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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

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Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#41

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

MrDarcy wrote: post #31
crooked-v wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rejected an applicant earlier this year who was obviously reading off another screen for every answer (as in, blatant pauses while I could literally see their eyes moving back and forth). I don't understand if they thought I wouldn't notice or what.

This situation terrifies me as an autistic person. I can’t fathom maintaining eye contact while taking the time to think about a response to an interview question, even over a video call. I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.

Fellow autist here, I don't think you have anything to worry about, the eye movements of someone reading are very different to autistic scanning while thinking. Reading has a rhythmic left right pattern to the eye twitches while scanning (at least for me) tends to either be fixed in place or rolling in a way that is basically impossible to confuse with reading.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#42

Post by markus_zhang »

neilv wrote: post #34

Incidentally, I really-really like that they asked questions based on the person's resume. That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money. (And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been insti…

I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed. Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#43

Post by yieldcrv »

Glyptodon wrote: post #32

AI definitely makes take homes and non live coding exercises less viable (and even live ones to an extent). Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.

Somewhat less but if you are having them do a monorepo with the latest major releases of the frameworks involved, AI will mess it up because there is a 4-6 month knowledge gap

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#44

Post by madeofpalk »

Glyptodon wrote: post #32

AI definitely makes take homes and non live coding exercises less viable (and even live ones to an extent). Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.

I don’t think take homes should really be about the code, but about the developer being able to reason about why that was the code they wrote.

Asking developers to explain why they wrote that code mitigates against using LLM coding tools - if the candidate can’t back it up then they’ll do poorly in it.

I recently had a candidate submit an otherwise average exercise that was a big mish-mash of coding styles (inconsistently using var/let/const in js, for example). When asked about it, they weren’t able to explain their choice at all and just stumbled through it.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#45

Post by no-dr-onboard »

I keep coming back to this phrase used in this post: "it was scary".

Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.

The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.

- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.

- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#46

Post by madeofpalk »

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.

Has someone who’s interviewed candidates that do this, I like to think it’s fairly obvious when the candidate doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#48

Post by madeofpalk »

mathgeek wrote: post #8
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…

Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.

The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#50

Post by raincom »

neilv wrote: post #34

Incidentally, I really-really like that they asked questions based on the person's resume. That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money. (And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been insti…

At the company I work for, we are forbidden to ask questions based on resume, as it introduces biases. Reduction of bias means "ask same questions of every candidate".
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