Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42909166

by ramesh31 • 1 year ago

535 700 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

Have you gone back to in-person whiteboards? More focus on practical problems? I really have no idea how the traditional tech interview is supposed to work now when problems are trivially solvable by GPT.

iExploder2• 1 year ago

Name of the game now is not to get fired at all costs and weather the storm until the dust settles...

jppope3• 1 year ago

hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one

iExploder2• 1 year ago

hiring market tightened up... that doesn't mean there isn't one

tightened market is one thing, the absolute insanity of the recruitment process in last couple years with now AI thrown into the mix is really something to behold, test these waters at your own peril

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

nope, but the process is worse

- Much less resposnes

- For your sanity you want to make sure there aren't obvious signs of something being a ghost job, an H1B hire, an internal hire, or a farce because "we're always growing" (lying).

- expect longer processes. Hasn't happened to me but 7+ stage interview processes is not uncommon these days, even outside of tech

- accept that some processes will be frozen under your nose. especially because of longer processes crossing quarters

- expect less respect in the process. They feel like they do not want you. You are expendable

- don't bother negotiating in this market. You get a number and take it unless you already have a job. Even then they may simply pass you for someone more desperate. BTW wages are being suppressed; you're probably not getting pre 2023 salaries right now.

Yeah... if you're not being abused at work, I'd just weather it out.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

I sadly failed long ago. The company itself did not weather the storm.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Not sure why interviews would change.

Even if you're using ChatGPT heavily it's your job to ensure it's right. And you need to know what to ask it. So you still need all the same skills and conceptual understanding as before.

I mean, I didn't observe interviews change after powerful IDE's replaced basic text editors.

fragmede3• 1 year ago

Because there's a format of interview that's basically a brainteaser that takes 45 minutes to think through and whiteboard some code for, but which is trivially solvable by copy and pasting a screenshot of the prompt into ChatGPT. This amounts to candidates being given the answer and then pretending to struggle with understanding your question and then figuring out a solution to it when really they're just stalling for time and then just copying the answer from one browser tab to the next.

Barrin922• 1 year ago

If you're doing this at least face to face over Zoom and you can't tell that someone is copying answers from their second monitor and throwing ChatGPT explanations at you, you honestly need a better interviewer.

I've done a lot of interviews over Zoom, and whenever someone cheats, by passing someone else's work off as their own (the weirdest thing I've ever encountered was someone having a friend on trying to feed them answers, which he admitted to later) it is so painfully obvious if you grill them a bit and throw a few curveballs.

InkCanon• 1 year ago

Because interviews were always an attempt to discern a signal few hours interview into an accurate prediction of performance from months to years. AIs generate a lot of nosie to mask that. Interviewees can just pass the question to the AI, who will generate a reasonable sounding response.

vunderba2• 1 year ago

I mentioned this in a different related post but there seems to be a pretty sad lack of basic integrity in the tech world where it's become a point of pride to develop and use apps which allow an applicant to blatantly cheat during interviews using LLMs.

As a result, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on-site" interviews. The funny thing about this is that these are 100% remote jobs - but the interviews are being conducted at shared workspaces. This is what happens when the level of trust goes down to zero due to bad actors.

ghaff3• 1 year ago

Largely past COVID it seems like sheer laziness or cheapness not to conduct in-person interviews for a professional job other than a short-term project after essentially an initial screen for all sorts of reasons that have little to do with cheating. I don’t care if the job is largely remote.

As someone else noted, this used to be utterly standard. And frankly I’d probably just pass on someone who balked. Plenty of fish in the sea.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

The crushingly long and disrespectful interview process cut the bridge off first. If the job market becomes a problem of scale, people (especially programmers) will scale up as such. As the interviewers have with ATC.

vrosas• 1 year ago

As someone currently job searching it hasn’t changed much, besides companies adding DO NOT USE AI warnings before every section. Even Anthropic forces you to write a little “why do you want to work here DO NOT USE AI” paragraph. The irony.

Pooge3• 1 year ago

They will very happily use AI to evaluate your profile, though :)

pizzalife• 1 year ago

Applying at Anthropic was a bad experience for me. I was invited to do a timed set of leetcode exercises on some website. I didn't feel like doing that, and focused on my other applications.

Then they emailed me a month later after my "invitation" expired. It looked like it was written by a human: "Hey, we're really interested in your profile, here's a new invite link, please complete this automated pre-screen thingie".

So I swallowed my pride and went through with that humiliating exercise. Ended up spending two hours doing algorithmic leetcode problems. This was for a product security position. Maybe we could have talked about vulnerabilities that I have found instead.

I was too slow to solve them and received some canned response.

x0x0• 1 year ago

fyi, that's because (from experience) the last job req I publicly posted generated almost 450 responses, and (quite generously) over a third were simply not relevant. It was for a full-stack rails eng. Here, I'm not even including people whose experience was django or even React; I mean people with no web experience at all, or were not in the time zone requested. Another 20% or so were nowhere near the experience level (senior) requested either.

The price of people bulk applying with no thought is I have to bulk filter.

explorigin• 1 year ago

Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate.

Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful response to my question 30 seconds later.

AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

ktallett4• 1 year ago

This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.

remus• 1 year ago

Doesn't even have to be a project per se, if they can discuss some sort of technical topic in depth (i.e. the sort of discussion you might have when discussing potential solutions to a problem) then that's a great sign imo.

polishdude20• 1 year ago

My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.

satvikpendem8• 1 year ago

There are much more sophisticated methods than that now with AI, like speech to text to LLM. It's getting increasingly harder to detect interviewees cheating.

yowlingcat2• 1 year ago

I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools.

If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating.

If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.

vunderba2• 1 year ago

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

satvikpendem8• 1 year ago

Also because most people are busy with actual work and don't have the time to have passion projects. Some people do, and that's great, but most people are simply not passionate about labor, regardless of what kind of labor it is.

pdimitar3• 1 year ago

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-19 gigs).

If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away.

I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years).

I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc.

And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it.

If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description).

I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.

nyrikki• 1 year ago

To add to this, lots of senior people in the consultanting world are brought in under escalations. They often have to hide the fact they are an external resource.

Also if you have a novel or disclosure sensitive passion project, GitHub may be avoided even as a very conservative bright line.

As stated above I think it can be good to find common points to enhance the interview process, but make sure to not use it as a filter.

AlgebraFox• 1 year ago

I really hate those who ask for GitHub profiles. Mine is psuedo anonymous and I don't want to share it with my employer or anyone I don't want to. Besides privacy, I do not understand why a company would even expect the candidate to have free contribution in the first place. Can't the candidate have other hobbies to enjoy or learn?

brianstrimp• 1 year ago

Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to join your company because they know that their coworkers will have been chosen by a subpar process.

That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist?

Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?

kmoser• 1 year ago

That might be good for newbie developers but for the rest of us it'll end up being the Clippy of AI assistants. If I want to know more about an API I'm using, I'll Google (or ask ChatGPT) for details; I don't need an assistant trying to be helpful and either treating me like a child, or giving me info that maybe right but which I don't need at the moment.

The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.

sien• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure I've been in an interview with an 'interview assistant' and that it was another person.

This was 2-3 years ago in a remote interview. The candidate would hear the question, BS us a bit and then sometimes provide a good answer.

But then if we asked follow up questions they would blow those.

They also had odd 'AV issues' which were suspicious.

yosito• 1 year ago

If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate

So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?

colonial• 1 year ago

You'd be surprised at how good you can get at sniffing out slop, especially when it's the type prompted by fools who think it'll get them an easy win. Often the actual content doesn't even factor in - what triggers my mental heuristics is usually meta stuff like tone and structure.

I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.

alok-g4• 1 year ago

The strong language used aside, indeed, we should be cautious of our own potential biases when screening or otherwise.

I am imagining an AI saying my CV is AI-generated, when in reality, I do not even use Auto-correct or Auto-suggest when I (type)write! :-)

RajT88• 1 year ago

AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing.

If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.

hibikir5• 1 year ago

There's candidates running speech-to-text that avoid the noticeable delays, but it's still possible to do the right kind of digging the AI will almost always refuse to do, because it's way too polite.

