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An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

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Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#111
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core issue here is the sheer volume of applicants. Microsoft opened 30 new-grad software engineering positions. Care to guess how many applications they got within 24 hours? 1,000? 10,000? Nope. 100,000 applications. In under a single day. With that kind of applicant pool, I’m honestly not sure what the best approach is—even though, in a perfect world, your suggestion would be the more appropriate route. The real…

I think at that point it's a lottery anyway, pick 50 truly randomly and try those?

“We don’t want to hire unlucky people.”

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#112
post #10

I’m reasonably certain that I interviewed someone using this or something like it in the last few days. Lots of eye scanning while looking above the window they’d been typing into. Pauses. Big pastes. One of my excellent colleagues noticed that the candidate made use of exciting C++ casts before ever defining the variable’s types. Complete inability to explain or debug the code just written. So. Frustrating in two di…

It sounds like you want sympathy but it just shows that some people just don't understand the power dynamics of an interview. I believe live coding is a scourge and we should get rid of it altogether. Get a tiny open ended project, which requires more design/architecture skills than actually finishing the solution. You do it at your own time and shouldn't take more than 1-2h. You submit it and provide your mental pro…

Your comment is excessively dismissive. The irony is that parent actually did what you’re suggesting, tried to talk about the interviewee’s solution and found that they didn’t come across as knowledgeable and experienced enough even though their code suggested otherwise. Whether it’s live coding or take-home is mostly irrelevant.

Your proposed alternative is absolutely subject to the same problem, AI-written code and LLM-written mental process. Think more carefully about whether it solves anything and exactly what problem it solves, because it does not solve the problem of people trying to game interviews with AI, your suggestion is potentially worse on that axis. The whole point of doing it live is to get to the talking part that you suggested more quickly.

Wouldn’t you rather be discussing your thinking immediately and get a sense for what the real questions are and how you’re doing, and have the opportunity to talk about it, than waste several hours doing it at home trying to write something up without getting clues along the way or being able to ask questions, only to have the next guy get hired because they used AI, or because they’re fine with live coding, or because they’re better at writing than coding, or because they got lucky?

You have to live code on the job. Do take a moment to consider what the hiring manager needs and whether take-home problems are either more effective or more efficient for the company. Managers want to find the best candidates, and best involves more than coding, it involves communication and collaboration skills too. Live coding can give some indicators of those things, and take-home problems cannot.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#113
post #108

This kind of tool is why companies will push back towards on-site interviews, and consequently RTO, given that the people who interviewed are the ones who could easily go to the office to be interviewed. Honestly, it's hard to blame the company. If the employee is willing to lie and cheat even before they were hired, it's expected that companies will take away their tool to do it: remote calls and WFH. As always, the…

Yeah tech has always been a meritocracy built on ethics and we need to remember that.

Trust.

Some people think that trust just means a someone blindly trusting another, but of course that's not how it works. People will be trusted to an extent that they can be trusted, and this goes for company-employee relations too. If people prove they cannot be trusted with remote interviews, companies will take remote interviews away. This was a luxury given to us during the pandemic, and it's now being rolled back because of tools like these.

I remember people here on HN complaining about CEOs mandating RTO without data to support it. Well, this certainly doesn't help.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, these sorts of “practical interviews” aren’t just limited to Big Tech. There’s been an arms race for thirty years now between applicants and employers, the latter creating new hurdles to overcome and the former finding new ways to bypass unnecessary hurdles. Employers demanded applications instead of resumes, so candidates used copy machines. Then they wanted block lettering, so candidates used type writers. A…

As an employer, I know candidates use LinkedIn’s “Apply in one click” in bulk. When we contact them, half of them notice they don’t even fit the criteria in our ad (be a Java developer, for starters).

And while I sympathize with your frustration, workers are caught between companies who can't even be bothered to send a rejection form letter anymore, companies posting "ghost jobs", and companies who post such broad salary ranges (if any at all) that they're unusable. Then you roll in the "resume farms" abroad (shady recruiters submitting candidates without approval and who don't match the requirements, so they can net a payday), and it's a nightmare for both sides (workers and employers).

Where my sympathy dissipates, though, is the knowledge that workers are merely responding to the ever-increasing demands of employers. It's ultimately up to the employers to fix this mess, because they're the ones who created it in the first place. It might mean an in-person career event to weed out remote candidates, if you're adamant about a local hire, with humans reviewing resumes in-hand, in real time, absent ATS and AI systems getting in the way. It might mean forgoing practical interviews entirely, in favor of better verbal interviews that assess skills and competencies, with hypothetical questions AI can't quickly or reliably answer.

And it also might mean rebuilding company loyalty and incentivizing people to stay instead of leave. It might mean reducing the amount of jobs you're posting externally by resuming promoting internally again. It might mean dangling carrots that keep workers from jumping ship every two years to grow wages in a meaningful way.

Point is, there's a lot of ways to address this, but the current attitude is "MOAR TECHNOLOGY", which doesn't seem to address either side's core grievances around the hiring and employment processes.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#115

I don't get why companies waste time with this sort of interview that just turns into this stupid cat and mouse game. Even ignoring this sort of software, someone cramming leet code exercises is the same thing in my view (they won't remember or use in their work 99% of that stuff). Just talk to the person, talk about the sorts of problems you expect them to solve. Can they understand the problem? Do they have ideas o…

Every single big corpo knows about it. We just haven’t been able to come up with a better filter for the amount of candidates that are going through the interviews that isn’t extremely subjective.

