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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

#601

Post by rahimnathwani »

mywittyname wrote: post #552
spongebobstoes wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

  no interviewer has ever looked at it
How do you know this? Did you challenge every interviewer to tell you whether they'd looked at any of the code on your personal github page?

If I review code on someone's github page, that doesn't mean I'll proactively ask them about it in an interview.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#602

Post by mk89 »

I don't understand how relevant is that this person used AI for preparing etc.

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this experience, and if you believe it's right so, it means you didn't interview before AI.

It was exactly like that. The only difference was the lack of availability of tools that can give you the answer right away, fake the voice, etc.

But even then, if it stinks, trust your guts.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#603

Post by levocardia »

Foofoobar12345 wrote: post #134

We get a few thousand fresh grads applying to us each year. It’s practically impossible to interview every one of them. At the same time, any sort of coding assignment we give is easily defeated by AI—so that’s not useful either and there are very few signals there. What we do instead is send out a test - something like a mental ability test - with hundreds of somewhat randomized questions. Many of these are highly v…

>something like a mental ability test

General-purpose "mental ability tests" are typically illegal for hiring in the US.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#604

Post by rDr4g0n »

I see quite a few comments about how this is nothing new and it's easy to catch scammers, etc, etc.

Scamming may not be new, but a person using AI in this way is able to penetrate quite deeply into (long, tedious, time-consuming) interview process if folks aren't keeping an eye out for it (and this article, like many personal experiences, indicate that people aren't yet). Having an AI voice in your ear, rapidly providing you answers in real time is something new; at least in terms of how easily accessible it is.

It's amazing to me that folks have the audacity to come to interviews like this. I think some candidates genuinely feel that it is a reasonable thing to do along the lines of stuffing their resumes with keywords to get through the various recruiter filters. It's like hey, everyone in baseball is doping, so I have to do it to keep up!

The behaviors are obvious once you've seen them before, but as an engineer and not a "talent acquisition" person, I feel deeply uncomfortable implying that some candidate I'm interviewing is lying or cheating, so it took me a bit to speak up about it.

These types of articles need to continue to come out and the conversation elevated, if just to save some poor devs hours of interviews with candidates who were able to bluff their way through the less technical initial conversations.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#605

Post by rahimnathwani »

sethammons wrote: post #300
highwaylights wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a few red flags here on the hiring side too. I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them. Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real releva…

> having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.

Me, too.

But, sadly, OP is right.

When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.

For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:

  SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;
(EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER BY id;)

I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.

You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.

Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.

I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.

You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.

(I won't use this particular one again.)

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#606

Post by FirmwareBurner »

before_the_law wrote: post #559
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 then? Should I be unemployed? Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market . All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one.…

>Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market.

In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#607

Post by FirmwareBurner »

tyzoid wrote: post #560
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 ve…

Not the case in my jurisdiction, exaggerating in your resume is not illegal. And I really don't care, call it whatever you want if that makes you feel better. Companies are dishonest all the time to their customers and to their workers and especially to their candidates. Been screwed 3 times by dishonest employers, I'm only reciprocating their attitude.

I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the top. Companies aren't religious holier than though, they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's the case, I can play the same game.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#608

Post by rahimnathwani »

levocardia wrote: post #603
Foofoobar12345 wrote: post #134

We get a few thousand fresh grads applying to us each year. It’s practically impossible to interview every one of them. At the same time, any sort of coding assignment we give is easily defeated by AI—so that’s not useful either and there are very few signals there. What we do instead is send out a test - something like a mental ability test - with hundreds of somewhat randomized questions. Many of these are highly v…

>something like a mental ability test General-purpose "mental ability tests" are typically illegal for hiring in the US.

Yes, not absolutely illegal, but if an applicant challenges the legality of the test, the burden of proof is on the employer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#609

Post by lgas »

triyambakam wrote: post #520
zelphirkalt wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing someone wearing a suit for a dev interview would make me think one of the following: (1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need. (2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills? (3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things. (4) Hopefully this is not an "En…

Sad because I /like/ wearing a suit, even to the grocery store. I know I must look weird, but I feel more comfortable with and confident in myself.

You probably wear suits that fit and the confidence probably shows through. Not to stereotype, but I suspect a large number of developers have one or two suits they wear for job interviews, weddings and funerals, and they bought them long enough ago that they are too loose or too snug by now, and consequently feel uncomfortable when wearing them. At least this used to be me.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#610

Post by crazygringo »

gwbas1c wrote: post #579
crazygringo wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, let's see you do it! That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just trying to provide some helpful info. If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret knowledge.

So then I'm going to interpret that as not being possible.

You can interpret it however you want. That doesn't mean you'll be interpreting it correctly. Good luck.
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