It's as if we were testing for replicants in Blade Runner: The AI response will rarely figure out you are aiming to look for something frustrating, that they are actually proud of, or figure out when you are looking for a hot take you can then disagree with.

roland35• 1 year ago

There are some tools that read your screen and can provide hints and solutions for coding type questions. I honestly don't trust myself to not mess it up, plus the whole ethics side of it, but I'm sure that will always be a problem for online assessments

ktallett4• 1 year ago

The key is having interviewers that know what they are talking about so in-depth meandering discussions can be had regarding personal and work projects which usually makes it clear whether the applicant knows what they are talking about. Leetcode was only ever a temporary interview technique, and this 'AI' prominence in the public domain has simply sped up it's demise.

danielbln3• 1 year ago

This is the way. We do an intro call, an engineering chat (exactly as you describe), a coding challenge and 2 team chat sessions in person. At the end of that, we usually have a good feeling about how sharp the candidate is, of they like to learn and discover new things, what their work ethic is. It's not bullet proof, but it removes a lot of noise from the signal.

The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with AI. We can no longer afford not to use LLMs for engineering, as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right, so candidates should show how they use LLMs. They need to be able to explain the code of course, and answer questions about it, but for us it's a negative mark of a candidate proclaims that they don't use LLMs.

satvikpendem8• 1 year ago

The coding challenge is supposed to be solved with AI. We can no longer afford not to use LLMs for engineering, as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right, so candidates should show how they use LLMs. They need to be able to explain the code of course, and answer questions about it, but for us it's a negative mark of a candidate proclaims that they don't use LLMs.

Do you state this upfront or is it some hidden requirement? Generally I'd expect an interview coding exercise to not be done with AI, but if it's a hidden requirement that the interviewer does not disclose, it is unfair to be penalized for not reading their minds.

crooked-v6• 1 year ago

as it's that much of a productivity boost when used right

Frankly, if an interviewer told me this, I would genuinely wonder why what they're building is such a simple toy product that an LLM can understand it well enough to be productive.

_puk• 1 year ago

This completely..

You ask a rote question and you'll get a rote answer while the interviewee is busy looking at a fixed point on the screen.

You then ask a pointed question about something they know or care about, and suddenly their face lights up, they're animated, and they are looking around.

It's a huge tell.

crooked-v6• 1 year ago

You know, this makes me wonder if a viable remote interview technique, at least until real-time deepfaking gets better, would be to have people close their eyes while talking to them. For somebody who knows their stuff it'll have zero impact; for someone relying entirely on GPT, it will completely derail them.

soheil2• 1 year ago

its demise

MacsHeadroom5• 1 year ago

Changed enormously. Both resumes and interviews are effectively useless now. If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for then you aren't ever going to hear from us. If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

fifilura• 1 year ago

Does that mean you will not hire anyone without a public portfolio?

Pooge3• 1 year ago

I thought that meant what you typically write in the "Experience" section. GP, am I wrong?

Is everyone writing a "Projects" section by rewording what they wrote in "Experience"?! For me, "Projects" should strictly be personal projects. If not, maybe that's what I'm missing.

MacsHeadroom5• 1 year ago

Essentially, yes. Public portfolios come in different flavors though. Most often it's code. But sometimes it's research, a blog, transcripts of talks ripped from YouTube.

tmpz22• 1 year ago

If the interview is mostly a formality is it still multiple hours of leet code?

MacsHeadroom5• 1 year ago

No, there are AI's specifically for solving leet code. It's a waste of time.

https://leetcodewizard.io/

Gigachad3• 1 year ago

What worked for me is just ignoring the job listing websites, and calling recruiters directly on the phone. Don’t bother hitting “easy apply” just scroll to the bottom and call the number.

I’ve also been asked for the first time in ages to come to the companies office to do interviews.

andrewflnr2• 1 year ago

What do you tell them on the phone? Are they prepared for just "Hi I want to apply for the $job position"? And do they have an answer besides "cool, use the website"?

crooked-v6• 1 year ago

a portfolio of original work

I'm too busy doing actual paid work for companies for that.

lnsru2• 1 year ago

That’s the reality for most people. Creating many things under NDA with tools watching for IP theft. So no single line of code can leave the company. I know a guy who has a portfolio, but he’s freelance web designer.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

If our AI agents can't find a portfolio of original work nearly exactly what we want to hire you for

that'd be a huge issue for most candidates (and basically all top candidates) because "exactly what you want to hire you for" is probably not open source code to begin with.

If you are one of the 1 in 4000 applications who gets an interview then you're already 70% likely to get an offer and the interview is mostly a formality.

That has not been my experience at all in 2023/2024.

delduca• 1 year ago

I recently reviewed a medium-complexity assignment—just questions, no coding—and out of six candidates, I only approved one. The others were disqualified because their answers were filled with easily identifiable ChatGPT-generated fluff.

And I had made it clear that they should use their own words.

ryan-duve• 1 year ago

My startup got acquired last year so I haven't interviewed anyone in a while, but my technical interview has always been:

- share your screen

- download/open the coding challenge

- you can use any website, Stack Overflow, whatever, to answer my questions as long as it's on the screenshare

My goal is to determine if the candidate can be technically productive, so I allow any programming language, IDE, autocompleter, etc, that they want. I would have no problem with them using GPT/Copilot in addition to all that, as long as it's clear how they're solving it.

silasdavis• 1 year ago

I don't care how you're good at it so long as I can watch.

b1124• 1 year ago

I'd be fine with the GPT side of things, as long as I could somehow inject poor answers, and see if the interviewee notices and corrects.

cpursley• 1 year ago

That's actually a horribly awesome idea.

htrp2• 1 year ago

the trick is to phrase the problem in a way that GPT4 will always give the incorrect answer (due to vagueness of your problem) and that multiple rounds of guiding/correcting are needed to solve.

hibikir5• 1 year ago

There's more than one possible AI on the other end, so crafting something that will not annoy a typical candidate, but will lead every AI astray seems pretty difficult.

shaneoh5• 1 year ago

I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job.

It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried asking ChatGPT the problem straight up, even though I clarified up front "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."

After just the initial batch of candidates it became clear it was muddying things too much, so I simply forbade using it for the rest of the candidates, and those interviews went much smoother.

layer8• 1 year ago

Did you tell them that you “want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job”? Just curious.

Aeolun4• 1 year ago

What are you supposed to ask chatGPT if you can’t just ask it the answer? That’d confuse me too.

mmh00002• 1 year ago

Over the years, I've walked from several "live coding" interviews. Arguably though, if you're looking for "social coders" maybe the interview is working as intended?

But for me, it's just not how my brain works. If someone is watching me, I'll be so self-conscious the entire time you'll get a stream of absolute nonsense that makes me look like I learned programming from YouTube last night. So it's not worth the time.

You want some good programming done? I need headphones, loud music, a closed door and a supply of Diet Coke. I'll see you in a few hours.

skinner927• 1 year ago

Maybe come up with a problem that isn’t so simple you can just ask it to ChatGPT. Create some context that would be difficult/tedious to convey.

raincole• 1 year ago

"You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."

No, it's not "obvious" whatsoever. Actually it's obviously confusing: why you are allowing them to use ChatGPT but forbidding them from asking the questions directly? Do you want an employee who is productive at solving problems, or someone who guess your intentions better?

If AI is an issue for you then just ban it. Don't try to make the interview a game of who outsmart who.

9467899876492• 1 year ago

I've had a few people chuck the entire problem into ChatGPT, it was still very much useful in a few ways:

- You get to see how they then review the generated code, do they spot potential edge cases which the AI missed? - When I ask them to make a change not in the original spec, a lot of them completely shut down because they either didn't understand the code generated well enough, or they themselves didn't really know how to code.

And you still get to see people who _do_ know how to use AI well, which at this point is a must for its overall productivity benefits.

random_walker• 1 year ago

I love these kind of interviews. This would very closely simulate real world on-job Performance.

dalmo32• 1 year ago

If I had to do real world on-job coding while someone looks over my shoulder at all times (i.e. screensharing), I'd be flipping burgers.

staticautomatic2• 1 year ago

I did this while hiring last year and the number of candidates who got stuff wrong because they were too proud to just look up the answer was shocking.

prisenco3• 1 year ago

Is it pride or is it hard to shake the (reasonable, I'd say) fear the reviewer will judge regardless of their claims?

bagels2• 1 year ago

If you really don't penalize them for this, you should clearly state it. Some people may still think they'll be penalized as that is the norm.

blazing2348• 1 year ago

im not doing any coding challenges that aren't real world

if i see anything remotely challenging i dip out. interviewing is just a numbers game nowadays so i dont waste time on interviews if they seem like they're gonna burn me out for the rest of the day. granted i have 11 years experience

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

I would have no problem with them using GPT/Copilot in addition to all that, as long as it's clear how they're solving it.

