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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

kapwing.com

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Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#21

Post by neilv »

inertiatic wrote: post #5

I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks. Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on…

What might have happened is that AI tools helped them fabricate, maybe including one or more of:

* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.

* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.

* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#22

Post by greenavocado »

It doesn't matter because I can always pry past the candidate's work in front of me to see if there is anything behind the facade. Usually there isn't even if their take-home assignment is done perfectly with of LLMs but there is no understanding behind the work being showcased.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#24

Post by criddell »

neilv wrote: post #11

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example: 1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed. 2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#25

Post by myself248 »

neilv wrote: post #11

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example: 1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed. 2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

If the unredacted parts of the resume were entirely fabricated, what harm is there in having the lies out there? The candidate will be scrubbing from their honest version going forward anyway.

Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#26

Post by mavsman »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #15

Oddly one impact on me from reading this is that Kapwing seems like probably a nice place to apply for a job -- simple enough application process, human review, sane and respectful take-home and no live pressure coding. I'm not affiliated in any way nor am I a FT software developer, but this seemed like a pretty sane process (which sadly the article reveals may not be sufficient to properly vet candidates).

I think this was the whole point of the blog post. As someone else mentioned, this didn't have much to do with AI so referencing AI seems purely like an attempt to capture some eyes for publicity.

I'd actually say that _not_ using AI to prepare for an interview is mistake, putting you at a major disadvantage (and there are plenty of honest ways to use it).

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#27

Post by myself248 »

inertiatic wrote: post #5

I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks. Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on…

It sounded like the candidate froze mid-interview to ask the AI to provide more detail about the things it'd already fabricated.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#28

Post by reneretord »

neilv wrote: post #11

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example: 1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed. 2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

Generally I agree with this advice, but if the goal is to make the dork findable with a modicum of plausible deniability this is fine.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#29

Post by esafak »

rdtsc wrote: post #14

> I ended by saying that the software community is smaller than it seems, and integrity and reputation goes a long way. Well who are they? How would the next member of the community know this is a fake candidate. I like the idea in general of finding a way to eliminate these time-wasters but how would that work? The candidate can adjust a bit and improve the AI "foo" to come up with online answers for them.

Report them to LinkedIn.

edit: I'm talking about egregious cases where the name, location, picture, and work history are false, not the exaggerations you mention. The profiles have few connections since they do get flagged and recreated with a new false identity...

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#30

Post by esafak »

qoez wrote: post #20

Weird that they wouldn't just use whisper to pipe the interview questions into AI to reply better. If you're gonna cheat at least do it well.

They do do that. If it was merely for translation it would be okay, but usually it doesn't stop there.
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