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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this. I hate this planet. So many problems would go away if people could actually afford to make choices.

> So many problems would go away if Writing it like you did implies that a magical solution exists and we are all maliciously withholding it from you. It does not and we are not.

>implies that a magical solution exists and we are all maliciously withholding it from you

i did not get that from what they wrote at all.

they sound frustrated. but that does not mean they are frustrated at you specifically.

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

#182
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could at least allow hiring teams to send out a feedback email that highlights what the candidate did WELL, at a high level. This way the candidate gets some meaningful signal, while the company avoids the legal gray area of admitting why they rejected them. Just add a disclaimer like “unfortunately company policy prohibits us from explicitly mentioning why we chose another candidate.”

But you’d need to actually care to take something like that into consideration so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with erasing biases is that you cannot look at any statistics. The internet and training set can be free of any form of -ism, and the models would still be expected to have biases. In fact it's something desirable, because statistical inferences are a valuable tool. The AI won't care if some people get upset because it consistently recommends you get Mexican food instead of Italian when you're visiting so…

I didn't find much in East Texas. Is South Texas much better?

There are dozens and dozens of cheap-looking restaurants in San Antonio with absolutely no online presence that will serve you the most delicious tex mex you’ve had in your whole life

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.) I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m alr…

I do Rover for extra fun money and I get to watch other peoples dogs when I don’t have one myself right now. Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly. Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Pl…

Is this suspicious, probably:

“ps— hope I hit my goal of responding in (w/biz hours mentioned in ad)

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

#185
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.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014. Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another auto…

>Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems?

i think it is important to remember that ai interviews arent constrained to the tech industry. many people who have no idea what a 'leet-code' is, and who have always done normal human-human interviews, are now having to navigate being interviewed by ai as well.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives. If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought pro…

you can put a time limit on it from when they start to submit. It's really the only way to solve high volume of unqualified applicants. So much time wasted talking to people who could barely code

Submit 30min after interview, “you have 20min” (remainder for bio break or whatever)?

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

#187
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't pay anything to a company I'm applying to, but I would gladly send a small amount of money to a charity and show them the relevant bank or cryptocurrency proof if they explain why they need the micropayment. They could present me with a list of 10 or 10000 charities, I'd pick 1 and put "micropayment for applying to company X" in the comment of the payment. That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge…

To avoid overhead for many small payments, start a platform where users can buy many credits at once by contributing larger amounts to charity. Then, you burn your credits to apply to companies (or cold message applicants) to show you're not just spraying and praying.

Some more thoughts before I go to bed.

This could also be used for combating spam elsewhere, like posting in forums, comment sections and so on. To preserve privacy, something like zero-knowledge proofs could be utilized. I don't know how the cryptography would work exactly, but if you can't double spend a credit and you can choose whether to keep it anonymous or not, it could work, too. It would be best if for a given credit spent, you could only disclose your identity to the entity you want access to, not the credit issuing entity.

For spam, it seems like the cost of maintaining a forum like the servers are much lower than the cost of the mods that deal with spam. So instead of paying the forum directly, we lower the need for human mods to spend their time. That way we lower resources to the forum indirectly. The credits could be per post or per account creation. I assume the HN mods' time is worth a lot more than the servers and power HN runs on.

Also, we won't have the issue that PoW and other proofs-of-X's have of being easier to do on some devices, but harder on others (like the power and time it takes to run PoW on a beefy desktop with AES-NI vs an on old phone).

But we'll still have the issue with different standards of living in different places making the credits more or less expensive for the user subjectively. Companies hiring worldwide could require different amounts of credits for applicants from different countries, but for forums this wouldn't work.

A solution to that could be issuers giving credits for local volunteering work. Clean up some garbage from the shore and get a credit regardless of whether you're in the USA or Bangladesh. But if you want to prevent credits from being traded (do we? idk) and, at the same time, have some amount of privacy, how would you do it?

But now you'd have to make sure that credit issuers all over the world only issue credits for real charity-like work. And who's to say how to value picking up garbage vs volunteering at an animal shelter vs donating 1$ to a charity.

It's interesting to think about this, even though I don't have any resource to implement anything like that.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outstanding. I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive

Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard". The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.

Engineering interviews in tech are arbitrary and biased by design.

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

#189
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.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014. Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another auto…

A leet-code style automated assignment is like a test. We all did tests in school so I guess most people do not feel there is anything wrong about that.

However, an interview, which should be conducted by human, but instead by something AI pretends to be human, would make most of the current human beings feel disgusted, naturally.

Is there any formal proof that an AI conducted interview yields more than a pencil & paper test? Or is there any scientific research about that? I doubt there would be any in the near future. Then using such AI conducted interviews is simply a belief.

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.

It works in essentially every other profession. Programming isn’t that special.

It appears that the coding job will be some variation will be some variation of vibecoding going forward, so a professional cert might be good enough.
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