Too many people are the opposite that I would literally never tell you

And this works.

what can we do to help that?

I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged as well.

but so many casual tirades against it dont make me want to ever try being forthcoming. most organizations are realistically going to be 10 years behind the curve on this

hibikir5• 1 year ago

The difficulty of your questions have to change drastically if they are using good tooling. Many a problem that would take a reasonable candidate half an hour to figure out is 'free' for Claude, so your question might not show any signal. And if you tweak your questions to be sure to not be auto-solved by a strong enough AI, then you better say it's semi-required, because the difficulty level of the question you need to ask goes up quite a bit.

Some of the questions in our interview loop have been posted in github... which means every AI has trained on them specifically. They are, therefore, useless if you have AI turned on. And if you interview enough people, someone will post on github, and therefore your question will have a pretty short shelf life before it's in training and instantly solved.

pnathan• 1 year ago

Screen share or in person are what I think the best ways are. These are not the best options.

I do not want AI. The human is the value add.

I understand that people won't feel super comfortable with this, and I try not to roast the candidate with leetcode. It should be a conversation where I surface technical reality and understanding.

elzbardico• 1 year ago

I have a colleague that uses AI to comment on RFCs. It is so clearly machine generated, that I wonder if I am the only one to see it. He is a good colleague though, but as he is a bit junior, it is still not clear to me if AI is helping him to improve faster or if it is hindering his deep learning of stuff.

gibbonsrcool• 1 year ago

Panel interviews seem to be more common. Curious if others have seen the same? I personally feel very uncomfortable coding in front of a group. First one of these I tried had like 5 people watching and I lost my nerve and bailed. :|

RevEng• 1 year ago

Panels and live programming assignments are such an awful idea. Is that what the workplace is like? Doo they want people who can work under those conditions? I've been a working professional for 18 years who gives public talks regularly and I can still see myself clamming up in that situation. Everyone knows it's hard to think and type when you are being watched.

lubujackson3• 1 year ago

Worse, how little does the company value developer time? If you get hired there, how many brainnumbing panels will you need to be a part of? Stinks of a lack of focus, trust and quality.

hot_gril• 1 year ago

It's still remote. I don't get how you could pass an interview using ChatGPT unless it's purely leetcode.

trustinmenowpls• 1 year ago

I've been on both sides recently, and it hasn't really changed significantly. If you're heming and hawing you're not getting the job.

jppope3• 1 year ago

I've been very curious about this and about how we should modify our hiring. Its obvious that an individual should be able to use AI companions to build better, faster, higher quality things... But the skillsets are sooo uneven now that its unfair to those who are with and without.

I think it ultimately comes back to impact (like always) which has remained largely unchanged.

bdcravens• 1 year ago

I haven't done any hiring in a while, but my feelings on the matter:

If they can talk through the technology and code fluently, honestly, I don't care how they do the work. Honestly I feel like the ability to communicate is a far more important skill than the precise technology.

This is of course presumes you have a clue about the technology you're hiring for.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

I tell everyone to share their entire screen, have their video on, and start coding. It's not that different. Even as an interviewer, I experimented with the usual cheating techniques so I know what to look out for. The best are the AI teleprompters. If you can do the work with your own AI then I see no need to care as the business will not care either.

The story is completely different for airgapped dark room jobs, but if you know you know.

crooked-v6• 1 year ago

share their entire screen

That would be a bit awkward with my 32:9 primary monitor.

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

I have my dual 4K Dells for day to day work but I unplug one and scale it to something reasonable for interviews because having consideration is part of the signal that I'm sending (and empathy, because I hate trying to read purple text on a black background myself when trying to view other people's setups)

blazing2348• 1 year ago

if your interviews are easily cheatable you should probably fix the interviews. back in the day when i was in university we were allowed to use any resources for exams cause you couldnt cheat easily.

locusofself2• 1 year ago

I'm curious what you mean by this as someone who has worked in a SCIF for years. What I've found (and I personally benefited from this) is that interviews are far more forgiving for people who have security clearances, because of the comparatively tiny available talent pool. AWS, Azure etc allow people to join as "SRE" (a bastardized term at this point) or "Cloud Engineer" and later switch to SWE pretty easily.

acwan933• 1 year ago

I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate.

The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.

buggy62572• 1 year ago

My first read of this was they made a joke (not wise when scheduling for interviews sure but maybe funny) by intentionally responding that way.

This is because my brain couldn't fathom what is likely the reality here -- that someone was just pumping your email thru AI and pumping the response back unedited and unsanitized, and so the first thing you got back was just the first "part" of the AI response.

...Christ.

john-radio• 1 year ago

Yeah I don't know about this specific situation, but as someone who is on the job market, is a good developer, but can come off as a little odd sometimes, I often wonder how often I roll a natural 1 on my Cha check and get perceived as an AI imposter.

rantallion• 1 year ago

I'm with you. Looking at the way people respond online to things now since LLMs and GenAI went mainstream is baffling. So many comments along the lines of "this is AI" when there are more ordinary explanations.

acwan933• 1 year ago

Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates.

Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eyebrows and very quickly leads to a rejection. There’s other cases where your written English is flawless but your phone interview indicates you don’t understand the English language compared to when we correspond over email/Indeed/etc.

Mind you, this is all before we even get to the technical knowledge part of any interview.

On a related hire, I am also in the unfortunate position where we may have to let a new CS grad go because it seemed like every code change and task we gave him was fully copy/pasted through ChatGPT. When presented with a simple code performance and optimization bug, he was completely lost on general debugging practices which led our team to question his previous work while onboarding. Using AI isn’t against company policy (see: small team with limited resources), but personally I see over reliance on ChatGPT as much, much worse than blindly following Stack Overflow.

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

A friend of mine works with industrial machines, and once was tasked with translating machine's user's manual, even though he doesn't speak English. I do, and I had some free time, so I helped him. As an example, I was given user manual for a different, but similar machine.

1. The manual was mostly a bunch of phrases that were grammatically correct, but didn't really convey much meaning

2. The second half of the manual talked about a different machine than the first half

3. It was full of exceptionally bad mistranslations, and to this day "trained signaturee of the employee" is our inside joke

Imagine asking ChatGPT to write a manual except ChatGPT has down syndrome and a heart attack so it gives you five pages of complete bullshit. That was real manual that got shipped a 100 000€ or so machine. And nobody bothered to proofread it even once.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

I don't even understand why you want an AI responding to emails from an interviewer. I have 2-3 template answers I can access with a keystroke.

But yes, I read it the same way. Pretty funny way to respond to a recruiter after they say "no AI please".

sshine3• 1 year ago

I can't speak for job interviewing, but having recently completed 3rd-semester trade-school oral exams in Java programming:

It is really important to watch people code.

Anyone can fake an abstract overview.

j-scott• 1 year ago

In my most recent cycle, I didn’t ask to use AI and I was only warned once about using AI when I had the official language plugin for an IDE annotate some struct fields with json tags. I explained the plugin functionality and we moved on.

When I was part of interviews on the other side for my former employer, I encountered multiple candidates who appeared to be using AI assistance without notifying the interviewers ahead of time or at all.

NomDePlum• 1 year ago

It can be weird. Seen some decent resumes for people that in the actual interview the candidate obviously has zero demonstrable knowledge of.

Ask even the shallowest question and they are lost and just start regurgitating what feels like very bad prompt based responses.

At that point it's just about closing down the interview without being unprofessional.

lolinder4• 1 year ago

The traditional tech interview was always designed to optimize for reliably finding someone who was willing to do what they were told even if it feels like busywork. As a rule someone who has the time and the motivation to brush up on an essentially useless skill in order to pass your job interview will likely fit nicely as a cog in your machine.

AI doesn't just change the interviewing game by making it easy to cheat on these interviews, it should be changing your hiring strategy altogether. If you're still thinking in terms of optimizing for cogs, you're missing the boat—unless you're hiring for a very short term gig what you need now is someone with high creative potential and great teamwork skills.

And as far as I know there is no reliable template interview for recognizing someone who's good at thinking outside the box and who understands people. You just have to talk to them: talk about their past projects, their past teams, how they learn, how they collaborate. And then you have to get good at understanding what kinds of answers you need for the specific role you're trying to fill, which will likely be different from role to role.

