Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

kapwing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 731 posts

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#451

Post by borroka »

crabbone wrote: post #355
sethammons wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general rule is to dress one step up from those in the role. Everyone in hoodie and shorts? Wear pants. Everyone in collared polos? Go business casual with maybe a blazer. Showing up a level lower makes you look unprepared. Showing up some levels higher, like in a suit to a hoodie shop, shows lack of research and reading a room. In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def starte…

Erm... no? The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in th…

A few months ago, the 60-year-old CEO of the previous company I worked for, employing 100,000 people, showed up at our satellite office with other senior executives and EVPs for an official visit.

He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.

In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#452

Post by whatamidoingyo »

esafak wrote: post #36
bitlad wrote: post #3

Sounds like all the interviews I do in india.

I've seen it more with candidates in Asia. And they claim to be based in the US :) A few even used digital face transplants, stuck in the uncanny valley, to hide it. I imagine it will be hard to tell in a few years.

... you do realize that India is in Asia, right?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#453

Post by kevinsync »

Aurornis wrote: post #58
no-dr-onboard wrote: post #45

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 lyi…

> 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…

My personal theory is less that it's reducing the guilt of lying if the machine fabricates it but rather more that the average person has historically been not so good at fabricating a fib (and they now have instant access to plausible-sounding lies)

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#455

Post by cruffle_duffle »

barbs wrote: post #378
jaredklewis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit. Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”) Anyway, probably not g…

I wore a suit to my very first tech interview on the advice of my well-meaning but ill-informed mother. I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!

Very close story here as well. lol. “You can always underdress but never overdress!”

Thanks mom!

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#456

Post by theamk »

xigency wrote: post #103
esafak wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With all the unemployed tech workers, would it just make sense to hire someone who knows their salt to do recruiting and interviews? Recruiters always seem to have a blast moving between random high-level companies and ghosting people over text, socials and the phone. If they lack both the social skills and the technical knowledge, I don't know what their value proposition is, but compared to chronic underemployment…

The problem is "knowing their salt to do recruiting" is very hard. In all places I've been, the kinds of interview we are talking about here (technical problems, etc...) are delegated to regular engineers. So those technical interviewers are likely great at reading and writing the code, but they many not be the best at spotting fake AI.

(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#457

Post by whstl »

ilamont wrote: post #340
whstl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?

I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way, then ask HR to reject the candidate.

I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha

I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#458

Post by gwbas1c »

crazygringo wrote: post #172
gwbas1c wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Regular sharpening doesn't work. But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function. This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the b…

Well, let's see you do it! Can you deblur something like the first 2-3 letters of a name?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#459

Post by 9rx »

borroka wrote: post #437
yks wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a t-shirt/jeans combo.

In human dynamics, very little is based on “first principles”. Some words are considered vulgar and others are not. Why? Aren't they just a sequence of letters? They certainly are, but those sequences have been assigned a meaning that does not derive from any “first principle”. In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now…

> In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men.

Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.

> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.

It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#460

Post by rafaelmn »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #435
never_inline wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description". Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!

> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description". If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview? Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

> what is one to do

Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?

Post reply on HN