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Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#251

Post by aakresearch »

pdimitar wrote: post #64
vunderba wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-1…

Brilliantly put! Upvoted and "favorited".

I would also add meticulous attention to documenting requirements and decisions taken along the development process, especially where compromises were made. All the "why's", so to speak.

But yes, commercial development, capital-A "Agile" absolutely kills the drive.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#252

Post by pdimitar »

aakresearch wrote: post #251
pdimitar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-1…

Brilliantly put! Upvoted and "favorited". I would also add meticulous attention to documenting requirements and decisions taken along the development process, especially where compromises were made. All the "why's", so to speak. But yes, commercial development, capital-A "Agile" absolutely kills the drive.

Thank you. And yep I didn't want to make my comment too big. I make double sure to document any step-by-step processes on "how to make X or Y work", especially when I stumble upon a confusing bug in a feature branch. I go out of my way to devise a 100% reproducible process and document it.

Those, plus yours, and even others, are what makes a truly good programmer IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#253

Post by forrestthewoods »

paxys wrote: post #171
shihab wrote: post #164

To get an idea of just how advanced cheating tools has become, take a look here: https://leetcodewizard.io/ I think every interviewer, hiring manager ought to know or be trained on these tools, your intuition about candidate's behaviour isn't enough. Otherwise, we will soon reach a tipping point where honest candidates will be at a severe disadvantage.

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

> Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

100% of all job interviews are a proxy. It is not possible to perform an interview in ~4 hours such that someone sufficiently engages in what the job “actually entails”.

A leetcode interview either is or not a meaningful proxy. AI tools either do or not invalidate the validity of that proxy.

Personally I think leetcode interview are an imperfect but relatively decent proxy. And that AI tools render that proxy invalid.

Hopefully someday someone invents a better interview scheme that can reliably and consistently scale to thousands of interviews, hundreds of hires, and dozens of interviewers. That’d be great. Alas it’s a really hard and unsolved problem!

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#254

Post by duskwuff »

mdaniel wrote: post #211
buggy6257 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the hilarity who in their right mind is replying to job denial emails? What the hellll…

I for sure do, because I'm thrilled out of my mind they were polite enough to not just ghost me. I know better than to ask for feedback, or to expect any subsequent exchange, though

If they sent a personalized rejection email, maybe. Surely not to a boilerplate email from the ATS, though?

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#255

Post by mattbillenstein »

I've only done a few interviews the past couple years, but I've asked people to turn off coding assistants and not use an LLM on my coding screen. I want to know how _they_ think and solve problems, not how the LLM does.

And generally, the more junior people are just completely lost without it. They've become so dependent on it, they can't even google anything anymore. Their search queries are very weirdly conversational questions and the idea of reading the docs for whatever language or library they're using is totally foreign to them.

I think it's really hampering the growth of junior devs - their reasoning and thought processes are just totally tuned to this conversational form of copy and paste programming, and the code is really bad. I think the bottom half of programmers may just LLM themselves out of any sort of job because they lose the ability to think and problem solve... Kinda sad imo.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#256

Post by skinner927 »

shaneoh wrote: post #68
ryan-duve wrote: post #19

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been: - share your screen - download/open the coding challenge - you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, e…

I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job. It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried…

Maybe come up with a problem that isn’t so simple you can just ask it to ChatGPT. Create some context that would be difficult/tedious to convey.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#258

Post by sramam »

I recently completed a take-home assignment with the following instructions:

This project is designed to evaluate your ability to:

  - Deconstruct complex problems into actionable steps.
  - Quickly explore and adopt new frameworks.
  - Implement a small but impactful proof of concept (PoC).
  - Demonstrate coding craftsmanship through clean, well-architected code.
We estimate this project will take approximately 5–7 hours. If you find that it requires more time, let us know so we can adjust the scope.

Feel free to use any tools, libraries, frameworks, or LLMs during this exercise. Also, you’re welcome to reach out to us at any time with questions or for clarification.

I used LLM-as-a-junior-dev to generate 95+% of the code and documentation. I'm just an average programmer, but tried to set a bar that if I was on the other side of the table, I'd hire anyone who demonstrated the quality of output submitted.

  - The 5-7 hour estimate was exceeded (however, I was the first one through this exercise). 
  - IMHO the quality of the submission could NOT have been met in lesser time.
  - They had 3 tasks/projects:
     - a data science project, 
     - a CLI based project and
     - a web app
  - They wanted each to be done in a different language. 
  - I submitted my solution
I've been on both sides of the table of many interviews.

This was by far the most fun and one to replicate every chance I get.

[EDITS]: Formatting and typos.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#259

Post by alexjplant »

sergioisidoro wrote: post #63

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc. So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So…

Earlier this past week I asked Copilot to generate some Golang tests and it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub. I had to explicitly ask it to generate idiomatic tests and even then it still didn't test all of the parameters that it should have.

At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with my colleague via PR) reviewed the generated code we ended up with a preprod bug because the LLM used session.flush() instead of session.commit() in exactly one spot for no apparent reason.

LLMs are still not ready for prime-time. They churn out code like an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday.

Re: Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

#260

Post by csense »

alexjplant wrote: post #259
sergioisidoro wrote: post #63

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc. So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So…

Earlier this past week I asked Copilot to generate some Golang tests and it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub. I had to explicitly ask it to generate idiomatic tests and even then it still didn't test all of the parameters that it should have. At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with m…

> an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday

That's...oddly specific.

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