The days of the interchangeable cog are over, and with them easy answers for interviewing.

nouveaux2• 1 year ago

Have you spent a lot of time trying to hire people? I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees. This perspective smells completely like "If I were in charge, things would be so much better." Guess what? If you were to take your idea and try to lead this change across a 100 people engineering org, there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your ideas and cause dissent. At that point, guess what? You're going to figure out how to hire compliant people who will execute on your strategy.

"talk about their past projects, their past teams, how they learn, how they collaborate"

You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

dakiol• 1 year ago

My take is:

- “big” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft came up with these types of tech interviews. And there it seems pretty clear that for most of their positions they are looking for cogs

- The vast majority of tech companies have just copied what “big” tech is doing, including tech interviews. These companies may not be looking for cogs, but they are using an interview process that’s not suitable for them

- Very few companies have their own interview process suitable for them. These are usually small companies and therefore the number of engineers in such companies is negligible to be taken into account (most likely, less than 1% of the audience here work at such companies)

dennis_jeeves22• 1 year ago

I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

The council itself is made of "busywork" worker bees. Slave hiring slaves - the vast majority of IT interviewers and candidates are idiot savants - they know very little outside of IT, or even realize that there is more to life than IT.

northern-lights• 1 year ago

You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

This was the norm until perhaps for about the last 10-15 years of Software Engineering.

lolinder4• 1 year ago

I guarantee you there is no shadow council trying to figure out how to hire "busywork" worker bees.

I didn't say that. I said that this style of interview was designed to hire pluggable cogs. As others have noted, that was the correct move for Big Tech and was cargo culted into a bunch of other companies that didn't know why their interviews were shaped the way they were.

there would be "out of the box thinkers" who would go against your ideas and cause dissent. At that point, guess what? You're going to figure out how to hire compliant people who will execute on your strategy.

In answer to your original question: yes, I'm actively involved in hiring at a 100+ person engineering org that hires this way. And no, we're not looking to figure out how to hire compliant people, we're hiring engineers who will push back and do what works well, not just act because an executive says so.

You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

Only if you suck at making people comfortable and at understanding different (potentially awkward) communication styles. You don't have to discriminate against people for being awkward, that's a choice you can make. You can instead give them enough space to find their train of thought and pursue it, and it does work—I recently sat in on an interview like that with someone who fits your description exactly, and we strongly recommended him.

bodge50002• 1 year ago

You have now excluded amazing engineers who suck at talking about themselves in interviews. They may be great collaborators and communicators, but freeze up selling themselves in an interview.

This is the job of a good interviewer. I've run the gauntlet from terrible to great answers to the exact same questions depending on the interviewer. If you literally just ask that question out of the blue, you'll either get a bad or rehearsed response. If you establish some rapport, and ask it in a more natural way, you'll get a more natural answer.

It's not easy, but neither is being on the other side of the interviewer, and that's never been accepted as an excuse

dahart10• 1 year ago

what you need now is someone with high creative potential and great teamwork skills.

That’s exactly what we always needed, long before LLMs arrived. That’s why all the interviews I’ve seen or give already were designed to have conversations.

I’m agreeing with you, but I’ve never seen these ‘interchangeable cog’ interviews you’re talking about.

lolinder4• 1 year ago

Right, I agree. The leetcode interviews are a bad fit for almost every company—they only made sense in the Googles and Microsofts that invented them and actually did want to optimize for cogs.

__loam2• 1 year ago

There's still plenty of engineers that can't code their way out of a paper bag

throwaway123lol• 1 year ago

Well they're not really engineers then are they?

__loam2• 1 year ago

Neither are most programmers

screaminghawk• 1 year ago

I don't understand why an interviewer would ban the use of AI if they are allowed to use AI in the role.

The interview is a chance to see how a candidate performs in a work like environment. Let them use the tools they will use on the job and see how well they can perform.

Even for verbal interviews, if they are using ChatGPT on the side and can manage the conversation satisfactorily then more power to them.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

What if their lack of knowledge runs so deep that you question if their even able to prompt the AI without step by step instructions?

There's nothing wrong with a candidate going "Normally I'd prompt ChatGPT and get a skeleton project going" or saying "Look, I don't run around with the entire standard library in my head. I look that stuff up and sometimes that's with an LLM". The problem is when they can't go through the steps of solving a program, without the AI. I don't care about the details, or if you ask Copilot to do the API query code, because you don't want to write the error handling, that actually fairly reasonable, but if you can't prompt it to add the logic for a HTTP 403 then what's the point? In that case I'd rather hire someone who takes longer, but who knows that the 403 should probably redirect an unauthenticated user to the login page.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2• 1 year ago

Buddy of mine recently got a position with the help of custom built model that was listening on the call and printed answers on another screen. The arms race is here and frankly, given that a lot of people are already using it at work, there is no way to stop it short of minute upon minute supervision and even biggest micromanagers won't be able to deal with it.

Honestly, if I could trust that companies won't try to evaluate my conversation through 20 different ridiculous filters, I would probably argue that my buddy is out of line.. As it stands, however, he is merely leveling out the playing field. But, just life with WFH, management class does not like that imposition one bit.

sergioisidoro• 1 year ago

I've let people use GPT in coding interviews, provided that they show me how they use it. At the end I'm interested in knowing how a person solves a problem, and thinks about it. Do they just accept whatever crap the gpt gives them, can they take a critical approach to it, etc.

So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI. So far my opinion is if you have a good interview process, you can clearly see who are the good candidates with or without ai.

alpha_squared• 1 year ago

We do the same thing. It's perfectly fine for candidates to use AI-assistive tooling provided that they can edit/maintain the code and not just sit in a prompt the whole time. The heavier a candidate relies on LLMs, the worse they often do. It really comes down to discipline.

sureIy• 1 year ago

Discipline for what?

To me it's the lack of skill. If the LLM spits out junk you should be able to tell. ChatGPT-based interviews could work just as well to determine the ability to understand, review and fix code effectively.

randall• 1 year ago

i like this. it seems like a good and honest use of time.

Keyframe• 1 year ago

same thing here. Interview is basically a representative thing of what we do, but also depends on the level of seniority. I ask people just to share the screen with me and use whatever you want / fell comfortable with. Google, ChatGPT, call your mom, I don't care as long as you walk me through how you're approaching the thing at hand. We've all googled tar xvcxfgzxfzcsadc, what's that permission for .pem is it 400, etc.. no shame in anything and we all use all of the things through day. Let's simulate a small task at hand and see where we end up at. Similarly, there is a bias where people leaning more on LLMs doing worse than those just googling or, gasp, opening documentation.

t-writescode• 1 year ago

I imagine most of the things that would be good uses for seniors in AI aren't great uses for a coding interview anyway.

"Oh, I don't remember how to do parameterized testing in junit, okay, I'll just copy-paste like crazy, or make a big for-loop in this single test case"

"Oh, I don't remember the API call for this one thing, okay, I'll just chat with the interviewer, maybe they remember - or I'll just say 'this function does this' and the interviewer and I will just agree that it does that".

Things more complicated than that that need exact answers shouldn't exist in an interview.

ehnto• 1 year ago

Things more complicated than that that need exact answers shouldn't exist in an interview.

Agreed, testing for arcane knowledge is pointless in a world where information lookup is instant, and we now have AI librarians at our fingertips.

Critical thinking, capacity to ingest and process new information, fast logic processing, software fundamentals and ability to communicate are attributes I would test for.

An exception though is proving their claimed experience, you can usually tease that out with specifics about the tools.

CSMastermind2• 1 year ago

Yeah I've been doing the same. Have been pretty stunned at people's inability to use AI tools effectively.

3eb7988a1663• 1 year ago

What does effective use look like? I have attempted messing around with a couple of options, but was always disappointed with the output. How do you properly present a problem to a LLM? Requiring an ongoing conversation feels like a tech priest praying to the machine spirit.

al_borland• 1 year ago

When I was last interviewing people (several years ago now), I’d let them use the internet to help them on anything hands on. I was astounded by how bad some people were at using a search engine. Some people wouldn’t even make an attempt.

meesles2• 1 year ago

This has been my experience as well. The ones that have most heavily relied on GPT not only didn't really know what to ask, but couldn't reason about the outputs at all since it was frequently new information to them. Good candidates use it like a search engine - filling known gaps.

hsuduebc25• 1 year ago

I don't really can't imagine being it usefull in the way where it writes logical part of the code for you. If you are not being lousy you still need to think about all the edge cases when it generates the code which seems harder for me.

piloto_ciego• 1 year ago

This makes me feel good because it’s exactly how I use it.

