I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by projektfu » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #131

kazinator wrote: post #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 pre…

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?

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

#142

Post by suzzer99 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #138

nitwit005 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do think we have to distinguish two things though. It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me. What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you…

2 spaces ftmfw. I want to see as much on the screen as possible. Horizontal scrolling is bad.

Who still uses 8? Isn't that like a COBOL thing?

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

#143

Post by matheusmoreira » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

Teever wrote: post #122

tmoertel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry you had such a bad interviewing experience. You asked for feedback in your blog post, and since your blog doesn't allow comments, I hope you won't mind my responding here. You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it: > [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural inte…

> Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If yo…

> Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?

That hits pretty close to home... I'm a doctor who has a small blog about the implementation details of the lisp I made.

> Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about?

If someone asked me this point blank I think I'd laugh out loud. It's interesting enough for me to keep up with the latest evidence, thanks.

> Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?

To be fair, healthcare professionals have some pretty gruelling training and difficult licensing examinations. Some amount of preselection is taking place. Nobody needs a license to write software.

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

#144

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

tharkun__ wrote: post #135

YesBox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.

Using AI for what and is it bad or good? At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively. So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to…

> Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI.

You can likely control for that, if you either interview in person or via screen sharing. (Yes, it could be faked, but that's harder.)

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

#145

Post by diacritical » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

pedalpete wrote: post #35

I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019. Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through. AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds. It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round. The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many peo…

If you have 10k jobs and 500k applications, that's 50 applications per job. Spending a few minutes on each application would mean a few hours for the initial screening for each job, but if that job is filled, you'll get a person who'll stay there for a few years. How is that not worth it? Why would you need to automate it? If you're interviewing for people to do some quick task and leave, sure, but companies want long-term hires.

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

#146

Post by hansvm » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #8

JohnFen wrote: 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.

The last time I was hiring I gave out a take-home test, and I thought it was the opposite of an imposition on candidates' time. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts:

- It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting).

- I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn't waste your time. If you had enough other proof of abilities then I skipped the take-home.

- Candidates were told that it was designed to be fast and that if they couldn't complete it quickly they were unlikely to be successful interviewing either. They still had the option to spend a lot of time if they thought my assessment of the situation was wrong, but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired.

- I did a lot of work behind the scenes calibrating and re-writing the questions individually and as a whole so that the test score correlated very well with interview performance (most interviews administered by not-me, removing a form of bias that's easy to creep in there).

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

#147

Post by mistrial9 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

apologies for the quick reply -- but, did you not understand that this was implemented on a very large scale for a half-dozen massive US corps with large turnover, for example Hilton and Delta Air, THREE years ago ? to Americans in the USA ? Did no one here catch that ? AFAIK it was one of the first large use cases for corporate AI.

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

#148

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #111

ncr100 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here." A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra) It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos"…

"That is not how it works here." Right, how it works in Europe is there are just no jobs or economic growth at all. Works great for those late in their career who have jobs and basically can't be fired. Not so much for anyone younger though. Better hope your employer doesn't go out of business before you retire. Better hope your government doesn't go bankrupt before you die. Stop injecting politics into a non-politic…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

eikenberry wrote: post #63

bbkane wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers are also inundated by applications so they're applying higher bars to meet as a sort of back pressure. I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective. No, I don't know how to fix it.

Smaller companies is one fix. These are almost all problems of fast growth and scale.

The problem is that spambots don’t care how big the company is. I know folks that advertised local Office Manager positions for tiny companies, and got hundreds of totally unqualified and unrelated rèsumès, and that was before AI was common.

The “good” news, was, that it was pretty easy to bin the spam.

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

#150

Post by parpfish » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 1:40 AM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #97

suzzer99 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.

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

The inability to get feedback and course-correct is my biggest peeve with take homes.

Is this one of the tests where I just need to throw together a five minute quickie to get over your “can you program” filter? or do you need me to put together something flashy and memorable to show off my ceiling? If o put together my flashy thing, would I get dinged for over-engineering something where a five minute hack solution was good enough?