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Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

interviewcoder.co

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Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#111

Post by colesantiago »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #41
colesantiago wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now they can do fizz buzz with AI, Cursor, Copilot, etc. If you want to filter out these candidates, bounties are the way here and in person interviews. Leetcode can't help you here.

> And now they can do fizz buzz with AI, Cursor, Copilot, etc. No, they can't. These are the people who don't know the difference between a variable and a function call or what a module is. (90 percent of applicants.) AI can't help them here. Even if they can copy-paste an AI response they still don't have the vocabulary to explain what they're copy-pasting even in most basic terms.

> No, they can't. These are the people who don't know the difference between a variable and a function call or what a module is. (90 percent of applicants.)

Yes they can and you don't know if they don't know that.

You can't stop them from doing this.

The only way to stop them is to do in person, bounties and asking about their real world experience.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#112

Post by cherry_tree »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #6

So, am I missing something? Is this just a tool allowing job candidates to commit fraud? I'm no lawyer, so I'm not sure this would rise to the level of actual legal fraud, but moral fraud at the very least is what I think I'm seeing. EDIT: Now I see it at the bottom of the page... "Interview Coder is a desktop app designed to help job seekers ace technical interviews by providing real-time assistance with coding ques…

In most societies in the world today you must have a job to survive and to support the survival of one’s family. Imho it is not morally wrong to do anything you need to do to achieve gainful employment so that you and your family can survive, and I would go so far as to say it is immoral to be scolding people engaged in a fight for survival that they aren’t doing it properly.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#113

Post by rvz »

agubelu wrote: post #36
rvz wrote: post #20

Good. This destroys a system that is already broken and renders Leetcode and others useless for evaluating candidates in the AI era. The most ironic thing is that this qualifies for "hacking a system to your advantage" for Y Combinator. Those that are upset by Interview Coder as 'cheating' are themselves bounded by an outdated system waiting to be disrupted and Interview Coder is the result of that. The only way to s…

On-site and leetcode aren't mutually exclusive. We'll simply go back to in-person leetcode questions which will be equally shit.

> We'll simply go back to in-person leetcode questions which will be equally shit.

Great idea! That is even better.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#114

Post by bluefirebrand »

bilsbie wrote: post #72
danielvaughn wrote: post #33

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour. Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge. Not only is this LLM pro…

It’s a major improvement but you still want to be careful on what you consider common knowledge. There’s a lot of breadth to software engineering and there can be whole areas someone is missing but can learn. For example I was always a great employee but early in my career I wasn’t big on unit testing. Or I interviewed for an ML job and they dinged me for not knowing a bunch of statistics things off the top of my hea…

> I was always a great employee but early in my career I wasn’t big on unit testing

Unit testing does have drawbacks though, so as long as you could explain why you aren't a huge fan of it, I don't see why this would be a disqualification

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#115

Post by Ferret7446 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #33

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour. Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge. Not only is this LLM pro…

This doesn't scale, and opens up legal liability to unfair hiring accusations.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#116

Post by pseudalopex »

bogwog wrote: post #53
gcp123 wrote: post #22

I've spent the last decade watching this arms race between interviewers and candidates. Last month I hired a senior dev who couldn't implement a basic database migration when we brought him on but aced our interview problems. Turned out he'd been using tools like this. The problem isn't the tools - they're inevitable. The problem is that our industry clings to this bizarre ritual where we test for skills that are com…

> These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were. Whenever the topic about how broken tech interviews are has showed up on HN in the past, there were usually two crowds: the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people, and the much less common "they suck, so we do something else" crowd. Almost everyone agreed they were broken. What does it…

> Almost everyone agreed they were broken.

Many? Yes. Almost everyone? No.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#117

Post by pseudalopex »

tempodox wrote: post #61
iamdbtoo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's defensive against an industry who has developed ridiculous hiring practices.

If their hiring practice is that ridiculous, that means the company has been warped by an unreasonable amount of bureaucracy. Why would anyone want to work for such a company anyway?

Needing money and not finding a preferable job usually.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#118

Post by yongjik »

bogwog wrote: post #53
gcp123 wrote: post #22

I've spent the last decade watching this arms race between interviewers and candidates. Last month I hired a senior dev who couldn't implement a basic database migration when we brought him on but aced our interview problems. Turned out he'd been using tools like this. The problem isn't the tools - they're inevitable. The problem is that our industry clings to this bizarre ritual where we test for skills that are com…

> These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were. Whenever the topic about how broken tech interviews are has showed up on HN in the past, there were usually two crowds: the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people, and the much less common "they suck, so we do something else" crowd. Almost everyone agreed they were broken. What does it…

> the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people

I'm in this camp and I don't think it's "broken" - at least not in the sense that we have a broadly applicable "fix" that improves the situation.

I.e., everybody hates coding interviews but it's still close to the best we have got, and it beats credentialism or talking about random stuff (how are you going to compare across candidates).

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#119

Post by alistairSH »

esafak wrote: post #101
alistairSH wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? Most people will end up using Google or AI or whatever other tool is available to do the job. The tests aren’t for for purpose and that’s the root of the problem, IMO.

These people will then submit PRs with broken code they don't understand, as I have witnessed. You don't know anything about a candidate if you merely witness them repeating what the AI said.

You also don’t know much about them if you rely on online leetcode quizzes, even without AI. That’s the problem. That candidates are using AI is the expected outcome of the enshitification of the interview process.

Re: Interview Coder is an invisible AI for technical interviews

#120

Post by SilverRubicon »

koliber wrote: post #59
danielvaughn wrote: post #33

My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour. Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge. Not only is this LLM pro…

This is a great approach and I like it as well. I did have a few situations where the person could talk shop like an expert but when it came to actually writing some code they failed. I literally had a person fail fizzbuzz that was supposedly senior and talked shop really well.

As a senior developer I had to search for "wtf is fizzbuzz". How many senior developers spend their time solving these kinds of problems?
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