I’m basically pair programming with a wizard all day who periodically does very stupid things.

vanceism7_5• 1 year ago

Yea I agree. I don't rely on the AI to generate code for me, I just use it as a glorified search engine. Sure I do some copypasta from time to time, but it almost always needs modification to work correctly... Man does AI get stuff wrong sometimes lol

onemoresoop• 1 year ago

I like that you’re openminded to allow candidates to be who they are and judge them for the outcome rather than using a prescribed rigid method to evaluate them. Im not looking to interview right now but I’d feel very comfortable interviewing with someone like you, I’d very likely give out my best in such an interview. Id probably choose not to use an LLM during the interview unless I wanted to show how I brainstormed a solution.

apwell23• 1 year ago

It took a while for googling during interviews to be accepted

alexjplant2• 1 year ago

Earlier this past week I asked Copilot to generate some Golang tests and it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub. I had to explicitly ask it to generate idiomatic tests and even then it still didn't test all of the parameters that it should have.

At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with my colleague via PR) reviewed the generated code we ended up with a preprod bug because the LLM used session.flush() instead of session.commit() in exactly one spot for no apparent reason.

LLMs are still not ready for prime-time. They churn out code like an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday.

csense• 1 year ago

an overconfident 25-year-old that just downed three lunch beers with a wet burrito at the Mexican place down the street from the office on a rainy Wednesday

That's...oddly specific.

DustinBrett4• 1 year ago

I feel like I am taking crazy pills that other devs don't feel this way. How bad are the coders that they think these AI's are giving them super powers. The PR's with AI code are so obvious and when you ask the devs why, they don't even know. They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.

fenomas3• 1 year ago

I don't follow this take. ChatGPT outputted a bug subtle enough to be overlooked by you and your colleague and your test suite, and that means it's not ready for prime time?

The day when generative AI might hope to completely handle a coding task isn't here yet - it doesn't know your full requirements, it can't run your integration tests, etc. For now it's a tool, like a linter or a debugger - useful sometimes and not useful other times, but the responsibility to keep bugs out of prod still rests with the coder, not the tools.

fooker• 1 year ago

You are using it wrong.

Give examples and let it extrapolate.

bboygravity2• 1 year ago

You can't tell us that LLM's aren't ready for prime time in 2025 after you tried Copilot twice last year.

New better models are coming out almost daily now and it's almost common knowledge that Copilot was and is one of the worst. Especially right now, it doesn't even come close to what better models have to offer.

Also the way to use them is to ask for small chunks of code or questions about code after you gave them tons of context (like in Claude projects for example).

"Not ready for prime time" is also just factually incorrect. It is already being used A LOT. To the point that there are rumors that Cursor is buying so much compute from Anthropic that they are making their product unstable, because nvidia can't supply them hardware fast enough.

Seattle3503• 1 year ago

At a previous job I made the mistake of letting it write some repository methods that leveraged SQLAlchemy. Even though I (along with my colleague via PR) reviewed the generated code we ended up with a preprod bug because the LLM used session.flush() instead of session.commit() in exactly one spot for no apparent reason.

Ive had ChatGPT do the same thing with code involving SQLAlchemy.

Cthulhu_2• 1 year ago

Is that the LLM's fault or SQLAlchemy for having that API in the first place? Or was that a gap in your testing strategy, as (if I'm reading it right), flush() doesn't write anything to the database but is only intended as an intermediate step (and commit() calls flush() under water).

I think we're in a period similar to self-driving cars, where the LLMs are pretty good, but not perfect; it's those last few percent that break it.

linsomniac5• 1 year ago

it used some obscure assertion library that had a few hundred stars on GitHub.

That sounds like a lot of developers I've worked with.

alok-g4• 1 year ago

This is the best way to go.

I would love to go through mock interviews for myself with this approach just to have some interview-specific experience.

> So far, everyone that elected to use GPT did much worse. They did not know what to ask, how to ask, and did not "collaborate" with the AI.

Thanks for sharing your experience! Makes sense actually.

fendy3002• 1 year ago

Yes, the current google search is somehow bad than sometime between covid or before that. Using chatgpt as search engine can save time sometimes and if you're somewhat knowledgeable, you can pinpoint the key info and crosscheck with google search.

yesiamyourdad2• 1 year ago

That's an interesting point about watching how they work with AI. The people I know who are most successful actually engage in back & forth.

twoparachute455• 1 year ago

My company, a very very large company, is transitioning back to only in-person interviews due to the rampant amount of cheating happening during interviews.

As an interviewer, it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it, when you can very obviously hear them typing, then watching their eyes move as they read an answer from another screen. And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect anyway. I'm happy that we won't have to waste our time on those candidates anymore.

wccrawford• 1 year ago

When I was interviewing entry level programmers at my last job, we gave them an assignment that should only take a few hours, but we basically didn't care about the code at all.

Instead, we were looking to see if they followed instructions, and if they left anything out.

I never had a chance to test it out, since we hadn't hired anyone new in so long, but ChatGPT/etc would almost always fail this exam because of how bad it is at making sure everything was included.

And bad programmers also failed it. It always left us with a few candidates that paid attention, and from there we figure if they can do that, they can learn the rest. It seemed to work quite well.

I was recently laid off from that company, and now I'm realizing that I really want to see what current-day candidates would turn in. Oh well.

z3t42• 1 year ago

For those tests I never follow the rules, I just make something quick and dirty because I refuse to spend unpaid hours. In the interview the first question is why I didnt follow the instructions, and they think my reason is fair.

Companies seem to think that we program just for fun and ask to make a full blown app... also underestimating the time candidates actually spend making it.

prisenco3• 1 year ago

The industry (all industries really) might want to reconsider online applications, or at least privilege in-person resume drop-offs because the escalating ai application/evaluation war that's happening doesn't seem to be helping anyone.

datavirtue3• 1 year ago

No it's because AI shifted power over to the applicant.

mr_00ff00• 1 year ago

So depressing to hear that “because of rampant cheating”

As a person looking for a job, I’m really not sure what to do. If people are lying on their resumes and cheating in interviews, it feels like there’s nothing I can do except do the same. Otherwise I’ll remain jobless.

But to this day I haven’t done either.

ghaff3• 1 year ago

Note also "And the majority of the time the answer is incorrect anyway."

I haven't looked for development-related jobs this millennium, but it's unclear to me how effective a crutch AI is for interviews--at least for well-designed and run interviews. Maybe in some narrow domains for junior people.

As a few of us have written elsewhere, I consider not having in-person interviews past an initial screen sheer laziness and companies generally deserve whoever they end up with.

ryandvm• 1 year ago

I don't know, I kind of feel like leetcode interviews are a situation where the employer is cheating. I mean, you're admittedly filtering out a great number of acceptable candidates knowing that if you just find 1 in a 1000, that'll be good enough. It is patently unfair to the individuals that are smart enough to do your work, but poor at some farcical representation of the work. That is cheating.

In my opinion, if a prospective employee is able to successfully use AI to trick me into hiring them, then that is a hell of a lot closer to the actual work they'll be hired to do (compared to leetcode).

I say, if you can cheat at an interview with AI, do it.

chowells• 1 year ago

Here's the thing: 95% of cheaters still suck, even when cheating. Its hard to imagine how people can perform so badly while cheating, yet they consistently do. All you need to do to stand out is not be utterly awful. Worrying about what other people are doing is more detrimental to your performance than anything else is. Just focus on yourself: being broadly competent, knowing your niche well, and being good at communicating how you learn when you hit the edges of your knowledge. Those are the skills that always stand out.

dahart10• 1 year ago

it feels like there’s nothing I can do except do the same.

Why does it feel like that when you’re replying to someone who already points out that it doesn’t work? Cheating can prevent you from getting a job, and it can get you fired from the job too. It can also impede your ability to learn and level up your own skills. I’m glad you haven’t done it yet, just know that you can be a better candidate and increase your chances by not cheating.

