191–200 of 544 posts
So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...
I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…
“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.” Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?
Orchestras started using privacy screens for auditions for a reason. And I'm not familiar with an equivalent for the human voice, particularly for hiding halting, labored, or elliptical speech—possibly by a non-native speaker—that they could straighten out on the page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, this sounds extremely difficult and not in a good way. That sounds like many many hours of writing work, to describe a problem that might be many years in the past, that might have been solved by extremely intricate methods that are easy to forget, using technologies that are now not commonly in use, etc. A good question to ask about each interview question might be: would a good liar have an easier tim…
Having read many, many, many answers to this question, I don't think that a good liar has a particularly easy time answering this question -- or certainly not in a way that gets them further consideration! And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another…
How would you know?
> And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another.
I sincerely hope that I never accidentally apply for a company that thinks an unpaid, long form writing prompt is an appropriate interview question because the work happens to be hard.
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For CS1 you probably don't need much compute power for assignments. Schools are already well funded enough to sometimes offer freshman ipad pros. You could offer them a raspberry pi or some extremely cheap, low powered PC, make them return it after the semester if you want to save them money. You can firewall it from the open internet, and have students turn in their code from this device alone to a university server…
“enough friction and a timesink” Have you taught students before? Many will spend inordinate amounts of time to not learn the material. Often times it seems there is no friction too great if it allows one to not think too hard.
Of course the death blow for this sort of cheating is the exam, which you weight quite a bit more than the homework. A student who just copy and pastes code will still fail the class, since they can't use chatgpt in the lecture hall during exam time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, this sounds extremely difficult and not in a good way. That sounds like many many hours of writing work, to describe a problem that might be many years in the past, that might have been solved by extremely intricate methods that are easy to forget, using technologies that are now not commonly in use, etc. A good question to ask about each interview question might be: would a good liar have an easier tim…
Having read many, many, many answers to this question, I don't think that a good liar has a particularly easy time answering this question -- or certainly not in a way that gets them further consideration! And yes, it's many hours of work -- but the work itself that we are doing is quite hard, and if someone washes out in the application process because it feels unduly arduous, we are likely not a fit for one another…
IMO a good question provides the necessary context itself, and the candidate's thinking and reasoning skills are what's tested. With your question, it's basically turned into a competition of which candidate has tackled the most ridiculous/obscure/complex bug, so candidates aren't being judged on even footing.
OTOH, they still do need to learn how to program and debug (more important than ever if you're using machine-generated code likely to contain bugs, and with unknown error handling), so it seems colleges also need to make the assignments more complex to point where current crop of tools can only be used to assist - not to nearly write all the code.
It'll be interesting to see how these new tools affect hiring standards... Doesn't make much sense to pay someone just to get a tool to write the code, so maybe the bar will be raised there too.
All this tells us that whiteboard interviews are here to stay.
With the general shift to remote-first, it's a lot more difficult to verify that your whiteboarder isn't ChatGPT-ing just off-screen.
"Hey MultimodalGPT, look like me on a Zoom call and pass this interview."
Text2Video is already moving quickly. Maybe in as little as three years a video feed will be as trustworthy as an email.