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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

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Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#401

Post by lores »

donnachangstein wrote: post #179
eikenberry wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about hiring not being that much different but your prognostications are way off IMO. > - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again. Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore. > - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again. Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry. > - And yeah, y…

> Classic bigotry. Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours. Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.

There is a big difference between being in a conference room for an interview where you are judged, and on a regular work day. There is for me, and I'm old and have done dozens and dozens of interviews, largely successfully. Don't summarily judge people, especially if they're not neurotypical, as often happens in software.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#402

Post by sidrag22 »

jamesgasek wrote: post #361

"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful. This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just w…

this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.

i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.

Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.

IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#403

Post by ryandrake »

jgilias wrote: post #276
raincom wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the company I work for, we are forbidden to ask questions based on resume, as it introduces biases. Reduction of bias means "ask same questions of every candidate".

That’s mental. Why have a resume in the first place then? Any info in the resume introduces “bias”. Well, actually, even wanting to hire the best candidate for a job is already a bias of its own. So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process? /s But only slightly.

From the candidate’s point of view, most companies’ hiring processes are indistinguishable from a lottery.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#404

Post by lores »

sarchertech wrote: post #369
motorest wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional. You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills. Also, the ability to work under pressure…

Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior people to perform “work samples” under pressure, they just talk to them and dig into past work. All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews. Also in a couple decades workin…

I remember reading an article linked here (which I can't find anymore) about a lawyer who converted to software engineering. He was contrasting tech interviews, with 3, 4, 6 rounds* and live coding and high-pressure testing with the exactly one deep chat for a lawyer about to handle multi-hundred-million dollars lawsuits. Insanity.

* special demerits to Canonical

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#406

Post by motorest »

sarchertech wrote: post #369
motorest wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional. You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills. Also, the ability to work under pressure…

Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior people to perform “work samples” under pressure, they just talk to them and dig into past work. All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews. Also in a couple decades workin…

> Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this.

No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.

Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.

Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#407

Post by alabastervlog »

dagw wrote: post #365
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a string of meh employers What's a meh employer?

A lot of people look down on companies that solve 'boring' problems with 'boring' technologies. I guess it's an open question if having been writing in-house CRUD apps using a 10 year old tech stack for several years is a proxy for lack of competence.

I've seen a "senior" developer who didn't recognize what VSCode was. Like, not that they hadn't heard of the specific program—they didn't recognize the sort of program it was.

Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.

The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#408

Post by re-thc »

Apocryphon wrote: post #396
ryandrake wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always wondered: is there a LeetCode equivalent for doctors? When a hospital interviews a surgeon, do they roll out a cadaver and ask them to remove the gall bladder in 15 minutes while the interviewer scrutinizes how they hold the scalpel?

It’s because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked credentialism , is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the “every hacker for themselves” world of modern tech.

> is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the “every hacker for themselves”.

Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#410

Post by ryandrake »

roguecoder wrote: post #175
no_wizard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When an HVAC company hires a new tech HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.

We have some certs. The problem is that software development is about thirty different skills in a trench coat, and half of them we don't know how to evaluate (like slicing, or abstraction.) What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia. It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Gr…

It would be nice if there was at least a bare bones certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop and if statement is. You’d still have to interview the candidate but you wouldn’t have to start at Hello World or FizzBuzz.

I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.

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