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HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

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Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#42
post #6

An alarming number of people don't understand that LLMs work via purely stochastic processes, so I'm happy to see in-depth pieces like this. I'm looking for a job and maybe this is why it's so hard to get a callback these days: resumes are just dumped in some LLM black hole and no one really knows how it works. The author says: > temperature 0.1 — low, supposedly nudging the model toward deterministic outputs This is…

A distribution with all probability mass on one outcome is deterministic, so in principle, setting temperature to 0 _should_ result in deterministic outputs. There are a few reasons it might not, but I don't think any of these apply when running a local model like the author did.

There are. If the kernels are nondeterministic (e.g. timing issues) there are minor changes between runs, on a single system, even with eager decode enabled (typically what temperature=0 achieves).

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the easiest explanation would be that the model harness doesn't always take the most likely token but does top-k sampling or similar. temperatur just means that probabilities get more and more equalized, boosting the chance that an unlikely token gets picked. but even with temp 0 you could have 0.8 T1, 0.19 T2, ... and sometimes sample T2

No, this can't happen at temperature 0. The formula defining temperature-adjusted softmax isn't strictly defined at 0, but taking the limit (in the case where all logits are distinct) results in probability 1 being placed on the largest logit. Samplers will typically special case temperature 0 and pick the most likely token at each step.

This is a very authoritative answer that should be more nuanced and caveated as implementation-dependent. In some cases, repetition penalties take precedence over sampling; top_k and top_p can also be handled before or after the temperature step. In other cases, `0` is turned into like 1e-10 or some super tiny float value (which can drift if you do any arithmetic with it). Routing, quantization, etc. can also have an effect on sampling. And yes, in some cases, setting temperature to 0 can mean "pure greedy decoding" which makes the decoder about as deterministic as it can get.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#44
post #6

An alarming number of people don't understand that LLMs work via purely stochastic processes, so I'm happy to see in-depth pieces like this. I'm looking for a job and maybe this is why it's so hard to get a callback these days: resumes are just dumped in some LLM black hole and no one really knows how it works. The author says: > temperature 0.1 — low, supposedly nudging the model toward deterministic outputs This is…

A distribution with all probability mass on one outcome is deterministic, so in principle, setting temperature to 0 _should_ result in deterministic outputs. There are a few reasons it might not, but I don't think any of these apply when running a local model like the author did.

Setting the temperature to 0 should give deterministic results but that's not any better - it's just hiding the huge variance by only taking one sample.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#45
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are selecting for people who are fine working in their free time. If you contribute to open source you are more likely to contribute to the company on weekends. If instead you have other hobbies or a family that takes up non-work hours you are more likely to drop your pen after forty hours.

Maybe they're selecting for intrinsic motivation. People who enjoy programming to the point they do it for fun, not just because it pays. Free software work doesn't imply we work for free. We work on our projects, the stuff that we actually enjoy working on. Nobody is going to work on corporate products without adequate compensation.

"Nobody is going to work on corporate products without adequate compensation."

I guess there sadly are many nobodies who do this to hope to become somebody.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#46
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they're selecting for intrinsic motivation. People who enjoy programming to the point they do it for fun, not just because it pays. Free software work doesn't imply we work for free. We work on our projects, the stuff that we actually enjoy working on. Nobody is going to work on corporate products without adequate compensation.

"Nobody is going to work on corporate products without adequate compensation." I guess there sadly are many nobodies who do this to hope to become somebody.

If the open source work is part of a hiring pipeline, sure. Contribute to some repository and have it serve as a resume that gets you hired is also a form of compensation. If the work is also enjoyable, then it's a win either way.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#47
post #6

An alarming number of people don't understand that LLMs work via purely stochastic processes, so I'm happy to see in-depth pieces like this. I'm looking for a job and maybe this is why it's so hard to get a callback these days: resumes are just dumped in some LLM black hole and no one really knows how it works. The author says: > temperature 0.1 — low, supposedly nudging the model toward deterministic outputs This is…

A distribution with all probability mass on one outcome is deterministic, so in principle, setting temperature to 0 _should_ result in deterministic outputs. There are a few reasons it might not, but I don't think any of these apply when running a local model like the author did.

> so in principle, setting temperature to 0 _should_ result in deterministic outputs

It is a common misconception, but it is not true even in principle. If I have 2 or more logits which are equal to the maximum of my logits, I will sample uniformly random from them with any temperature, even zero. Sampling from softmax([1, 0, 1]) is still stochastic at temperature 0, because the limit is to sample uniformly from the first or the last element.

Anyway: "GPUs don't do deterministic matrix multiplications" is the biggest source of randomness in LLMs. GPUs put the associativity of the sums in matrix multiplications in arbitrary order, and this has a huge impact on the logits coming out of the neural network.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#48

> I fail 65% of the time. Same exact resume, different luck. As someone who’s run hiring pipelines for technical roles in the past few years, that’s actually a fantastic number. I objectively hate saying that, but it’s true. 35% chance of elevating a technical individual to the next stage with no effort? I’ve seen as many as 100+ applicants an hour even when including a domain specific screener question. That’s 35 “s…

In that case, I have a pre-screening system to sell you. Through state of the art technology, it only lets through the best* 1% of applications.

*According to our proprietary, undisclosed, non-deterministic metric, which may or may not be Math.random

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#49

> I fail 65% of the time. Same exact resume, different luck. As someone who’s run hiring pipelines for technical roles in the past few years, that’s actually a fantastic number. I objectively hate saying that, but it’s true. 35% chance of elevating a technical individual to the next stage with no effort? I’ve seen as many as 100+ applicants an hour even when including a domain specific screener question. That’s 35 “s…

there have got to be better ways to optimize pipelines. maybe set a limit on number of applications for a role based on the number you/your team can reliably go through them. if more are needed then open the role for another wave of applications.

Re: HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88

#50
post #6

An alarming number of people don't understand that LLMs work via purely stochastic processes, so I'm happy to see in-depth pieces like this. I'm looking for a job and maybe this is why it's so hard to get a callback these days: resumes are just dumped in some LLM black hole and no one really knows how it works. The author says: > temperature 0.1 — low, supposedly nudging the model toward deterministic outputs This is…

Willing to be corrected but I believe this type of automated resume filtering is illegal. Not saying it never happens but my understanding is it is not typical.

Illegal where?
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