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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

#611

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #488
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…

> 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 yo…

You're not harming anyone with grooming and pump up your resume to give yourself the best possible chance. Jobs aren't assigned and reserved to people from birth based on fate in order to be something you can steal from them with this. You don't deserve a job just because, you have to compete and interview for it like everyone else, and if you can get it and do the job, then good for you.

If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility to adapt to the variable interview process and prove yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge, cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to play their best hand all the time and honesty is not always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.

Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#612

Post by hashmush »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #605
sethammons wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know).

I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though.

(Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#613

Post by rahimnathwani »

hashmush wrote: post #612
rahimnathwani wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know). I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though. (Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)

Sorry, I wrote this in a hurry. Of course I would have included an ORDER BY clause.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#614

Post by Foofoobar12345 »

jannesan wrote: post #321
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…

As a candidate, this sort of test gives me the worst possible impression of the company. - 0 effort on your side - very stressful for me - completely unrelated to job - ridiculous definition of someone being “smart” Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.

We have to use some criteria when all applicants are effectively the same - 4000 applicants and 6 interviewers. We interview each applicant at least 3 times.

Definition of being smart is to be quick at mental math and logic, but the puzzles are represented visually. And yes, both those skills are needed in the course of our work.

Contrary to what you might expect, over 80% take the test. I suppose during next hiring season, we could A/B against random selection to compare what % go past our interview.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#615

Post by Foofoobar12345 »

intalentive wrote: post #506
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…

You could also sort by SAT / ACT score. It will yield roughly the same results as your IQ test.

We don’t operate in the US. Our applicants can’t present any standardized test scores

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#616

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #390
sarchertech wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior people to perform “work samples” under pressure, they just talk to them and dig into past work. All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews. Also in a couple decades workin…

I’ve always wondered: is there a LeetCode equivalent for doctors? When a hospital interviews a surgeon, do they roll out a cadaver and ask them to remove the gall bladder in 15 minutes while the interviewer scrutinizes how they hold the scalpel?

In the US, candidates to become physicians go through a 5-7 year residency which has low pay, dangerously long hours, and has a supervisor watching over them who can flunk them for failing to meet their standards. That's _after_ a normal bachelors degree and then medical school. Does that sound like something anyone would like to go through to become a software developer just to avoid technical interviews?

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#617

Post by Foofoobar12345 »

umbra07 wrote: post #199
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…

when you say "visual questions" - are you referring to questions in the style of Mensa/gifted tests? https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Simpler - eg. A table of some numbers, with a question to quickly compute averages of a filtered set, after performing some quick boolean logic to filter them.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#618

Post by wqaatwt »

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?…

Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is only necessary to pass the “filter” and that it has limited impact on the candidate’s ability to perform the actual work its not necessarily that straightforward.

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#619

Post by hoerzu »

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 think nowadays they directly use screen share and image recognition like https://interview.sh for example

Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

#620

Post by wqaatwt »

jajko wrote: post #572
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…

Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is. This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the b…

> would flag you internally

And how would they figure that out if you lie by exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright making up entirely false stuff?

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