Small companies that I interviews with had a very simple process (2x talks with upper management, mostly technical talks, also a semi-coding related talk about systems). There are a lot of very well paying (maybe 15-20% less than FAANG) jobs out there, but they’re just that fancy looking.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#116
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's much easier to get-by faking it as a software engineer compared to a lawyer or doctor. We've all have had these colleagues - and I've seen them jumping to other companies easily.

I don't know if that's true. I'm not saying software engineers don't fake it, but I think many doctors and lawyers are faking it, too, if we're defining faking it as looking up information, or even assisting with your core job responsibilities. I don't consider that faking it, but I think that's what we're talking about, isn't it? One time I asked my optometrist what he was doing when he left me in the examination ro…

I don't think that's faking it at all. Being able to research is part of any knowledge based profession.

Faking it is shirking your duties. Most bad medicine doesn't result in obvious harm/cost to a patient or a board complaint. A poorly managed medical practice that runs off support staff and makes patients wait three hours isn't going to threaten a license, and that's faking practice management. A primary care doctor who punts anything beyond the very, very basics to third party vendors or specialists is faking it.

In my major metropolitan area, general practice veterinarians are often absolute crap at doing their (required) medical notes. If you ask them for copies, they'll send you invoices. If you push for real notes, they'll use their 48 hour response window to make something up. They almost always get away with it because during future visits, the vet (whether it's the same person or not) will ask a bunch of questions to (necessarily) fake knowing what was done previously. It's obviously going to affect patient care and cost, and if you look at board complaints that aren't thrown out, the "punishment" is usually because the board saw that the vet has shit for notes. And don't even get me started on vets using AI, which results in hallucinations in the notes -- which I think are notably worse for patient care than just empty notes.

I think that's a good example of even good doctors faking it.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#117
post #6

Feels like in some sections of the US like big tech, the talent vetting process has evolved into some adversarial battle of attrition where the idea is to grind down the pool of candidates until only a few are left rather than find some potential new colleagues. Tools like this have emerged as a direct response to that process. What a bizarre way to begin a working relationship.

The ideal purpose of hiring is to find a skilled candidate who will be a good fit and maybe even bring talent and energy to the role. The hiring entity will ideally provide mentoring and training to ensure a successful investment and relationship.

But the catch is... the people doing the hiring must themselves ideally be talented, energetic, skillful mentors who envisage building a positive culture.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#118
post #23

Just in case this repo isn't a joke and some job seekers are seriously thinking of this tactic... Companies already know about cheat methods like this and candidates still have to demonstrate skills in-person on a whiteboard in a 2nd round of tech interviews. A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview. That still may not deter some folks and they'll try to cont…

FAANG jobs absolutely hire engineers over zoom. It’s not just one interview, but the whole process is done remotely over video. It typically includes somewhere between 5 to 10 sessions covering coding, architecture and behavioral. Source - work at a FANG which engineers exclusively via remote video call.

Is the option of in-person available to the candidate?, zoom interviews are exhausting

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, these sorts of “practical interviews” aren’t just limited to Big Tech. There’s been an arms race for thirty years now between applicants and employers, the latter creating new hurdles to overcome and the former finding new ways to bypass unnecessary hurdles. Employers demanded applications instead of resumes, so candidates used copy machines. Then they wanted block lettering, so candidates used type writers. A…

this does NOT match my experience as an interviewer. Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. I hope the folks we hired are paid enough to retain because there were was absolutely no glut of talent. It was hard to find the folks we wound up hiring. There was a glut of applications, yes…

So you're confusing your specific requirements with my generalization of "talent". Depending on your specifics, there might not be a glut of talent in that specific field or expertise, but there's still a surplus of domestic college grads unable to find work in their chosen fields, and companies who refuse to pay domestic graduates what they're worth when they can outsource to contractors, MSPs, or offshore work entirely for less.

My perspective on this issue is that the reason there's an abundance of candidates in any given application pool is because of a mismatch of expectations between employees and employers, even today. Employers have cultivated an environment where candidates must job hop frequently to grow their earnings, because internal advancement has dried up and employers haven't respected loyalty in decades. This results in a plurality of the workforce "always looking for work", because they see no potential in their current role for growth or advancement; in fact, the whole reason they applied to your role is because they wanted that growth or advancement, and now they have it, so it's time to apply elsewhere for the next step up.

I get that this environment totally sucks for both parties, but it's important to note that employers are the only ones who can change the system, since they hold the bulk of the power in individual negotiations. Unfortunately, the current attitude seems to be more of the status quo: more technology to "make it easier to find the best candidates" (thus removing humans from even more of the hiring process), forcing existing workers out (thus increasing the applicant pool), and then bemoaning about their problems on Business News ("too many unqualified applicants") or forums.

Applicants didn't create this mess, and we can't fix it.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, these sorts of “practical interviews” aren’t just limited to Big Tech. There’s been an arms race for thirty years now between applicants and employers, the latter creating new hurdles to overcome and the former finding new ways to bypass unnecessary hurdles. Employers demanded applications instead of resumes, so candidates used copy machines. Then they wanted block lettering, so candidates used type writers. A…

this does NOT match my experience as an interviewer. Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. I hope the folks we hired are paid enough to retain because there were was absolutely no glut of talent. It was hard to find the folks we wound up hiring. There was a glut of applications, yes…

It's often not clear what qualifications for a role really are - I think most of us have accepted roles where we had to learn "required" things on the job. Or where one of the requirements was a joke, liking knowing how to use some random tool or software (internal wiki, expensing system, etc.) that anyone could pick up in 15 minutes. Especially in tech. I've personally gotten jobs in languages I didn't know yet a couple times.

I do agree that for any given job a large chunk of applicants are people who have no business applying (IE barely capable coding themselves out of a paper bag or didn't read the job description), but there's always a long tail of plausible applicants if the job isn't a trash posting.

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