How ChatGPT is changing the job hiring process, from the HR department to coders

Right, trashy ads would randomly pop up in your program.

It's questionable that there will be many jobs that are very similar at all to SWE of today in five years.

There is no reason to believe that the large (language/multimodal) models will stop progressing. In six months the IQ of ChatGPT increased by 30-40 points. If we pretend that these things are linear, (so far they are actually exponential) then that's a 430 IQ in five years. Assuming the acceleration of progress entirely stops and just increases linearly from here on out.

There are quite a few people that think this stuff can easily become millions of times smarter. I am doubtful of that in the short term, because I think there are practical limits to compression, but you have to admit that multiple orders of magnitude increases in speed, data size, and efficiency are very plausible. Especially as new compute-in-memory systems start to roll out which is feasible in five years.

The non-conservative and increasingly popular belief is that these systems will be hundreds of times faster than humans and fully autonomous within a few years. Which seems extremely foolhardy but also the most likely path due to the inability of society to recognize and adapt to the real danger with enough nuance.

So I am wondering if there will be any jobs for any people at that point unless the AI is deeply integrated into their brain.

I've definitely had bad experiences with take home tests, but well-run take home setups can be a lot nicer than phone-screens with live coding.

When I interviewed at my current employer they made it very clear that the take home was meant as a conversation starter, and everyone who gets a take-home made it to the on-site (virtual in this case since its a remote role). This removed the guess work into whether the test will be a waste of time, as there was a guaranteed on-site interview. The test itself was also a more accurate representation of a simpler version of problems that the team was working on, as opposed to a generic algorithm problem.

Overall this was the most positive interview loop I've ever bene through, and was a big factor in making a decision to say yes to the job offer.

Let's suppose that the datasets don't increase in size. Look at the difference in speed between the old ChatGPT and turbo ChatGPT. Suppose within 6-8 months they can do that again with GPT4.

I think that would be about five times faster than a human.

But there is more data. Do you really think they have ingested every single YouTube video or movie? Video and video+transcription is the next thing.

Another source of data could be to have the models study and reprocess information into more concise language (possibly new vocabulary) or diagrams with the goal of increasing levels of abstraction or information density.

I’ve had my time wasted too

“We just want to see how you think”

really meaning they wanted unit tests, client side caching, and a particular design pattern

or really meaning they didn't want you to go outside the scope

or really meaning that they didn't even know that budget for their whole department could be revoked, so you wasted your time even if the single gatekeeper didn’t arbitrarily move the goal posts on you

in my experience, nobody can even tell you the details of what the “technical assessment“ will be, I’ve expected coderpads and instead gotten surprise screen sharing requests for using my own IDE, requiring an environment that isn’t even currently set up on that computer if I normally use a work laptop for the last who knows how long. I’ve NEVER seen a takehome project have some clear prewritten unit tests that the outcome had to conform to, I don't think this is a realistic request in this day and age.