasonable, I'd say) fear the reviewer will judge regardless of their claims?
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