271–280 of 544 posts
Long term, the bar will simply be raised. Smart/motivated kids armed with AI will still outperform the ones who don’t study, and will be graded accordingly.
This will only be a problem so long as AI help is considered cheating, and until teachers are able to recalibrate their standards.
So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
One of the smartest I ever felt was hearing some teammates a cube wall over saying "this one customer from poland says he's crashing a lot" (in our ui). I was like "is he in the polish locale/language? They asked.... yes... "I bet polish has different seperators and our split("/")[1] is crashing"... they checked, had him change to english, crash went away. I felt real yoda like. We had customer on chat so much easier…
But why would Polish have a different path separator? That's a filesystem choice not a language choice.
I don't understand how most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "these interview questions are useless now" or "we need to rethink education, it hasn't kept up". These all seem absurdly myopic to me. What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI. This is not going to make some interview questions obsolete, or give students more tools to cheat with their homework. It…
I don't understand how most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "these interview questions are useless now" or "we need to rethink education, it hasn't kept up". These all seem absurdly myopic to me. What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI. This is not going to make some interview questions obsolete, or give students more tools to cheat with their homework. It…
Perhaps this is another of the early (?) nails in the coffin for traditional higher education. If it becomes harder to assess if someone learned something (with a grade), the results of that assessment (GPA) become less valuable. Software has traditionally been at the forefront of allowing people with non-traditional backgrounds (bootcamps, other degrees, self-taught) to work in the highest echelon of jobs, because o…
Higher education will become just an optional prep course for your sit down conversational AI interview. Once AI can do a good job vetting candidates, I see no reason for companies not to have an open applicant process where anyone can interview and be evaluated. If you are sharp and know your shit, a degree won't matter and the AI interviewer won't care. But this is an "All else being equal" scenario, my true belief…
So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
is a hard bug the best interview question? When I do my job right 98% of the time is not debugging. This ratio changed dramatically over the course of my career.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" @ChatGPT: Give me three sample answers to the following questions related to programming: "What`s the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?"
"One time, I was working on a project where the UI kept freezing when a certain button was pressed. I spent hours debugging the code, but couldn't figure out what was causing the problem. Eventually, I discovered that the button's event handler was accidentally triggering an infinite loop that was consuming all the CPU resources, causing the UI to freeze. It was a weird bug because the symptoms were not immediately o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would 100% accept that as an answer since it tells me the candidate is not good with subtext, and that's really needed to solve a lot of interesting problems. After all, if I ask "what's your favorite food you've ever eaten", there's an unspoken implication that it's a food you remember eating. I am not in fact asking you to recall every single food you've ever eaten and choose one... - From my comment below since…
> I would 100% accept that as an answer since it tells me the candidate is not good with subtext, [...] if I ask "what's your favorite food you've ever eaten", there's an unspoken implication that it's a food you remember eating. Will this filter cut many of the best engineers? Our field is full of people who pull 'engineering' out of our behinds, to various degrees. I'd assert that the engineer who doesn't assume an…
It won't cut out a single good engineer, let alone the best.
> I'd assert that the engineer who doesn't assume an unspoken implication, but instead qualifies their answer, or tells you when they cannot answer, or asks for clarification... is more likely to be the one who can make a system that works, and tell you when a system will not work.
You grouped the one option that a bad engineer would take, with several that a good engineer would take. "Tells you when they cannot answer" is not what a good engineer does.
They may say "I cannot answer question as-is" as a jump off for clarification.
In fact in my response to your sibling comment I explain that even if there were no interesting bugs you can give an answer that isn't lying, or pulling engineering out of your ass, or dishonest.
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But flat out refusing or immediately jumping to "well but I can't remember everything!!!!" is still you interpreting subtext... except you've now interpreted the most negative possible subtext. You've assumed your interviewer is asking you to recall things you can't recall and that there is no further room for discussion.
A poor engineer is one that shuts completely down at the first hint of a broken invariant, rather than trying to surface that there is an invalid invariant, or learn more about the broken invariant.
That kind of curiosity to go further than shutting down is what the question is meant to tease out, so you're not beating the system by deciding not to engage, instead you're sending the exact signal being looked for as something to avoid bringing into your organization.
I don't understand how most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "these interview questions are useless now" or "we need to rethink education, it hasn't kept up". These all seem absurdly myopic to me. What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI. This is not going to make some interview questions obsolete, or give students more tools to cheat with their homework. It…
So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
"it involved a program that ran perfectly fine during testing but crashed whenever it was deployed to the production environment. After much investigation, it was found that the bug was caused by a combination of the production environment's security settings and the program's use of random number generation. The program used a random number generator to generate a unique ID for each user that logged in. However, the…
Turns out their MS SQL Server install was configured for MM-DD-YYYY output which only crashed when we reached the 13th of the month. Important lessons were learned that day!