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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

#481

Post by __turbobrew__ »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #264
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…

In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason. It is not an expensive as people think to fire someone who deceived your hiring process. However, institution inertia is real. That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.

If you make a bad hire you stop looking to fill that role, and then if you fire them 2-3 months later you are back at square zero.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#482

Post by [deleted] »

iamleppert wrote: post #476

It's really easy to catch these scammers. Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written. Actually take the time to read through the code and understand at least a part of it. In an interview, ask them some questions about it. People who actually wrote the code or did the thing can talk at length about about what they did, the history behind it, trade offs, have colorful stories about it, etc.…

[deleted]

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#483

Post by hliyan »

astroalex wrote: post #479
a_t48 wrote: post #474

On the topic of interview prep - is it weird that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it? I can’t be the only one, right? As best as I can tell it’s never really hurt me (okay, there was a Google interview I failed where grinding a few leetcodes might have helped…).

If you are trying to advance your career, I feel prepping for interviews is probably the number one most important thing you can do, unless you are freakishly gifted at acing interviews with no prep.

The number one most important thing you can do is to learn how to actually do the job. Your ability to pass interviews will follow from that. If the place you're applying to has an interview process that does not align well with the job, then you might not want to apply there -- they will be hiring a lot of people who are not a best fit for the role, and that's the environment you might end up working in.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#484

Post by sethammons »

ljm wrote: post #433
sethammons wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hired a guy who did that :) If you're on, hi Minh :wave:

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#485

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #480
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of…

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#486

Post by hliyan »

a_t48 wrote: post #474

On the topic of interview prep - is it weird that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it? I can’t be the only one, right? As best as I can tell it’s never really hurt me (okay, there was a Google interview I failed where grinding a few leetcodes might have helped…).

You're not, and thank goodness for that. I hired about 10 engineers during the past six months, and as far as I could tell, at least 9 out of 10 didn't use AI in the interview process, as in, they demonstrated in day to day work, the same level of proficiency they demonstrated in the interview. If that's because they continue to use AI in day to day work, I have no problem with it as long as they don't exfiltrate IP and data in the process.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#487

Post by fancyfredbot »

a_t48 wrote: post #474

On the topic of interview prep - is it weird that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it? I can’t be the only one, right? As best as I can tell it’s never really hurt me (okay, there was a Google interview I failed where grinding a few leetcodes might have helped…).

If you never prepared for the interview then you probably never really wanted/needed the job and so the requisite motivation wasn't there for you.

Nothing wrong with that - nice position to be in actually.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#488

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #485
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of…

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will…

> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".

I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!

> So white lies are the only way.

It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.

> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege

This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.

> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...

I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.

We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.

> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...

We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#489

Post by rafaelmn »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #471
rafaelmn wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is one to do Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#490

Post by mortar »

neilv wrote: post #11

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example: 1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed. 2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

On 2, I was surprised the author included the screenshot in their write up so I did some very pointed searches on some of the strings, and was surprised to see just how many profiles on LinkedIn were sourced for this farce. Good work LLMs
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