I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by 1718627440 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #386

1718627440 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring to disclose your breakfast habits for a job application has not anything to do with your merit to the company, and gives grounds to the possibility of choosing people on sympathy to their answers to that question. It became frowned to include a picture into a CV, because this feeds implicit biases, why should that be any different with alimentary behaviour? Honestly for dealing with job application spam, th…

Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail of small talk and start talking about legality and such, is employability poison. And that's something interviewers are looking for. I agree that it's a weird question, but one that the person being interviewed can easily just pass without it being a big deal. The other poster said it's just a question to easily filter out applicants who aren't payin…

As I said I would have just ignored that request in an application, because it sounds inappropriate. I would just give the context that not all people not writing an answer failed to read that request.

> And that's something interviewers are looking for.

I understood this answer to be part of the written application, in an interview I would just classify this as pointless small talk and just answer something.

> Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail

This is HN, sir. Going all-in on detail is part of the culture.

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

#442

Post by koliber » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #358

shwetanshu21 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is becoming common in countries like India since there is no other option. We are looking for a mid level DevOps and get like 1000s of application. The requirements were clear we need k8s and IaC exp. But when we went to interview, none of them had production level exp. They told the recruiter that they had who didnt have a way to verify it. After 2-3 interviews like that, I had so start giving the…

Why don't you just hire people who present as being of normal or better intelligence, and train them on what you need them to do. This is how companies used to do things.

Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience.

If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.

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

#443

Post by IshKebab » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

xlii wrote: post #45

ossa-ma wrote: post #9

Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith. One was so bad I had to write about it: https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed

Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.

Once I got really detailed feedback from an interview for a job I didn't get. It really took me by surprise! I didn't even have to ask.

It was quite interesting too because the things they'd inferred about me - stuff that I had understood or not understood - were just plain wrong. I didn't get everything right, but some bits I did understand fine, they thought I didn't.

I'm not sure what to take from that, other than that it's not about knowing stuff, it's about convincing someone else that you know stuff.

Also I'm about to do a hardcore leetcode interview. Wish me luck. (I'm probably going to fail; I'm pretty great at programming but only average at leetcode.)

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

#444

Post by delecti » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

qwertygnu wrote: post #393

delecti wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs have no awareness of their own bias, and no incentive or ability to mitigate it. A human can, in theory, realize "hey, I tend to be a little harsh on , is this negative judgement just that?" while an LLM could never. In practice I doubt many people are aware of their biases either, or think "it's not bias if it's true" or something. But at least on the less "internally" biased end of humans there will be less ex…

I wonder what would happen if you tell the LLM to have no/less bias. What would the 1913 one say

They don't have any concept of their "personal" bias, so they'd imitate whatever training data they received that was tagged as not being biased, if there even was any.

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

#445

Post by diacritical » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

encom wrote: post #290

diacritical wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more thoughts before I go to bed. This could also be used for combating spam elsewhere, like posting in forums, comment sections and so on. To preserve privacy, something like zero-knowledge proofs could be utilized. I don't know how the cryptography would work exactly, but if you can't double spend a credit and you can choose whether to keep it anonymous or not, it could work, too. It would be best if for a giv…

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt Check all that apply.

I forgot this existed. I filled it out for fun, even though I get your reply was more rhetorical.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (?) market-based ( ) vigilante

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

- for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

- if the credits are treated as money

(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

- that will always be an issue, but I doubt it's too relevant here

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

- if someone spends a credit for spam and they think it's worth it, it might be an issue. But most spam wouldn't be worth it, IMHO, especially if it will be deleted from a forum, anyway.

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

- well, yeah :)

(X) Sending email should be free

- this isn't about email, but I don't necessarily like having to pay to post. However, lots of forums will remain free, as not everyone will use this idea if it's implemented. And some forums have paid accounts now, anyway.

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

- why should we trust the credit system - important question, as we haven't thought out how it could be gamed or abused.

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

#446

Post by encom » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

diacritical wrote: post #445

encom wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt Check all that apply.

I forgot this existed. I filled it out for fun, even though I get your reply was more rhetorical. Your post advocates a (X) technical ( ) legislative (?) market-based ( ) vigilante (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once - for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this Specifically, your plan fails to account for (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms…

  (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

:)

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

#447

Post by Esophagus4 » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #413

Esophagus4 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will kind of happen anyway right? People who have really good jobs aren’t applying for jobs below them, so your applicant pool will always be people who are in an equal or worse position than your job. No one at, Anthropic, for example, is applying to a job at Geico.

I guess, I think there's too large of a pool of companies for anyone to really say what's a meaningfully "equal" or "worse" job. If Geico was opening a new machine learning division to do some really interesting work on the probably shitload of actuarial data they've built over the years, maybe someone from anthropic would be interested in that. Or maybe everyone gets laid off from anthropic because of an AI bubble b…

> If Geico was opening a new machine learning division to do some really interesting work on the probably shitload of actuarial data they've built over the years, maybe someone from anthropic would be interested in that

But they’re not. And they won’t. And that is my point. They’d make a ML Engineer post on LinkedIn and get a bunch of people for whom Geico would be a step up.

There will never be a job opening from Geico that someone at Anthropic would apply to.

That’s my point - your pool will always be people who are in a worse position than your job. Being laid off is a worse position than a job.

You’ll never see Anthropic candidates in a Geico hiring pool, unless they were laid off for being lousy and can’t find anything else.

The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation.

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

#448

Post by 9rx » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

altruios wrote: post #426

9rx wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not purely a social construct. What else is involved? Despite the inane ramblings of the parent comment, scarcity isn't actually a factor. Allocation occurs because of scarcity. Without scarcity, there is no such thing as allocation. It is the reason for why resource allocation exists entirely a social construct.

While food is not scarce in total, logistics are (at some limit) physics bound. Other resources are currently in higher demand than their current supply: silver for example. So there is nuance.

> Other resources are currently in higher demand than their current supply: silver for example.

That, of course, is why we created resource allocation as a social construct. Obviously you fundamentally cannot have allocation without scarcity.

But it doesn't answer the question. If resource allocation is not entirely a social construct, are you imagining that resources are also allocated by some kind of natural force? Given the scarcity of silver, maybe the universe decides that you get some and I don't? And if you try to give me yours, contrary to the fabric of the universe, you will be struck down by a bolt of lightning before you can give it to me? What is the "what else" here?

This nuance you vaguely refer to but don't say anything about is certainly intriguing. I am looking forward to you completing that chain of thought.

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

#449

Post by nradov » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #424

nradov wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a tenant identify the insurer?

Minutes of HOA is where I would normally get that kind of info. They have to justify the amount you pay and the insurance invoice is normally divided across all of the tenants.

That only works for unit owners, not tenants.

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

#450

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 6:15 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #442

SoftTalker wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just hire people who present as being of normal or better intelligence, and train them on what you need them to do. This is how companies used to do things.

Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience. If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.

But now you're dealing with a hundred applicants who claim to know how to drive, but actually don't. Either because they never learned, or they aren't capable of it.