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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

#141

Post by 9rx »

no_wizard wrote: post #135
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not sure we can come to agree on what competence is.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#142

Post by roguecoder »

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…

Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people can sue you.

It is one thing to frame your experiences in ways that are relevant to what the job is looking for: it is not only unethical to fabricate experiences, it is counter-productive. I will be checking references, and if their reports of the role you played on a project don't match yours I will not be hiring you. If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you. All you have done is waste my time and yours.

The sheer number of applications from auto-submit-to-every-job application processes have completely broken the system. There is simply no way for every recruiter to consider ever candidate, which is what they are now being asked to do. I know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.

We will eventually figure out how to defeat these candidate-spam bots. In the meantime the only hiring pipelines that are still functional are human-to-human individual networking.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#143

Post by Arwill »

esafak wrote: post #62
Aurornis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie. Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying. There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not…

It definitely did change with AI. Imposters are becoming harder to detect, at a cost to the company.

Interviewing has also become harder too. You try to search the net during the interview, because you forgot the name of a thing, and the interviewer will assume you are running with an AI chat, and are cheating the interview.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#144

Post by xmprt »

crooked-v wrote: post #12
lurker919 wrote: post #10

I recently interviewed an engineer who was somehow using ChatGPT realtime on another laptop beside him. The irony was that the questions were pretty simple overall and our rubric also wasn't very strict, so he likely would have passed if he just used his memory and common sense. Though the answers weren't wrong overall, I still felt cheated because of the deception and had to reject him later.

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.

I sometimes take notes/talking points about things I want to cover in my interviews and reference those. This could arguably be considered cheating but definitely not as egregious as using ChatGPT but I worry it would almost appear the same to an interviewer (referencing notes vs ChatGPT).

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#145

Post by spzb »

ghaff wrote: post #87
aaomidi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies just need to fork 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. There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH. IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially st…

If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.

What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is not the barrier it was five years ago.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#146

Post by whstl »

roguecoder wrote: post #115
Joeboy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the people saying nothing's changed are not people who've been conducting interviews recently.

I have seen wild things in the last year. People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions. People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that. People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way. I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up o…

I interviewed every single candidate for development positions in a 300-400 company for the last three years and I saw some incredibly crazy stuff.

- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.

- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.

- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.

- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.

Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#147

Post by roguecoder »

gwbas1c wrote: post #137
mystraline wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Leaving short-duration jobs off is common practice. The only way it might be "lying" is if you happened to, I dunno, have joined SVB just in time to commit a bunch of fraud, and then hoped no one googles your name. And even then, if it was three weeks, when your conviction comes up in the google search no one is going to think you lied leaving it off.

Similarly, it is typical that people will have a polite fiction for "why did you leave your last role?" that hints in the direction of the real reason without saying anything the company wouldn't want to be said publicly. That question is a test of your discretion as much as it is making sure the same reason doesn't apply to the new company.

However, saying you have a degree you don't, worked on a project you didn't, implemented something you didn't, led a project you only participated in, or used a technology you didn't: those are lies. Even if you get away with it, you are setting yourself up for a role you are unqualified to have. If you get caught, you will be correctly fired.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#148

Post by xmprt »

neilv wrote: post #84
raincom wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is that because * they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or * they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or * DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or * some other HR theory?

The problem with modern hiring practices is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hiring based on past experience is biased and often can lead to either subpar candidates (lemons) or overpaying. You're either left with the people who didn't succeed at their previous job (but are good talkers) or people who have a brand name college/company but aren't really exceptional. On the other hand, trying to completely ignore past experience means you're left asking questions completely unrelated to real world work.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#149

Post by neilv »

zanecodes wrote: post #55
MrDarcy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Closing your eyes is always an option, if you're trying to think deeply and without distraction. It helps a lot to explain your stream of consciousness as you think, even if it's disorganized, and you're definitely not cheating if your eyes are closed!

That sounds worth trying. And it would definitely be something to practice in advance...

When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet, or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about the immediate problem and related things.

(In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about the job opportunity that's the real point of the exercise.)

I don't understand how that works, but it usually works very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.

If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.

Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview, trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences, disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant, redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but energized and commanding manner. You might get permabanned from that company, for coming across like an aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky interview process. :)

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#150

Post by neilv »

goldchainposse wrote: post #138
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.

IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was found to be legitimate fair use.
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