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I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job

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

#241

Post by ryandrake »

seer wrote: post #210
heavyset_go wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every "20 min max" take home assignment, there will be people who are willing to spend 4+ hours doing it to outshine candidates who have jobs, families and lives. If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought pro…

Live coding during an interview is one of the most oppressive things I’ve witnessed in the industry in general. There is usually a huge disconnect between someone who knows that “this task should take 20mins” and doing it cold in a super high-pressure environment. People sweat, panic, brain freeze, and are just plain out stressed. I’ll only OK something like this if we give out a similar but not the same task before…

Yea, there's really no way to do an "interview assignment" well.

If you give unlimited amount of time, you're giving an advantage to people with no life who can just focus on your assignment and polish it as if it were a full time job.

If you give a limited amount of time, then you're making the interview a pressure cooker with a countdown clock, giving a disadvantage to people who are just not great at working under minute-to-minute time pressure.

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

#243

Post by wzdd »

Manuel_D wrote: post #132
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.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014. Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another auto…

Online tests have very explicit grading criteria which you can be confident are applied equally. AI evaluations, as the linked video in the article points out, not only do not have explicit grading criteria but the companies promoting them can't even describe what it is.

So the meaningful difference is that unlike a test you don't know what it's looking for and you don't know if it's ranking you objectively.

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

#244

Post by ryandrake »

roenxi wrote: post #238
9rx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity. > If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation…

That is quite hard to marry up with > Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it. though. If there are n people who want things and (n-1) things, then someone being unable to afford something isn't some pretend state. There is certainly an element of social construct in that the word we use is "afford", if we all agreed to use a different word that'd b…

Energy is definitely a better example than food. There is enough food produced to feed the entirety of humanity, probably several times over, but the social and political problem of who the food gets distributed to is the limiting factor, so hunger exists. Same is true for homes. There are enough homes to house everyone, yet homelessness exists. I'd argue we are already post-scarcity for many things, but distribution is socio-political and therefore deliberately uneven.

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

#245

Post by Manuel_D »

wzdd wrote: post #243
Manuel_D wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014. Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another auto…

Online tests have very explicit grading criteria which you can be confident are applied equally. AI evaluations, as the linked video in the article points out, not only do not have explicit grading criteria but the companies promoting them can't even describe what it is. So the meaningful difference is that unlike a test you don't know what it's looking for and you don't know if it's ranking you objectively.

Not necessarily, many online assessments I've encountered had a technical discussion session where you describe your problem solving process and design decisions. The ranking is more subjective for this component. Not to mention plenty of the assessments have more and less optimal solutions, as well as edge cases in the grading inputs that aren't in the sample inputs.

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

#246

Post by sosuke »

This was a thing in the beginning of 2025. Not sure how they do now but I did the interview just to see the AI bot in action. It wasn't great but it was amazing at the same time. It might have been around sooner but I remember doing one AI interview that had a video lip synced avatar asking questions like we were on video chat.

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

#247

Post by hansvm »

seer wrote: post #206
hansvm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a year since I've actively given out take-homes for hiring, but I'm not sure I agree that everyone will use AI. I designed half the questions to be impossible for current-gen AI to answer without the candidate actually knowing what's going on [0], and only ~1% of candidates who responded did poorly on that half and not the other half (and, if we're worried about LLMs being better than I think, not all that…

Thanks for clarifying - I kinda get the idea but would love to see an example for this. I’ve mostly given up on all of the standard techniques for interviewing sadly, just because “using ai” makes a lot of them trivial, and have resorted to the good old fashioned interview, where I screen for drive, values and root cause seeking, and let people learn tech/frameworks/etc themselves. But I was wondering, isn’t a take h…

> examples

One such question (obviously tailored to the role I'm hiring for) is asking whether SoA or AoS inputs will yield a faster dot-product implementation and whether the answer changes for small vs large inputs, also asking why that would be the case.

I typically offer a test with a small number of such questions since each one individually is noisy, but overall the take-home has good signal.

> why not test that directly?

The big thing is that you don't have enough time to probe everything about a candidate, especially if you're being respectful of their time and not burning too much of yours. Your goal is to maximize information gain with respect to the things you care about while minimizing any negative feelings the candidate has about your company.

I could be wrong, but vibe coding feels like another skill which is more efficient to probe indirectly. In your example, I would care about the prompt/session, mostly wouldn't care about the resulting code, and still don't think I would have enough information to judge whether they were any good. There are things I would want to test beyond the vibe coding itself.

In particular, one thing I think is important is being able to reason about code and deeply understand the tradeoffs being made. Even if vibe coding is your job and you're usually able to go straight from Claude to prod, it's detrimental (for the roles I'm looking at) to not be able to easily spot memory leaks, counter-productive OO abstractions, a lack of productive OO abstractions, a host of concurrency issues LLMs are kind of just bad at right now, and so on. My opinion is that the understanding needed to use LLMs effectively (for the code I work on) is much more expensive to develop than any prompt engineering, so I'd rather test those other things directly.

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

#248

Post by auggierose »

davnicwil wrote: post #121
dice wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected. I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal o…

just thinking about this, if you had the latitude to explain it more or less exactly as you have here, in human language, and frame it as a screen stage of the application and not an interview, and add: 'hey, I know this is really far from ideal but if you're legitimately interested this probably works in your favour', good people might not mind it. I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff a…

That works only for a minute. Then every company having an AI interview stage will "level with you".

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

#249

Post by RobotToaster »

deathanatos wrote: post #56
RobotToaster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Require paper application. If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.

… needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.

Mass mailing usually gets a hefty bulk discount.

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

#250

Post by 9rx »

roenxi wrote: post #238
9rx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity. > If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation…

That is quite hard to marry up with > Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it. though. If there are n people who want things and (n-1) things, then someone being unable to afford something isn't some pretend state. There is certainly an element of social construct in that the word we use is "afford", if we all agreed to use a different word that'd b…

> how much economically extractable oil is available on earth is actually a fundamental property of the universe.

Affordability requires something to exist. Once all the oil is used up it won't be affordability that prevents you from obtaining some. As oil still exists, your ability to afford it is entirely a social construct. There isn't some fundamental property of the universe that prevents you from having that oil. The only thing standing in your way from not getting the oil you want to have is what people believe. Again, resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Scarcity is the reason for that construct. Allocation is not a thing where there is no scarcity.

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