How ChatGPT is changing the job hiring process, from the HR department to coders

It does seem somewhat hard to imagine being employed as a SWE in 5 years without being proficient in incorporating some sort of generative AI into your work.

Edited to include “in 5 years”

Beyond the general idea of incorporating chatGPT into usual work; IMO, chatGPT is highlighting all of the biggest sore spots of the hiring process and instead of finding solutions we're just digging our heads further into the sands.

Job descriptions, resumes, cover letters, filling out forms, writing boilerplate for take home projects, etc. All of these are massive problems in the hiring process, and should be addressed before the entire thing turns into a complete nonsensical clown fest of nobody reading anything unless they're face to face with somebody.

So much of these things are just leftovers from the old days, we demand a resume not because it's an accurate assessment of history or skill but because "it's tradition". We write job descriptions not based on accurate demands of the job, but to fit in as many keywords as possible in hopes your ideal candidate doesn't miss it. List goes on, but really we can't start addressing these until we admit there's a serious problem - and this time not just relying on Google to maybe come up with something new.

Recently had to hire a new dev, and one of the submissions used chatGPT to generate a solution for our take-home test.

The really clever thing was, they did a line by line breakdown of the solution chatGPT came up with, keeping certain parts and throwing out others, giving reasons why each part deserved to stay or be tossed.

Then they wrote a second solution incorporating parts of the first and their own original code, which was genius. They put it all in a readme file with the solution. It instantly put them at the top of our candidate pile.

Unfortunately, the in person interview didn't go so well so we didn't hire them.

Smart approach though. If they'd just used ChatGPT to come up with some bog standard interview questions and solutions they'd probably have walked right into a job with us.

if fair use doesn't apply to training... what would it be trained on?

Microsoft's code base?

who the hell would pay for that?

so at what point does your in person interview become the problem?

what is the line for you when the day to day doesn't involve unassisted time trials, but instead requires code reviews of assisted work and code reviews of colleagues work