The thing I see people getting wrong with live coding interviews (speaking as an interviewer) is that their code rarely matters. If you write some code, I might ask "So what kinds of failure modes will this code need to account for?" Whether you named your variables well or wrote comments didn't matter. If you can't talk about your work or explain your thinking or discuss tradeoffs or question constraints or show your thought process, that's what's going to fail the interview for you. Getting the exact right solution is bonus points, but the job isn't to consistently get things 100% right writing code by hand.
An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
181–190 of 265 posts
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heavily disagree with this. Technical interviews are great if done correctly. Or do you think that technical interviews hold such trait that is always present, that you can label all of them useless?
I think they’re useless unless they touch some part of the domain you’re howling to work in.
Why do they need to touch the domain? The point of generic interviews is to find smart people who can learn any domain.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#183Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…
If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#184If you wanted a completely invisible system you could do it via audio. Speech to text and back again and use a two pairs of same model wireless headphone with say the left ear connected to a hidden device and the right ear to the interview machine.
Other than a bit of practice it would be completely undetectable visually. It’s extra nice that we encourage thinking out loud.
We should assume people are doing this. The solution is interviews that don’t require information that can be looked up or in-person interviews or permitting the use of AI.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#185Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…
If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.
I work in infra. I don’t want an incident to be the time that I find out my coworkers don’t actually know how anything works, and are frantically posting questions to ChatGPT.
That said, I also don’t know how to adequately test, other than to carefully watch people’s eyes during questions; even that isn’t foolproof.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How do employers fix being blasted with resumes from unqualified morons?
Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game, and employers who need help digging through reams of documents.
That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change.
If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.
I work in infra. I don’t want an incident to be the time that I find out my coworkers don’t actually know how anything works, and are frantically posting questions to ChatGPT. That said, I also don’t know how to adequately test, other than to carefully watch people’s eyes during questions; even that isn’t foolproof.
"tell me about potential issues while doing X", then dig into answers? We may get there one day with LLMs, but currently it would be extremely hard to keep the conversation context and process the longer answers while talking to someone. The voice recognition quality and generating speed would be an issue too if you wanted to monitor the whole conversation.
Currently the cheating mostly aims for coding tasks because they're pretty simple to do and self-contained. Much less for helping with a good dialog.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#188Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…
There’s an argument to be made that by the time your business runs out of vetted candidates to hire you’re already staffed at some of the highest levels by corporate parasites who got there by gaming the system, and you can tolerate adding more elsewhere.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#189Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…
If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.
Interview performance used to be correlated to job aptitude, but no longer.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.
I work in infra. I don’t want an incident to be the time that I find out my coworkers don’t actually know how anything works, and are frantically posting questions to ChatGPT. That said, I also don’t know how to adequately test, other than to carefully watch people’s eyes during questions; even that isn’t foolproof.
Some of the best tests come from taking something mundane and twisting it just a little off the beaten path in a way that LLMs cannot handle. The usual example is the river crossing puzzle which has a standard format and solution but can be modified to make that solution incorrect. For code, an example would be parsing log lines to compile insights but switching it up so that the timestamp means something other than the time the log was collected, etc.
You can completely change the complexity of a bog standard leetcode question with the slightest of modifications, and I’m certain no extant LLM will catch such a nuance if your problem is a very common one.
A fun exercise is to ask chatGPT what the river crossing goat puzzle is and then say “do the same puzzle but with two goats and a cabbage please”. It can’t get it right even with multiple corrections. Might stop working at some point now that I posted this though!