An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

Unfortunately real life problems involve a lot of context and introducing that to interviews is hard. It either requires a long conversation where someone might lose track, or involve writing a large ish code base and getting them to work on that (which is a lot of work, and once again they don’t have context).

In my experience if a problem simple enough to be completed in an hour, it’s simple enough for AI.

> Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear.

Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class.

> It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well.

That is the (unspoken) point I've been trying to make, without being so overt about it. People need more money. Prices keep going up, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages have stubbornly refused to keep historical pace in the long view. The need for ever-growing sums of money just to survive is a key driver in the constant glut of applicants for jobs, one that is exacerbated by the staunch refusal of businesses to pay appropriate wages outside of the tech sector.

> It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you.

They're really not, though. Employers whine about a lack of qualified domestic candidates as justification for outsourcing jobs or importing migrants on precarious visas, but then also refuse to engage with local Higher Education institutions to "properly train" the candidates they need or contribute to on-the-job training. As the age-old HR koan goes: The CEO asks HR, "What if we pay for job training and they leave?", while HR replies, "What if we don't pay for training and they stay?" There is no zero-sum game being played, here, and the actions of employers do not align with their verbal complaints about the state of job applications and the labor market. They're complaining the basement is flooded while leaving the firehose turned on.

> The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today.

Yeah, nah. This is a recent trend, and a very recent narrative. In the 2000s and early 2010s, I was still being actively penalized for the appearance of job hopping, in the form of lower salaries and limited upward mobility. That really only began changing in the 2014-2016 window, when suddenly it became more acceptable as most millennials and Xers hadn't exactly had stable careers like our predecessors. In less than a decade, that shift from "job hopping=bad" to "job hopping=acceptable" accelerated to "job hopping=required if you want to survive and thrive". That attitude only came about because the cost of everything kept going up, and up, and up, while our wages and upward mobility stagnated if we stayed put. Loyalty hasn't been rewarded since the 80s, but especially in a post-2008 world, it's been a hindrance to individual success and is solely the fault of employers, not employees.

> You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop.

I have plenty of first-hand knowledge from my own career, and have second-hand knowledge from the careers of my parents' circles compared to the careers of my senior mentors (Xers), colleagues, and juniors. Add in the data curated by all the other groups trying to sell their own narrative, data gathered by governments, and just casual observations of both domestic and global employment trends, and this isn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach by anyone reasonably well-informed and suitably objective about it.

> Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.

It is a fight, though. A fight for everyone to be able to make rent, pay bills, and have a decent quality of life on a full-time job. That's the fight. Such a lifestyle has increasingly been constrained solely to those in Big Tech, especially in urban areas, and it's why there's such a fierce resistance to arbitrary RTO mandates and a willfulness to cheat on exams. Your retorts to me essentially boil down to the age-old propaganda of, "Workers should know their place and follow the rules for their own good," which only works when the rules ensure their basic needs are met. That is not the case, as can be evidenced from even a casual glance at current global events. Populism doesn't arise from peace, love, and good times for all, it arises from a broken system that doesn't satisfy the needs of the masses. That is why hiring is broken, in a nutshell.

A good leader understands the system they operate within, its flaws as well as its strengths, and what is or isn't within their ability to fix or improve upon. Individual managers and employers simply cannot fix what amounts to a broken system rooted in short-termism. Sure, working with recruiters can ease the burden, but that also comes at a substantial cost. The point is that the usual refrains in self-help books or "visionary thought leaders" don't work when the system itself is at fault, and that's very much the case here. It's not possible to eliminate cheating solely through discipline; rather, the system must be amended such that there's little to no incentive to cheat in the first place. Right now, there's every incentive to cheat the system when it could lift you out of poverty or give you a substantially improved quality of life, and that's why it's on the rise professionally today, just as it was in academia not a decade ago.

Desperation is the root cause of a multitude of negative outcomes. To reduce those outcomes, you must reduce the amount of desperation in a society.

I simply give option of candidates to use AI helpers they want. Still a lot come up short. All you need is a baseline that is the same for every candidate and let them differentiate themselves with the same tools they'd use in real live setting anyway.

> The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.

That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal.

So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years.

In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd.

Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable:

> A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job.

Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.

Interviews seek to estimate long-term job performance. Since they cannot measure this directly, they measure attributes that correlate with performance. If you interfere with these measurements (e.g. through fraud), you break those correlations. This doesn't mean the interviews are measuring the wrong thing, or that people who cheat on the interviews will meet the performance bar in the actual job.

If someone uses AI to defeat a CAPTCHA, does that mean the CAPTCHA was poorly designed because "the bot is just as valid a user as any human"? Of course not - the CAPTCHA's entire purpose was to establish that correlation between "can solve this" and "is human," and breaking that correlation through automated tools defeats its purpose entirely.