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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

#131

Post by eikenberry »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #123
eikenberry wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about hiring not being that much different but your prognostications are way off IMO. > - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again. Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore. > - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again. Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry. > - And yeah, y…

> Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore. Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.

So fly them to multiple destinations? I was hired 1 year ago and interviewed with ~14 people all living in different locations. That could be paired down, but it won't ever reach the single destination that the OP is referring to.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#132

Post by [deleted] »

gwbas1c wrote: post #124
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.

> Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed. I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating? As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.

[deleted]

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#133

Post by roguecoder »

roguecoder wrote: post #127
MisterTea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit. No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.

You assume we aren't going to end up wearing them daily in order to get promotions. The same elitist power trip that drove RTO is also likely to produce the "dress like us & be rewarded" dynamics that push for conformity.

In more detail, in a glutted market with an unknown percentage of fakers, companies look for costly signals they can use to sort.

This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.

If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.

The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#134

Post by Foofoobar12345 »

We get a few thousand fresh grads applying to us each year. It’s practically impossible to interview every one of them. At the same time, any sort of coding assignment we give is easily defeated by AI—so that’s not useful either and there are very few signals there.

What we do instead is send out a test - something like a mental ability test - with hundreds of somewhat randomized questions. Many of these are highly visual in nature, making them hard to copy-paste into an AI for quick answers. The idea is that smarter candidates will solve these questions in just a few seconds - faster than it would take to ask an AI. They do the test for 30 minutes.

It’s not expected that anyone finishes the test. The goal is to generate a distribution of performance, and we simply start interviewing from the top end and make offers every week until we hit our hiring quota. Of course, this means we likely miss out on some great candidates unfortunately.

We bring the selected candidates into our office for a full day of interviews, where we explicitly monitor for any AI usage. The process generally appears to work.

On a different note, things are just getting weird.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#135

Post by no_wizard »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #116
no_wizard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When an HVAC company hires a new tech HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.

Some parts of the IT industry do lean on certs. IIUC, network engineering in particular is an area where vendor certs play a big role (mainly Cisco). AWS, Azure and GCP all have certs. There are certs for Windows and Linux administration. Java has certs. (I don’t know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but they do exist.)

I think in part, the difference in what I mean about certification (perhaps licensure is better word here) is an industry body - accepted and respected generally by the businesses within our industry - that will demonstrate some form of competence

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#136

Post by crazygringo »

I'm not sure what this has to do with AI, except for being a buzzword to add to a title.

People have been lying about their experience since time immemorial. You don't need an AI to do it, you can just ask a friend with experience to invent a few plausible projects you could have worked on, and solutions you might have found. Or just look at a bunch of resumes online and read a few blog posts of people describing their work.

I'm not surprised this happened. I'm surprised by why the author was surprised. Maybe "Sam" was exceptionally bad at "faking it" in person, but I've done tons of interviews where the candidate had exaggerated their experience and couldn't answer basic questions that they should have been able to.

Honestly, this is why some companies do whiteboard coding interviews before getting to the interviews about experience, because it does a decent initial job at filtering out people who have no idea what they're doing.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#137

Post by gwbas1c »

mystraline wrote: post #122
gwbas1c wrote: post #112

Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview. Other people think an interview is just a matter of finding the "magic words" to get the job. What I don't understand is, what did the candidate do with AI? Did they use the AI as a coach? Did they use it to suggest edits to the resume? --- I once interviewed a candidate who was given my questions in advance. (I shou…

> Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview. So marketing works in the company's favor, and not the candidates? Its a tough pill to swallow, but bending the truth and lying seems to be the way folks get jobs now. Perhaps not lying... But I've thought about the 1pt font white on white mega-tech-list attached to Workday resumes to get past THEIR ai-slop filters…

Well, everyone tells their interpretation of the facts in a way that puts them in the best light.

For example, in 2003, I was fresh out of college and the job market was slow. I applied at a retail store so I could have some beer money. I was honest that I was looking for a job in tech and that I wasn't going to stay forever. Then I said I'd probably be there for 3-4 months.

I was there for 2 weeks, and I don't list the job on my resume.

Was I telling the truth when I said 3-4 months? I certainly gave them the longer end of the estimate in my head.

Was I telling the truth when I left the retail job off of my resume?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#138

Post by goldchainposse »

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.

3. This probably counts as copyright infringement, unless it's chatbot output.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#139

Post by ghaff »

gwbas1c wrote: post #112

Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview. Other people think an interview is just a matter of finding the "magic words" to get the job. What I don't understand is, what did the candidate do with AI? Did they use the AI as a coach? Did they use it to suggest edits to the resume? --- I once interviewed a candidate who was given my questions in advance. (I shou…

The first part sounds like what I’d expect a serious candidate to do. Didn’t you look at the questions we sent you?

The second part sounds like areal curveball unless you made it clear that the questions sent out were only representative/samples of what you’d ask.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#140

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

roguecoder wrote: post #133
roguecoder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume we aren't going to end up wearing them daily in order to get promotions. The same elitist power trip that drove RTO is also likely to produce the "dress like us & be rewarded" dynamics that push for conformity.

In more detail, in a glutted market with an unknown percentage of fakers, companies look for costly signals they can use to sort. This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption. If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it…

Man, as a 6'5" guy I wish getting a suit was that simple.

> It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.

This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor? Am I tailoring my own suit?

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