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AI Broke Interviews

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Re: AI Broke Interviews

#21

Post by tavavex »

> Then there’s the pacing. A human pauses to think. AI-assisted candidates pause to receive a perfect answer. You can mostly feel the rhythm shift. Their eyes drift slightly. You think we don’t see that, don’t you?

I really hope most interviewers have at least the barebones skills to be able to discern AI-using interviewees, like what the author claims to have. I'm trying to get hired at the junior level, and the thought of competing with people who have no qualms with effectively cheating in real time is pretty scary. I'm human, I will inevitably not know something or make minor missteps - someone with an AI or a quick-witted friend by their side can spit out perfect, fully-rounded, flawless, HR-optimized stories and replies with a satisfying conclusion for the behavioral questions, and basically always-correct, optimal solutions for the technical questions.

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#22

Post by danpalmer »

neilv wrote: post #8

> Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers. Before Google, AFAIK, it was ad hoc, among good programmers. I only ever saw people talking with people about what they'd worked on, and about the company. (And I heard that Microsoft sometime…

Prepping for interviews has been a big deal forever in most other industries though. It's considered normal to read extensively about a company, understand their business, sales strategies, finances, things like that, for any sort of business role.

I think tech is and was an exception here.

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#23

Post by habosa »

For our coding interviews we encourage people to use whatever tools they want. Cursor, Claude, none, doesn’t matter.

What I’m looking for is strong thinking and problem solving. Sometimes someone uses AI to sort of parallelize their brain, and I’m impressed. Others show me their aptitude without any advanced tools at all.

What I can’t stand is the lazy AI candidates. People who I know can code, asking Claude to write a function that does something completely trivial and then saying literally nothing in the 30 seconds that it “thinks”. They’re just not trying. They’re not leveraging anything, they’re outsourcing. It’s just so sad to set how quickly people are to be lazy, to me it’s like ordering food delivery from the place under your building.

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#24

Post by ekropotin »

captainkrtek wrote: post #13

I’ve conducted about 60 interviews this year, and have spotted a lot of AI usage. At first I was quite concerned, then I realized that in nearly all cases I’d spotted usage, a pattern stood out. Of the folks I spotted, all spoke far too clearly and linearly when it came to problem solving. No self doubt, no suggestion of different approaches and appearance of thought, just a clear A->B solution. Then, because they of…

Jumping straight to the optimal solution may also indicate that candidate have seen the problem before.

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#25

Post by tavavex »

captainkrtek wrote: post #13

I’ve conducted about 60 interviews this year, and have spotted a lot of AI usage. At first I was quite concerned, then I realized that in nearly all cases I’d spotted usage, a pattern stood out. Of the folks I spotted, all spoke far too clearly and linearly when it came to problem solving. No self doubt, no suggestion of different approaches and appearance of thought, just a clear A->B solution. Then, because they of…

Can I ask - out of the 60 interviews, roughly how many times did you suspect AI usage?

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#27

Post by Freedom2 »

captainkrtek wrote: post #13

I’ve conducted about 60 interviews this year, and have spotted a lot of AI usage. At first I was quite concerned, then I realized that in nearly all cases I’d spotted usage, a pattern stood out. Of the folks I spotted, all spoke far too clearly and linearly when it came to problem solving. No self doubt, no suggestion of different approaches and appearance of thought, just a clear A->B solution. Then, because they of…

> most engineers contemplate ideas, change their mind, ask clarifying questions

I don't disagree at all. I find it slightly funny that in my experience interviewing for FAANG and YC startups, the signs you mentioned would be seen as "red flags". And that's not just my assumption, when I asked for feedback on the interview, I have multiple times received feedback along the lines of "candidate showed hesitation and indecision with their choice of solution".

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#29

Post by tavavex »

ferrouswheel wrote: post #2

While I agree LLMs have forever changed the interviewing game, I also strongly disagree with deeming slop code as "perfect" and "optimal". There's a lot of shitty code made my LLMs, even today. So maybe we should lean in, and get people to critique generated code with the interviewer. Besides, being able to talk through, review, and discuss code is more important than the initial creation.

Interview questions are a genre of their own though. They are:

1. Very commonly repeated across the internet

2. Studied to the point of having perfect solutions written for almost any permutation of them

3. Very short and self-contained, not having to interact with greater systems and usually being solvable in a few dozen lines of code

4. Of limited difficulty (since the candidate is put on the spot and can't really think about it much, you can only make it so hard)

All of that lends them to being practically the perfect LLM use case. I would expect a modern LLM to vastly outperform me in almost any interview question. Maybe that changes for non-juniors who advance far enough to have niche specialist knowledge, but if we're talking about the generic Leetcode-style stuff, I have no doubts that an LLM would do perfectly fine compared to me.

Re: AI Broke Interviews

#30

Post by makeitdouble »

neilv wrote: post #8

> Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and system design rounds. Before that, it was brainteasers. Before Google, AFAIK, it was ad hoc, among good programmers. I only ever saw people talking with people about what they'd worked on, and about the company. (And I heard that Microsoft sometime…

> many companies just blindly do it.

Yes. A while ago a company contacted me to interview, and after the first "casual" round they told me their standard process was going full leetcode on the second round and I'm advised to prepare for those if I'm interested in going further.

While that's the only company that was so upfront about it, most accept that leetcodes are dumb (need to be prepped even for a working engineer) and still base the core of their technical interview on them.

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