Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on my personal github page and even thought it's listed on my resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at it. This includes contributions to a widely used OSS project.

YMMV, but all the high paying jobs I've received were due to knowing the tech stack they used and being able to walk through the projects that I've done in detail.

Admittedly, the last time I changed jobs was 2024, so things might be different now.

The questions dont require google; but what do you do when you don't know a specific thing? You search for it.

The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?

and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.

In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?

> 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.

Really? That's the bigger issue?

Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?

I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."

Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.

The two are not remotely comparable.

> This promotes lying

No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]

I linked this to my team and got back "I had almost identical experience with some candidates though no one admitted faking" and "One candidate just disconnected and was never heard back from after being asked to remove virtual background".

Interviewing is hard. Over the years the one thing I have learned is that for a technical role you want to interview people for how they THINK and REASON. This is hard and requires a time investment in the interview.

Back in the day when interviewing people for roles in networking, data center design, etc. I used to start by saying I am going to ask you a question and unless you have seen this very specific issue before you will NOT know the answer and I do not want you to guess - what I care about is can you reason about it and ask questions that lead down a path that allows you to get closer to an answer - this is the only technical question I will be asking and you have the full interview time to work thought it. I have people with 4+ CCIE family certs (this is back when they were the gold standard) and 10 year experience have no idea how to even reason about the issue. The candidates that could reason and work the problem logically became very successful.

For coding at my company now we take the same approach. We give candidates a problem with a set of conditions and goal and ask them to work through their approach, how they would go about testing it, and then have them code it in a shared environment of their choosing. The complexity of the problem depends on the level the candidate is interviewing for. For higher level engineerings besides the coding, we include a system architecture interview, presenting a requirement, taking the time to answer any questions, and then asking the candidate how they would implement it. At the end we do not care if it complies, what we care about is did the candidate approach the problem reasonably. Did they make sure to ask questions and clarifications when needed. Did their solution look reasonable? Could they reason on how to test it? Did their solution show that they thought about the question - IE, did they take the time to consider and understand before jumping in.

Anyone can learn to code (for the most part). Being able to think on the other hands seems to be something that is in short supply.

> who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not

Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.

It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... :

> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).