Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 419 posts

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#321

Post by madeofpalk »

Draiken wrote: post #192
madeofpalk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen applicants use AI to answer questions during the 'behavioral' Q&A-style interviews. Those applicants are 'cheating', and it defeats the whole purpose as we want to understand the candidate and their experience, not what LLMs will regurgitate. Thankfully it's usually pretty easy to spot this so it's basically an immediate rejection.

If the company is doing behavioral Q&A interviews, I hope they're getting as many bad applicants as possible. Adding a load of pseudo-science to the already horrible process of looking for a job is definitely not what we need. I'll never submit myself to pseudo-IQ tests and word association questions for a job that will 99.9% of the time ask you to build CRUD applications. The lengths that companies go to avoid doing…

I think there's a misunderstanding here. I just want to talk to the applicant and see what they think about working with designers, their thoughts on learning golang as a javascript developer, or how they've handled a last minute "high priority" project.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#322

Post by JacksCracked »

davely wrote: post #274
nejsjsjsbsb wrote: post #24

Not new they had that 5 years ago at least. Anthropic interview is nebulous. You get a coding interview. Fast paced, little time, 100% pass mark. Then they chat to you for half an hour to gauge your ethics. Maybe I was too honest :) I'm really bad at the "essay" subjects vsm the "hard" subjects so at that point I was dumped.

I recently took their CodeSignal assessment, which is part of their initial screening process. Oh, wow. I really believe they are missing out on great engineers due to the nature of it. 90 minutes to implement a series of increasingly difficult specs and pass all the unit tests. There is zero consideration for quality of code. My email from the recruiter said (verbatim), “the CodeSignal screen is intended to test you…

[dead]

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#323

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #6

This is quite a conundrum. These AI companies thrive on the idea that very soon people will not be replaced by AI, but by people who can effectively use AI to be 10x more productive. If AI turns a normal coder into a 10x dev, then why wouldn't you want to see that during an interview? Especially since cheating this whole interview system has become trivial in the past months. It's not the applicants that are the prob…

It's not a conundrum, they're selling snake oil. (Come on people, we've been through this many times already.)

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#324

Post by Muromec »

rmgk wrote: post #200
Muromec wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that "almost getting there" will simply become the norm. I have seen a lot of buggy and almost but not exactly right applications, processes and even laws that people simply have to live with. If US can be the worlds biggest economy while having an opiod epidemy and writing paper cheques, if Germany can be Europes manufacturing hub while using faxes, sure we as a society can live in the unoptimal sta…

Using faxes is much more streamlined than the more modern Scan, Email, Print process.

Found the german!

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#325

Post by Eisenstein »

exe34 wrote: post #174
Eisenstein wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?

Failing for a bit, thinking hard and then somehow getting to the answer - for me it was usually tutorials, asking on stackoverflow/forums, finding a random example on some webpage. The fastest way for me to learn something new is to find working code or code that I can kick for a bit until it compiles/runs. Often I'll comment out everything and make it print hello world, and then from there try to figure out what the…

Why is modifying working code you didn't write better than having an AI help write code with you? Is it that the modified code doesn't run until you fix it? It still bypasses the 'hard won effort' criteria though?

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#326

Post by nertirs1 »

ecocentrik wrote: post #262
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…

I don't see the cognitive dissonance here. If a model was applying for a position with a cosmetics company, they might want to see what the blank canvas looks like. Being able to gauge a candidate's natural communication skills is highly useful. If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

The same could be said about a lot of things, like being able to write a functional solution to a leet code puzzle on a black board in front of an audience.

IMHO, an effective interview process should attempt to mimic the position for which a person is applying. Making a candidate jump through hoops is a bit disrespectful.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#328

Post by mathgeek »

ecocentrik wrote: post #262
latexr wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't find anything wrong with this It’s not about being wrong, it’s about being ironic. We have LLMs shoved down our throats as this new way to communicate—we are encouraged to ask them to make our writing “friendlier” or “more professional”—and then one of the companies creating such a tool asks the very people most interested in it to not use it for the exact purpose we’ve been told it’s good at. They are aski…

I don't see the cognitive dissonance here. If a model was applying for a position with a cosmetics company, they might want to see what the blank canvas looks like. Being able to gauge a candidate's natural communication skills is highly useful. If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

> If you're an ineffective communicator, there's a good chance your comprehension skills are also deficient.

We are quickly moving into a world where most communications are at best assisted by AI and more often have little human input at all. There’s nothing inherently “wrong” about that (we all have opinions there), but “natural” (quotes to emphasize that they’re taught and not natural anyway) communication skills are going to be less and less common as time marches on, much like handwriting, typewriting, calligraphy, etc.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#329

Post by shigawire »

toolz wrote: post #306
numbsafari wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the same people that insist we arm elementary school teachers and expect those teachers to someday pull the trigger on a child instead of having proper gun laws. There is no irony.

If you think proper gun laws would keep guns away from evil people in the US, please explain to me why the war against illegal drugs in the US has been losing since the day it started. Sure, some places in the world can successfully limit gun access. Those places aren't close and even bordered by the most active cartels in the world. Just as a fun thought exercise, consider that to grow the plant necessary to produce…

Drugs are more addictive than guns typically. I am not sure your comparison is useful.

Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"

#330

Post by Daub »

csomar wrote: post #208
Daub wrote: post #135

Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate…

> what is your creative philosophy? Seriously?

Yep. Some candidates really enjoy the question to the point where it becomes difficult to get them to stop answering it.
Post reply on HN