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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

kapwing.com

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Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#531

Post by disambiguation »

dakiol wrote: post #251
disambiguation wrote: post #207

AI is a problem, so is lying, but this is a non issue already solved by the ancient tradition of in person interviews. I assume the folks at kapwing are monitoring the responses, so if you're really open to ideas then i offer the following for your consideration: The best interview I've had to date has been a live debugging challenge. Given an hour, a printed sheet of requirements, and a mini git repo of mostly worki…

Please, no. I don’t want to travel hundred of kilometres each time I want to apply for a job.

Why would you interview with a company far away if you aren't willing to travel and eventually relocate there?

Job hunting has become a game of shotgunning your resume while employers cast the widest net, and this has been hugely detrimental. Internships, junior positions, and onsite training are disappearing across the board. Everyone instead wastes time shopping around without any real evidence that this way improves outcomes.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#532

Post by fancyfredbot »

hnbad wrote: post #502
fancyfredbot wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or they might simply have some ADHD/autistic traits which make these things require additional effort. I have a list of past projects I'm comfortable talking about. I can go to great lengths talking about any of them in detail if prompted. I'm also comfortable talking about technical topics including those I'm not intimately familiar with - that's part of my job after all. But most importantly, I'm confident enough t…

Okay, you don't like leetcode, that's fine. It doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare for an interview. In fact I'd say preparing for an interview might include researching their interview process and avoiding them if they use leetcode type questions which you don't like. It might also include learning about their tech stack, brushing up on relevant past experience, or learning a bit about the industry they operate in (for example).

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#533

Post by spongebobstoes »

wijwp wrote: post #514
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.…

"Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written." I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.

Spending a few hours to write some open source code seems like a reasonable tradeoff to get a high paying job.

It is surprising to me that folks looking for a new job would not do this proactively.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#534

Post by mytailorisrich »

zemo wrote: post #466
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…

> The issue is lying about your experiences I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.

That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#535

Post by aforwardslash »

Aurornis wrote: post #58
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…

> The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie. Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying. There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not…

I've conducted interviews where the candidate asked if he could use google to try to get an answer. I often say "sure". If a guy can read an explanation out of context, understand it in a way he can explain it using his own words, and reason about corner cases in a couple of minutes, he's hired. The same goes with AI; canned responses work when you ask canned questions, not so much on open-ended ones.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#536

Post by aforwardslash »

noirbot wrote: post #434
Arwill wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is actually a great idea, thanks!

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#537

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

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…

>The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#538

Post by zellyn »

never_inline wrote: post #477
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound authentic.

It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#539

Post by fzeroracer »

motorest wrote: post #518
fzeroracer wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances. I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the compa…

> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work. Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time". https://www.jetbrain…

I asked you, specifically. I'll bite anyways, but I'll expect an actual answer from you.

> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure

No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.

It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.

> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.

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