Using an LLM isn’t cheating if the interviewer allows it. Whether they allow it or not, there’s still no substitute for putting in the work. Interviews are a skill that can (and should) be practiced. Candidates are rarely hired for technical skill alone. Attitude, communication, curiosity, and lots of other soft skills are severely underestimated by so many job seekers, especially those coming right out of school. A small amount of strengthening your non-code abilities can improve your odds much faster than leetcode ever will. And if you have time, why not do both?

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

sounds cheesy, but keep being honest. Eventually companies will realize (as we have years ago) that automating recruiting gets you automated candidates.

But YMMV. I have 9 years and still can get interviews the old fashioned way.

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

it feels like there’s nothing I can do except do the same. Otherwise I’ll remain jobless.

Never buy into this mentality. Because once you do, it never goes away. After the interview, your coworkers might cheat, so you cheat too. Then your business competitors might cheat, so you cheat too. And on and on.

wsintra2022• 1 year ago

Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?

risyachka• 1 year ago

I guess its more of a question if you can solve the problem without AI.

In most interview tasks you are not solving the task “with” ai.

Its AI who solves the task while you watch it do it.

isbvhodnvemrwvn• 1 year ago

For the goal of the interview - showing your knowledge and skills - you are failing miserably. People know what LLMs can do, the interview is about you.

twoparachute455• 1 year ago

If you've been given the problem of "without using AI, answer this question", and you use an AI, you haven't solved the problem.

The ultimate question that an interview is trying to answer is not "can this person solve this equation I gave them?", it's usually something along the lines of "does this person exhibit characteristics of a trustworthy and effective employee?". Using AI when you've been asked not to is an automatic failure of trust.

This isn't new or unique to AI, either. Before AI people would sometimes try to look up answers on Google. People will write research papers by looking up information on Wikipedia. And none of those things are wrong, as long as they're done honestly and up front.

dahart10• 1 year ago

Interviews aren’t about solving problems. The interviewer isn’t interested in a problem’s solution, they’re interested in seeing how you get to the answer. They’re about trying to find out if you’ll be a good hire, which notably includes whether you’re willing and interested in spending effort learning. They already know how to use AI, they don’t need you for that. They want to know that you’ll contribute to the team. Wanting to use AI probably sends the wrong message, and is more likely to get you left out of the next round of interviews than it is to get you called back.

Imagine you need to hire some people, and think about what you’d want. That’ll answer your question. Do you want people who don’t know but think AI will solve the problems, or do you want people who are capable of thinking through it and coming up with new solutions, or of knowing when and why the AI answer won’t work?

jacobsenscott2• 1 year ago

If you are pretending to have knowledge and skills you don't have you are cheating. And if you have the required knowledge and skill AI is a hindrance, not a help. You can solve the problem easily without it. So "is using ai cheating"? IDK, but logically you wouldn't use AI unless you were cheating.

paxys2• 1 year ago

it's wild to me how many candidates think they can get away with it

Remember that you are only catching the candidates who are bad at cheating.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

That's fine. The ones who are "good cheaters" are probably smarter than many honest people. Think about those school days where your smartest peers were cheating anyway, despite teaching you organically earlier on. Those kinds of cheaters do it to turn an A into an A+, not because they don't understand the material.

guywithahat• 1 year ago

I mean they could be googling things; I’ve definitely googled stuff during an interview. I do think in-person interviews area important though, I did some remote final interviews with Amazon and they were all terrible

IG_Semmelweiss2• 1 year ago

I'm using AI for interview screeners for nontechnical roles that require knowledge work. The AI interviewing app is very very basic, its just a wrapper put together by an eng, with enough features to prevent cheating.

Start with recording the session and blocking right-click, and you are halfway there. Its not hard.

The AI app has helped me surface top candidates. I don't even look at resumes anymore. There's no point. I interview the top 10 out of 200, and then do my references and select.

zx8080• 1 year ago

If there's no independent verification, how do you know it's really top 10? (not middle 10, or random 10?)

cuuupid4• 1 year ago

So far 3 of the 11 people we interviewed have been clearly using ChatGPT for the >>behavioral<< part of the interview (like, just chatting about background, answering questions about their experience). I find that absolutely insane, if you cannot hold a basic conversation about your life without using AI then something is terribly wrong.

We actually allow using AI in our in-person technical interviews, but our questions are worded to fail safety checks. We'll talk about smuggling nuclear weapons, violent uprising, staging a coup, manufacturing fentanyl, etc. (within the context of system design) and that gives us really good mileage on weeding out those who are just transcribing what we say into AI and reading the response.

xarope• 1 year ago

what actually happens to the interviewee? Do they suddenly go blank when they realise the LLM has replied "I'm sorry I cannot assist you with this", or they try to make something up?

dmazzoni• 1 year ago

Ha ha, that's a great idea!

I love the idea of embedding sensitive topics that ChatGPT and other LLMs will steer clear of, within the context of a coding question.

Have you ever had any candidate laugh?

Any candidates find it offensive?

soheil2• 1 year ago

llama2-uncensored to the rescue

pllbnk• 1 year ago

I think you (your company) and many other commenters here are just trying too hard.

I had just recently lead through several interview rounds for software engineering role and we have not had any issue with LLM use. What we do for the technical interview part is very simple - live whiteboarding design task where we try to identify what the candidate's focus is and might pivot at any time or dig deeper into particular topics. Sometimes, we will even go as detailed as talking about particular algorithms the candidate would use.

In general, I found that this type of interview is the most fun for both sides. The candidates don't feel pressure that they must do the only right thing as there is a lot of room for improvisation; the interviewers don't get bored with repetitive interviews over and over as new candidates come by with different perspectives. Also, there is no room for LLM use because the candidate has to be involved in drawing on the whiteboard and showing their technical presentation skills, which are very important for developers.

hn8726• 1 year ago

I find that absolutely insane, if you cannot hold a basic conversation about your life without using AI then something is terribly wrong.

I'm genuinely curious what questions you ask during the behavioral interview. Most companies ask questions like "recall a time when..." and I know people who struggle with these kinds of questions despite being good teammates, either because they find it difficult to explain the situation, or due to stress. And recruitment process is not a "basic conversation" — as a recruiter you're in far more comfortable position. I find it hard to believe anyone would use an LLM if you ask them question like "what were your responsibilities in your last role", and I do see how they might've primed the chat to help them communicate an answer to a question like "tell me about a situation when you had a conflict with your manager"

eastbound• 1 year ago

if you cannot hold a basic conversation about your life without using AI then something is terribly wrong.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of Google Docs and Gmail forcing full AI, is a generation of people who can’t even talk about themselves, and can’t articulate even a single email.

Is it necessary? Perhaps. Will it make the world boring? Yes.

hibikir5• 1 year ago

Some can be quite good at the cheating: At least good enough to get through multiple layers. I've been in hiring meetings where I was the only one of 4 rounds that caught the cheating, and they were even cheating in behaviorals. I've also been in situations with a second interviewer, where the other interviewer was completely oblivious even when it was clear I was basically toying with the guy reading from the AI, leading conversation in unnatural ways.

Detection of AI in remote interviews, behavioral and technical, just has to be taught today if you are ever interviewing people that don't come from in-network recommendations. Completely fake candidates are way too common.

topkai222• 1 year ago

I haven’t been doing that much interviewing, but in the dozen or so candidates I’ve had I don’t think a single one has tried to use AI. I almost wish they would, as then at least I’d get past the first half of the question…

aprilthird20212• 1 year ago

I'm at the same company I think. I don't get why we can't just use some software that monitors clicking away or tabbing away from the window, and just tell candidates explicitly that we are monitoring them, and looking away or tabbing away will appear suspect.

md-ayaz-me• 1 year ago

I second this. My previous company started in-person interview for this very reason.

codr7• 1 year ago

About time, testing coding skills that way was always a bad idea.

Xmd5a• 1 year ago

Shouldn't a portfolio of personal projects be enough ? In the past couple years I:

- adapted Java's Regex engine to work on streams of characters

- wrote a basic parametric geometry engine

- wrote a debugger for an async framework

- did innovative work with respect to whole-codebase transformation using macros

Among other things.

As for ChatGPT in the context of an interview, I'd only use it if I were asked to do changes on a codebase I don't know in limited time.

ganoushoreilly• 1 year ago

I think the arguments is there is no way to validate it was you that did the work. There's been too many instances of groups that do interviews for others or the work for take homes to help get people placed. There was a big deal about some H1Bs a while back where the people that showed up didn't look anything like the people that interviewed. So I understand both sides.

