Despite how bad the job market seems at the moment it's things like this make me feel confident for when I have to search again.
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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
71–80 of 731 posts
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed. Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?
They read the CV but placing too much weight on it makes it difficult to compare candidates objectively.
The CV is a starting point for conversations. On topics other than whether the person happened to memorize whatever Leetcode question was rolled on the dice. And it can more closely approximate actual work.
Regarding cheating, and the widespread organized sharing of "which questions did this company ask, and what are the answers", the conversation isn't so vulnerable to that.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#73This has nothing to do with AI. They lied in an interview like you could have done in 1980. You can prepare with AI and lie and you can prepare with AI and not lie. I have done the latter.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#74I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks. Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on…
My memory had held back my career I am sure. I can't regurgitate the minute details of impact I did even 12 months ago, just broad strokes... so I prep as best I can but it probably sounds like I am lying. Now with AI and everyone is suspicious it is worse. Got downleveled to 4yoe level yoe from where I am 20yoe but I needed a job so.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that. They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing. One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that s…
You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#76As someone who has conducted interviews with candidates almost certainly using AI in both the phone screen and coding portion. The biggest giveaway is the inability to explain the why of things. Even some of the simple things like "why did you initialize that class member in this method rather than in the constructor?"
I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.
The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.
Fair for the ones who don’t put in any effort, but I don’t buy this generalization for the folks who are real people in the middle between “completely unqualified” and “telling the truth about their experience”.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that? If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw. The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs. It was also tough when…
Interesting.
What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)
Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This situation terrifies me as an autistic person. I can’t fathom maintaining eye contact while taking the time to think about a response to an interview question, even over a video call. I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.
Closing your eyes is always an option, if you're trying to think deeply and without distraction. It helps a lot to explain your stream of consciousness as you think, even if it's disorganized, and you're definitely not cheating if your eyes are closed!
Thanks, I hadn’t considered this before.
Re: Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
#80An interesting story! I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution. Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a goo…
I think the better/mature response to this cultural change is to design takehomes anticipating the use of AI and then seeing where the canddiate got lost in the weeds or gets lost when cross questoined about it