As much as I hate cheating, I wonder if these apps will lead to invisible and ubiquitous AI helping us navigate life.
As a teacher, it is my job to make sure my students control that AI instead if being controlled by the AI.
An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
251–260 of 265 posts
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
That, to some degree, is guaranteed to happen naturally. But why not use a sieve approach and narrow the pool exponentially using a range of tools that goes from automatic and instantaneous at the start to manual and time-intensive interviews at the end? The potential upside for a company is relatively large - with a small amount of work they have the opportunity to get the approximately best 30 people out of 100k gr…
The problem is noise. Say you want to take 10% at each round. You have to do this three times to get 100 people, and then another round to get the top 30. If you tighten the criterion, noise matters more, so you will drop your actual best candidates, since people need a high skill+noise. But if you try to keep the unlucky "good" candidates by having a wider band, you pay more. Also, if you are successful at finding t…
I don't see how your method works better than a sieve with noise.
Instead of a "noisy" sieve, you're just using the time of application as your sieve. Which, unless your job opening values the skill of submitting lightning fast job applications, is pretty much 100% random noise.
You say a sieve approach drops the best candidates. Your approach also drops the best candidates.
And if the bar is actually so high that only the best candidate(s) qualify for the job, then your approach would imply you interview an expected half of the applicants before you fill the positions.
It's pretty obvious a "noisy" sieve (with some signal) is better than sieving by application time or sorting by arbitrary order and taking the top N applications. You don't have a magical solution. The people handling those 100000 applications are not that stupid.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, if *you* did them they might have been fine. One really important thing the interview needs to screen for is the qualifications of the person actually trying to be hired, and not their buddy doing the work instead.
I am really glad I don't live in your world where interviewing is such a profoundly low-trust activity. I feel sorry for interviewers where that's a legitimate concern.
I mean, dude, take a look at what we were originally discussing -- an app on github that helps you cheat on live interviews in Zoom.
FWIW, I've interviewed almost a hundred candidates in the past couple years and I think the number of candidates that I thought might be cheating are in the 3-5% range. It's fairly low, but if the take-home was the main thing that determined whether the candidate was hired, I wouldn't take that 3% chance.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
from collections import Counter if not Counter(str1) - Counter(str2): # success, they are anagrams
str1 = "a" str2 = "ab"
Good catch.
Counter(str1) - Counter(str2) | Counter(str2) - Counter(str1)
That ought to work. I'd hope Python's caching doesn't recompute the Counter for long strings.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#255The 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 you…
What you said is true, but it's much easier to do if you (as the interviewer) have full control over the questions and evaluation of the candidate in your interview.
For larger orgs at scale, often the interviewer needs to stick to a script, ostensibly to avoid personal bias (which probably does happen to a degree), and to make scores between interviewers comparable. In such cases it might be difficult for the interviewer to argue that the candidate has done well despite "not getting the answer correct".
A lot of the grievances people have for the interview process are artifacts of scaling the interview process for the largest tech companies. As for the smaller ones, it's basically good ol' cargo-culting. Small startups that follow FAANG processes probably don't realize they can customize their hiring process to their advantage.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am sympathetic to the argument that software engineers should be licensed, which would reduce the need for dumb technical interviews. But I imagine HN wouldn't like that very much. Oh yea, HN hates this idea, but I'm sure it would cut down on all the screening, FizzBuzz, hazing that happens during interviews. If you had a - basic, barebones - certification or exam, that all software engineers must pass, that at l…
Isn't there a business opportunity somewhere, providing exams and certificates for software developers? I find it surprising that many rich companies have this problem, and there is no standard solution yet. How much would it cost e.g. Google to start an independent certification company, with branches in 20 different cities across USA. The top candidates could be also offered a job at Google, but every candidate wou…
They kind of offer this service for free already. Who's going to pay them to do it? :)
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am sympathetic to the argument that software engineers should be licensed, which would reduce the need for dumb technical interviews. But I imagine HN wouldn't like that very much. Oh yea, HN hates this idea, but I'm sure it would cut down on all the screening, FizzBuzz, hazing that happens during interviews. If you had a - basic, barebones - certification or exam, that all software engineers must pass, that at l…
Isn't there a business opportunity somewhere, providing exams and certificates for software developers? I find it surprising that many rich companies have this problem, and there is no standard solution yet. How much would it cost e.g. Google to start an independent certification company, with branches in 20 different cities across USA. The top candidates could be also offered a job at Google, but every candidate wou…
Oracle has Java certs. That's something MS could also do with CSharp, AdaCore with Ada,...
How useful that stuff is/would be in practise, I don't know.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#258Earlier 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.
Interviews seek to estimate long-term job performance. Since they cannot measure this directly, they measure attributes that correlate with performance. If you interfere with these measurements (e.g. through fraud), you break those correlations. This doesn't mean the interviews are measuring the wrong thing, or that people who cheat on the interviews will meet the performance bar in the actual job. If someone uses AI…
> they measure attributes that correlate with performance. If you interfere with these measurements (e.g. through fraud), you break those correlations
Not necessarily... You just get the people that are technically competent enough and are self-corruptable enough to pass the test. There is still a correlation with performance but it is a weaker signal and you are more likely to miss out on people with equal ability but higher morals.
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#259what interviews get wrong is they typically assess a candidate's lower level thinking skills rather than their higher level thinking skills
cf. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/
Typical interview question (lower-level thinking, remember): List the primitives in JavaScript. (remember)
Better interview question (lower-level thinking, apply): When would you use an object instead of an array in JavaScript?
Really good interview question (higher-level thinking, evaluate): Here's some raw data that we'd like to put in a database, what data structures would you recommend and why?
Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews
#260Great 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…
Shut the fuck up. We'll stop cheating when these corps stop making us solve binary search algorithms to interview for front end React roles. Probably 80% of all technical interviews I've had were completely irrelevant to the actual daily work. They engineered this shitty game, we're just playing the game. No one's making you play this game.