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Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

interviewcoder.co

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Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#71

Post by throwanem »

bilsbie wrote: post #66

I think this is a cool idea: It’s a platform where referrals can register and then they put some money on the line. Say $20. When an employer calls my referrals through the platform if I end up getting fired in the first six month the people that referred me lose their money (and reputation). If I stay on they get paid that amount of money. Feel free to tweak the idea but I think it would be great to hire based on re…

Something very like that was a Launch HN in, I think, 2021. "Skip the Interview" was the name, I believe. But no doubt with that example to learn from it will go at least a little better this time.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#72

Post by bilsbie »

danielvaughn wrote: post #33

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour. Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge. Not only is this LLM pro…

It’s a major improvement but you still want to be careful on what you consider common knowledge. There’s a lot of breadth to software engineering and there can be whole areas someone is missing but can learn.

For example I was always a great employee but early in my career I wasn’t big on unit testing.

Or I interviewed for an ML job and they dinged me for not knowing a bunch of statistics things off the top of my head.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#73

Post by bilsbie »

koliber wrote: post #59
danielvaughn wrote: post #33

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour. Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge. Not only is this LLM pro…

This is a great approach and I like it as well. I did have a few situations where the person could talk shop like an expert but when it came to actually writing some code they failed. I literally had a person fail fizzbuzz that was supposedly senior and talked shop really well.

I’d really want to dig into that. Maybe they were nervous? I’ve gotten so nervous in some situations I’ve forgotten the next sentence was going to say. I wonder if it’s an issue like that. Your mind just blanks.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#74

Post by bilsbie »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #6

So, am I missing something? Is this just a tool allowing job candidates to commit fraud? I'm no lawyer, so I'm not sure this would rise to the level of actual legal fraud, but moral fraud at the very least is what I think I'm seeing. EDIT: Now I see it at the bottom of the page... "Interview Coder is a desktop app designed to help job seekers ace technical interviews by providing real-time assistance with coding ques…

Is it fraud when they tell you you’ll spend most of your time coding cool new products but then you mostly do customer support and meetings?

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#75

Post by SirHumphrey »

bogwog wrote: post #53
gcp123 wrote: post #22

I've spent the last decade watching this arms race between interviewers and candidates. Last month I hired a senior dev who couldn't implement a basic database migration when we brought him on but aced our interview problems. Turned out he'd been using tools like this. The problem isn't the tools - they're inevitable. The problem is that our industry clings to this bizarre ritual where we test for skills that are com…

> These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were. Whenever the topic about how broken tech interviews are has showed up on HN in the past, there were usually two crowds: the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people, and the much less common "they suck, so we do something else" crowd. Almost everyone agreed they were broken. What does it…

> What does it say about the tech industry that so many orgs continued to use a system that was known to be broken for so long?

That they tried to scale hiring. I don't think that technical interviews are bad per se, it's the form in which they are currently that is bad. I was once applying for a company working on a stage animation software - somebody there created a task relevant to their workflow, they specified which libraries I should use and then gave me 14 days, after which I sent them a link to Github repo with the code. It was overall a pleasant experience - I learned something new programing this task, they were able to access my code style and programing abilities - but this was long before AI. They were a fairly small company though.

In the large orgs you have a HR person overseeing a hiring who doesn't know how to code (fair enough - not their job) and bunch of engineers usually far to busy with actual problems to create a problem set and far to many applicants. So companies drop leetcode at the problem - thinking that any selection criteria is better than non selection criteria.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#76

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tempodox wrote: post #69
sbuttgereit wrote: post #6

So, am I missing something? Is this just a tool allowing job candidates to commit fraud? I'm no lawyer, so I'm not sure this would rise to the level of actual legal fraud, but moral fraud at the very least is what I think I'm seeing. EDIT: Now I see it at the bottom of the page... "Interview Coder is a desktop app designed to help job seekers ace technical interviews by providing real-time assistance with coding ques…

You're not wrong, but you're overlooking the cultural normalcy. When you have something to sell, you're allowed to lie until you're blue in the face and nobody even blinks. But when applicants merely demonstrate how well they understood and internalized that state of affairs, it's fraud. None of this is OK in my book but it's hypocritical to single out job applicants when the whole culture is like that.

1. That still doesn't make it okay.

2. No, you're not allowed to lie until blue in the face when selling; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising is illegal. (Is it underunforced? Probably. Do I wish those laws had much stronger restrictions and harsher penalties? Yep. But is it illegal to lie to sell things? Still yes.)

(IANAL and this isn't legal advice. Though it is moral advice.)

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#77

Post by esafak »

bilsbie wrote: post #68

I wish hiring was: pull a ticket out of your system and work through it with the interviewee. They could get a sense of what type of work they’d be doing and the competence of the organization and you’d get to see how they perform in the real world.

It would take a very senior coder to be able to make sense of the code base and start fixing a bug in the duration of an interview.

Plus the code base will involve technologies they are not familiar with; rarely does everyone know every technology needed beforehand.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#78

Post by throwanem »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #62
grakasja wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every company I've applied to or worked at commits both legal and moral fraud against its employees and applicants, on an industrial scale. They've also created a broken interview process that punishes honesty and forces applicants to find creative solutions. So personally I see no moral fraud here.

Really... so two "wrongs" really do make a "right". So when an employer sees many employees and candidates work the system like this, then they are also right to say, "pretty much every employee we've hired or candidate we've spoken with tries to dishonestly game the system and deals with us in bad faith, so we're justified in screwing with them any way we please. No moral fraud here: we're just doing onto those as t…

Oh, I see the problem. You've aimed your LinkedIn bot at Hacker News. You should really sort that out.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#80

Post by bilsbie »

esafak wrote: post #77
bilsbie wrote: post #68

I wish hiring was: pull a ticket out of your system and work through it with the interviewee. They could get a sense of what type of work they’d be doing and the competence of the organization and you’d get to see how they perform in the real world.

It would take a very senior coder to be able to make sense of the code base and start fixing a bug in the duration of an interview. Plus the code base will involve technologies they are not familiar with; rarely does everyone know every technology needed beforehand.

To clarify I’d intend the interviewer to do most of work that requires inside knowledge.

The interviewee could suggest the specific implementations within that.

Eg. We need to hook into our fubu system. Here’s our library for that. How would you code that?

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