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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

#591

Post by filoeleven »

polishdude20 wrote: post #573
_bin_ wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology. That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an a…

Do OCR systems still detect invisible words? I would have thought by now they'd use pixel based image recognition.

I doubt they're using OCR. More likely they're using one of the many text extractors available for PDFs.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-t...

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#592

Post by sarlalian »

hansvm wrote: post #583
_bin_ wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology. That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an a…

Interesting, that still works? I first heard about that a decade ago.

You can occasionally prompt the AI resume review systems using the white text as well.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#593

Post by WalterBright »

gosub100 wrote: post #510
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them, you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all, it's the same game. That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine" .

> it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them

Employers pay big fees to recruiters who deliver qualified candidates.

Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen match customers with providers. For that, they get paid.

They are not "harming" either, as the relationship and deals made are voluntary.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#594

Post by exabrial »

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…

>I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful.

It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#595

Post by el_memorioso »

malfist wrote: post #373
atq2119 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wearing a suit to a technical interview is an immediate red flag. Everybody knows you don't wear suits in this industry, so what's your motive? Your ability to wear a suit is irrelevant for the job, so what weaknesses that are relevant are you rather clumsily trying to hide?

It's a red flag? Come on, if I wear a suit it's because I want too and has no impact on my skills as a software engineer. Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear isn't productive

I would go as far as to say being this hyper-focused on clothes rather than if the person is sociable and competent is a red flag itself. It is rather superficial. Vague platitudes about "culture" might get thrown out, but are we engineering and building things or are we putting on a fashion show?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#596

Post by miki123211 »

gspencley wrote: post #556
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 hesi…

> 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?…

The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it.

If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#597

Post by collingreen »

zellyn wrote: post #538
never_inline wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”

Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#598

Post by rahimnathwani »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #589
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.…

> If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag. Is it? I can think of projects I've worked on that have come up with friends that I have no idea how they worked anymore, just barely if at all. If the project was within the last 2 years, then yeah, but if its 8 year old plus code, I don't expect anyone to remember. However, they could have looked at it when they sent it over and refresh their minds.

OK, so ask them for something they've written in the past 2 years.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#599

Post by FirmwareBurner »

WalterBright wrote: post #587
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? I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.

But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?

The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#600

Post by FirmwareBurner »

rafaelmn wrote: post #489
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 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 ?

I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.

Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.

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