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I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

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Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#72
post #55
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.

The lack of feedback is the worst part and is increasingly more common. Zero respect for the candidates time investment and propagates a terrible culture.

Most of big-CO legal teams do not allow for feedback to be communicated to the candidates. They are afraid the candidates will sue base on that. That is not new.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#74
post #2

> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired? For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.

I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.

So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.

> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard. I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate: What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted…

Arbitrary filtering of candidates is always an option, but then you may as well do it as cheaply as possible. Throw out half the resumes.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#76
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate. I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rath…

Small companies are an obvious 3rd place to escape to and there should be a good number of them given all the big companies behave as you indicate.. unless it really hard to start a new business in India. Do you know if this is the case or why else wouldn't you consider small businesses as a alternative?

I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.

I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#77
> But as we’ve covered again and again, a bias-free AI system is an impossible-to-achieve standard, since models are trained on large swaths of the internet, which contain sexism, racism, and other biases.

LLM trained on texts from before 1913 (Source: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms):

Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?

A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.

The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".

Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#78
post #66

Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions. It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting". They never got back…

Yeah, I wasted probably 40 hours of my life on Canonical's interview process and never even got to talk to a person. They wanted to know my high school GPA and ACT score.

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#79
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certification process like what Cisco has. All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it. You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience

This sounds an awful lot like a college diploma.

Colleges aren't all equal.

Professional certifications are different

Re: I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

#80
post #2

> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired? For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.

That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.

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