It's frustrating though when you've done a lot of work, as you've listed. I think in a good interview maybe going over that code and getting the chance to explain things you did, why you did, or issues you had, could also go a long way.

Interviewing is tough, more so at scale.

gray_-_wolf2• 1 year ago

Bit annoying is that when companies ask for a portfolio, they often mean GitHub. Lot of non-technical hiring people I discussed this with were confused by the fact that there are other ways to contribute, like mailing lists.

blazing2348• 1 year ago

most experienced developers don't have a portfolio because they code for a living lol

Madmallard• 1 year ago

I don't really think this is true? This might be true for developers that only work for companies and never in their own time maybe.

My portfolio site is just one of the sites on my personal website that also hosts many of my projects. It wasn't much work to setup, and it provides organization and sharing capability so there's motivation to make it anyways.

rockyj• 1 year ago

This is what I do not get. I just do not understand the technical interview process these days.

I have 20 years of experience in software development, I have hundreds of LinkedIn contacts you can check on, a dozen recommendations on LinkedIn and a dozen projects on Github, not to mention a blog and let's say a other indicators (e.g. Stackoverflow creds).

Now what exactly are people checking on? My picture is on LinkedIn and Github. Clearly I can code and have done dozens of projects. What is the point of asking me - "Do you know Kafka?", "Have you used AWS S3 and how?", "How would you build / scale a Node.js project" - these are the real questions I was asked. Yes, had you cared to look at my Github / blogs you would have seen I have done this multiple times, what are we verifying now?

I tried my best but at one point stopped caring about interviews.

nimish2• 1 year ago

If your interview process is susceptible to AI then you don't need to hire for the job. Just use an AI and prompt it.

The job you are therefore hiring for is now trivial. If it weren't, no amount of AI could pass your interview process.

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

I belive this line of thinking mistakes the result with the process, similar to assuming that the reason companies ask people to reverse a linked list is because there's an unmet market demand for list-reversal algorithms.

An interview has to be hard enough to filter those that are unqualified but also easy enough that the right person can pass with some minor preparation. If an interviewer asked me for the equivalent of production-ready code to add support for custom hardware in the Linux kernel I'd either reply with my freelance hourly rate or I'd end the interview.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

An interview has to be hard enough to filter those that are unqualified but also easy enough that the right person can pass with some minor preparation.

Yeah, ideally. Meanwhile the market evolved to asking Leetcode hards on the spot.

As usual, companies take a good concept and milk it to the point where you need to cheat or make studying leetcode your full time job to ace it. I'm not to sympathetic.

(PS yes, I've been asked to do what was essentially spec work a few times. Woudl have been smarter to reply with an invoice, but I was too tired and just said no).

blazing2348• 1 year ago

lol what

this is implying interview process actually showcases someone would be good at a job when it isnt

when has leetcode ever translated to web dev... fuckin never lol.

nimish2• 1 year ago

My point exactly.

Why do you let your interview process for web devs use leetcode?

bagels2• 1 year ago

People are sending us emails that are not just written with chatgpt, but I think they've automated the process as well, as parts of the prompt slip in.

You can see things in the emails like:

"I provided a concise, polite response from a candidate to a job rejection, expressing gratitude, a desire for feedback, and interest in future opportunities."

buggy62572• 1 year ago

Ignoring the hilarity who in their right mind is replying to job denial emails? What the hellll…

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

I for sure do, because I'm thrilled out of my mind they were polite enough to not just ghost me. I know better than to ask for feedback, or to expect any subsequent exchange, though

themanmaran• 1 year ago

On our side we've transitioned to only in person interviews.

The biggest thing I've noticed is take home challenges have lost all value. Since GPT can plausibly solve almost anything you throw at it, and it doesn't give you any indication of how the candidate thinks.

And to be fair, I want a candidate that uses GPT / Cursor / whatever tools get the job done. But reading the same AI solution to a coding challenge doesn't tell me anything about how they think or approach problems.

ghaff3• 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of take-home challenges anyway (for the most part). Anything non-trivial is a big time suck and you know some people will spend all weekend on you two hour assignment.

Sometimes you have to. In my previous analyst stint a writing sample was pretty non-negotiable unless they could oint to publicly-published material--which was much preferred. ChatGPT isn't much use there except to save some time. It's very formulaic and wouldn't pass though, honestly, some people are worse on their own.

chrisfowles• 1 year ago

From my perspective, you might be using take-home challenges incorrectly. The purpose for us is to have something that both sides are now somewhat familiar with, on which to base a technical conversation and ask questions. The actual solution delivered is a small part of the overall value.

meter2• 1 year ago

For the time being, I’ve banned LLMs in my interviews.

I want to see how the candidate reasons about code. So I try to ask practical questions and treat them like pairing sessions.

- Given a broke piece of code, can you find the bug and get it working?

- Implement a basic password generator, similar to 1Password (with optional characters and symbols)

If you can reason about code without an LLM, then you’ll do even better with an LLM. At least, that’s my theory.

I never ask trick questions. I never pull from Leetcode. I hardly care about time complexity. Just show me you can reason about code. And if you make some mistakes, I won’t judge you.

I’m trying to be as fair as possible.

I do understand that LLMs are part of our lives now. So I’m trying to explore ways to integrate them into the interview. But I need more time to ponder.

meter2• 1 year ago

Thinking out loud, here’s one idea for an LLM-assisted interview:

- Spin up a Digital Ocean droplet

- Add the candidate’s SSH key

- Have them implement a basic API. It must be publicly accessible.

- Connect the API to a database. Add more features.

- Set up a basic deployment pipeline. Could be as simple as script that copies the code from your local machine to the server.

Anything would be fair game. The goal would be to see how the candidate converses with the LLM, how they handle unexpected changes, and how they make decisions.

Just a thought.

blazing2348• 1 year ago

for the first point you better provide a jira ticket with steps to get there (;

i would just look at stack overflow for your second point lol...

_lvbh• 1 year ago

Run competitions. If you're hiring fresh grads, this is probably the best way to filter by skill. If you can use AI to beat all the other candidates that's a skill by itself. In practice, those that use AI rarely ever make it into the top 10. Add a presentation/demo as part of the criteria to filter out those with bad communication skills.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

In my industry, competitions for hire are just a front for spec work. So YMMV.

zitterbewegung• 1 year ago

I listened in to someone interviewing people since many people used AI. It's the same with googling the answer it is very obvious that someone is taking too long to get to the answer and or you can't see a separate screen. Mitigation is literally looking at the text window and seeing if they are not typing / taking too long to even make a bad implementation. There is now a problem if you allow for google since google will autogen a gemini query to solve it.

dijit• 1 year ago

I've always just tried to hold a conversation with the candidate, what they think their strengths are weaknesses are and a little probing.

This works especially well if I don't know the area they're strongest in, because then they get to explain it to me. If I don't understand it then it's a pretty clear signal that they either don't understand it well enough or are a poor communicator. Both are dealbreakers.

Otherwise, for me, the most important thing is gauging: Aptitude, Motivation and Trustworthiness. If you have these three attributes then I could not possibly give a shit that you don't know how kubernetes operators work, or if you can't invert a binary tree.

You'll learn when you need it; it's not like the knowledge is somehow esoteric or hidden.

punk_coder• 1 year ago

This is how I interview potential hires. I’ll admit I haven’t interviewed someone below a senior level in probably 10 years, so I interview someone that has a resume with experience that I can draw from. I read what they’ve worked on and just go from there. I hope I never have to submit someone to some stupid take home test or Leet Code interview.

fastily• 1 year ago

I expect in person interviews are going to be the norm soon, assuming they’re not already. For now, the challenge I give candidates causes ChatGPT to produce convoluted code that a human never would. I then ask the person to explain the code line-by-line and they’re almost never able to give a satisfactory answer

rachofsunshine• 1 year ago

We haven't seen major issues with AI with candidates on camera. The couple that have tried to cheat have done so rather obviously, and the problem we use is more about problem-solving than it is about reverse-a-linked-list.

This is borne out by results downstream with clients. No client we've sent more than a couple of people has ever had concerns about quality, so we're fairly confident that we are in fact detecting the cheating that is happening with reasonable consistency.

