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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

#431

Post by alabastervlog »

dagw wrote: post #341
j1elo wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point. One of my first interviews in tech was with a CEO who dressed with an Iron Maiden t-shirt. That settled to me the question about whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office! :)

whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office 'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.

Tech uniforms: instead of spending $2500 on four Brooks Brothers suits (seasonal sales), spend $2500 on fancy Nordic hiking clothes that you'll mostly wear sitting at a desk, as if an Arctic expedition might suddenly break out at the office and you'll need to at least have your base and mid layers ready.

Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#432

Post by hylaride »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #327
michaelt wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tech got rid of the suits, but kept the desire to judge people at interviews based on their clothes? Great. Fantastic job everyone /S

I remember reading, when IBM turned "business casual," that everyone adopted the same outfit: Khaki slacks, and blue polo shirts.

As a 25 year hoodie-wearing tech person, I'd pick suits over Khakis and polo shirts any day.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#433

Post by ljm »

sethammons wrote: post #376
crabbone wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... no? The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in th…

What is wrong with the advice? You are saying nobody was wearing a suit. I said dress a step up (for the interview). Sr. Management in graphic tees? Wear a polo shirt. Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee. And if the CEO wears a tee-shirt and all the rest are in some other category of dress, base your interview attire based on everyone else.

> Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee.

I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the front. The very definition of smart casual.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#434

Post by noirbot »

Arwill wrote: post #143
esafak wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely did change with AI. Imposters are becoming harder to detect, at a cost to the company.

Interviewing has also become harder too. You try to search the net during the interview, because you forgot the name of a thing, and the interviewer will assume you are running with an AI chat, and are cheating the interview.

It depends - I'm conducting interviews now and I'm totally ok with people screen sharing and showing me their internet searches and AI prompts as part of the interview. Part of the skills I'm hiring for is "can you find the docs/information you need to solve this", so knowing how to use whatever tools you prefer in order to do that is important.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#435

Post by FirmwareBurner »

never_inline wrote: post #386
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…

In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description". Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!

> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?

Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#436

Post by phaedryx »

jaredklewis wrote: post #110
no-dr-onboard wrote: post #45

I keep coming back to this phrase used in this post: "it was scary". Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture. The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lyi…

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit. Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”) Anyway, probably not g…

I've made it a point to always ask beforehand: "what is the dress code expectation? I've seen everything from t-shirts to suits in the tech industry and I'd like show up dressed appropriately."

I always get a positive response.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#437

Post by borroka »

yks wrote: post #422
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity. At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.

Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a t-shirt/jeans combo.

In human dynamics, very little is based on “first principles”. Some words are considered vulgar and others are not. Why? Aren't they just a sequence of letters? They certainly are, but those sequences have been assigned a meaning that does not derive from any “first principle”.

In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#438

Post by rafterydj »

yks wrote: post #422
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity. At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.

Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a t-shirt/jeans combo.

Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of clothes that are designed to look good on a male silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of wider society surrounding tech.

Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.

To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.

You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#439

Post by causalmodels »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #415
michaelt wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tech got rid of the suits, but kept the desire to judge people at interviews based on their clothes? Great. Fantastic job everyone /S

Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity. At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.

It's just a different set of in group // out group signals, not some sort of moral failing. You're well within your rights to not like the signals though.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#440

Post by hackable_sand »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #252
theamk wrote: post #2

An interesting story! I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution. Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a goo…

Don't see the point of these "take home projects". Just ask them what's the most difficult technical thing they had to do before, and have them walk you through it, probe, ask questions. If you don't like the one they talked about, ask about another one, or another one. You can generally weed out the bullshitters, they talk alot about "we" and hardly ever use "I" meaning they didn't do anything.

I would say "we solved this issue" if all someone did was hand me a coffee while I was debugging.

What compels you to play lingual games with peoples' livelihoods?

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