I actually just looked at our data a few days ago to see how candidates who listed LLMs or related terms on their resume did on our interview. On average, they did much worse (about half the pass rate, and double the hard-fail rate). I suspect this is a general "corporate BS factor" and not anything about LLMs specifically, but it's certainly relevant.

xyst• 1 year ago

If a problem can be “trivially” solved by GPT. The problem is with your interview process, not the tool. It’s wild to me that interviewers still ask candidates for senior positions leetcode type questions. Yet the actual job is for some front end or devops position.

The gap between interview and actual on job duties is very wide at many — delusional - companies.

blazing2348• 1 year ago

imagine trying to get a job doing CRUD and getting leetcode style questions.

locusofself2• 1 year ago

That is the world we live in from my experience. This is one of the reasons I decide to switch to management at 40 years old earlier this year - If I lose my job I don't really want to be grinding leetcode.

epolanski• 1 year ago

Nothing, we don't do technical interviews they are silly.

cjkdkfktmymymyy• 1 year ago

This conversation feels bizarrely tone deaf. The skill of being able to recall specific knowledge on demand is going away.

How LLMs will evaluate a skill they are making obsolete is a question I am not sure I understand.

khazhoux2• 1 year ago

That is exactly what this thread is discussing.

(You hardly needed a throwaway for this comment, though)

khazhoux2• 1 year ago

With AI making traditional coding problems trivial, tech interviews are shifting toward practical, real-world challenges, system design, and debugging exercises rather than pure algorithm puzzles. Some companies are revisiting in-person whiteboarding to assess thought processes, while others embrace AI, evaluating how candidates integrate it into their workflow. There's also a greater focus on explaining decisions, trade-offs, and collaboration. Instead of banning AI, many employers now test how effectively candidates use it while ensuring they have foundational skills. The trend favors assessing problem-solving in real work scenarios rather than just coding ability under artificial constraints.

guitheeengineer• 1 year ago

This sounds like it was generated by AI...

sweca2• 1 year ago

My company actually encourages the use of AI. My interview process was one relatively complex take home, an explanation of my solutions and thinking, then a live "onsite" (via zoom) where I had to code in front of a senior engineer while thinking aloud.

If I was incompetent, I could've shoved the problem into o1 on ChatGPT and probably solved the problems, but I wouldn't have been able to provide insight into why I made the design choices I made and how I optimized my solutions, and that would've ultimately gotten me thrown out of the candidate pool.

Aachen2• 1 year ago

What does onsite mean if it was a video call?

descendant2• 1 year ago

Just a new term used during and after COVID. It comes after the initial 'tech screen' round. They call is 'virtual onsite' sometimes. It involves giving multiple interviews in a very short duration. A positive decision in these 2-3 rounds pushes you forward to the final round with the hiring manager.

sweca2• 1 year ago

It just means a virtual onsite type interview process. Real time interviews for both skill and cultural fit.

shihab2• 1 year ago

To get an idea of just how advanced cheating tools has become, take a look here:

https://leetcodewizard.io/

I think every interviewer, hiring manager ought to know or be trained on these tools, your intuition about candidate's behaviour isn't enough. Otherwise, we will soon reach a tipping point where honest candidates will be at a severe disadvantage.

paxys2• 1 year ago

Tbh I’m very happy these tools exist. If your company wants to ask dumb formulaic leetcode questions and doesn’t care about the candidate’s actual ability then this is what you deserve. If they can automate the interview so well then they should also be able to automate the job right? Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

pydry• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's just a pity that human stupidity perpetuated leetcode as an interviewing tool to the point that AI had to kill it....

Im really happy it's finally broken though. Dumbest fad our industry ever had.

shihab2• 1 year ago

I understand this sentiment for experienced developers. It is an imperfect signal. But what is in your opinion a better signal for junior or new grads?

Every alternative I can think of is either worse, or sounds nice but impractical to implement in practice at scale.

I don’t know about you, but most interviewers out there don’t have the ability to judge the technical merit of a bullshitters’s contribution to a class or internship project in half an hour, specially if it’s in a domain interviewer has no familiarity with. And by the way, not all of them are completely dumb, they do know computer science, just perhaps not as well as an honest competitor.

forrestthewoods2• 1 year ago

Or are your interview questions not representative of what the job actually entails?

100% of all job interviews are a proxy. It is not possible to perform an interview in ~4 hours such that someone sufficiently engages in what the job “actually entails”.

A leetcode interview either is or not a meaningful proxy. AI tools either do or not invalidate the validity of that proxy.

Personally I think leetcode interview are an imperfect but relatively decent proxy. And that AI tools render that proxy invalid.

Hopefully someday someone invents a better interview scheme that can reliably and consistently scale to thousands of interviews, hundreds of hires, and dozens of interviewers. That’d be great. Alas it’s a really hard and unsolved problem!

crooked-v6• 1 year ago

I think this is the first interview cheating tool I've seen that feels morally justified to me. I wonder if it will actually change company behavior at all.

0x20cowboy• 1 year ago

The faster leetcode interviews can be completely broken to the point they are abandoned the better.

Der_Einzige• 1 year ago

Glad this exists and big +1 to the creator.

"Cheating" on leetcode is a net positive for society. Unironically.

blazing2348• 1 year ago

this is a good thing.

anyone I know who actually got a job through leetcode style in the last 2 years cheated. they would get their friends to mirror monitor and then type the answers in from chatgpt LOL

low_tech_punk2• 1 year ago

We are approaching a singularity where we actually want to hire the cheating tool, not the cheater.

dinkumthinkum2• 1 year ago

I strongly disagree. This is nothing. You can sort out if someone is using something like this to cheat. You have a conversation. You can ask conceptual questions about algorithms and time complexity and figure out their level and see how their sophistication matches their solution on the LeetCode problem or whatever. Now, if you have really bad intuition or understanding of human behavior then yeah it would probably be hard but in that case being a good interviewer is probably hopeless anyway.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

I’ve had people using AI in interviews to answer simple “get to know you” questions. People just disconnect their brain and read whatever the machine says.

gigatexal• 1 year ago

It has always been more about the application of facts or knowledge than the retrieval of facts that makes for a really good interview.

It’s better to know when to use a Linked list than how to make one (because I’d just use the one in the library).

So the candidate can prompt well good. But how much of the knowledge can they apply to a problem or are they just masters of hacker rank (sic).

But more often than not most interviewers are lazy and just use canned hacker rank style questions or if it’s not laziness it’s being too overworked to craft a really good interview.

shayarma• 1 year ago

They still find a way to make it horrible and degrading.

n0rdy• 1 year ago

Here where I live, home assignments with the follow-up tech discussion are way more common than the leetcode-like interviews. Therefore, I can't say that the process has already changed dramatically. Yes, I did review a couple of home assignments that had all the signs of being completely AI-generated. But it all became clear during the presentation of the solution, "why"-like questions, and extending the scope of the task to discuss the improvements. If the candidate could answer that, then AI was just a supplementary tool, which is great, as we also use Copilot, ChatGPT, and friends at work. If not, well, it's an obvious rejection.

It happened twice, that the candidate on the other side was clearly typing during the interview, taking a pause for a second or two, and then reading from the screen. That's very obvious as of today, but I can see how it will become a problem one day with the future AI development in terms of the speed of responses, and better voice recognition techniques (so, no typing needed).

1270018080• 1 year ago

You have to depend on your professional network to skip the BS of the modern day interview process (as an applicant and interviewer).

esafak• 1 year ago

These days I ask real-world debugging questions where the root cause is not the error on the screen. I allow LLM use as long as I see how.

In my unfortunate experience, candidates who covertly rely on LLMs also tend to have embellished resumes, so I try to root them out before asking technical questions.

donatj• 1 year ago

Oh man, I have kind of hunkered down and not interviewed anywhere since the start of COVID. I had not even thought about how AI might affect things let alone people not being in office.

Last time I interviewed I spent about half of it standing at a whiteboard.

mattbillenstein• 1 year ago

I've only done a few interviews the past couple years, but I've asked people to turn off coding assistants and not use an LLM on my coding screen. I want to know how _they_ think and solve problems, not how the LLM does.

And generally, the more junior people are just completely lost without it. They've become so dependent on it, they can't even google anything anymore. Their search queries are very weirdly conversational questions and the idea of reading the docs for whatever language or library they're using is totally foreign to them.

I think it's really hampering the growth of junior devs - their reasoning and thought processes are just totally tuned to this conversational form of copy and paste programming, and the code is really bad. I think the bottom half of programmers may just LLM themselves out of any sort of job because they lose the ability to think and problem solve... Kinda sad imo.

politician• 1 year ago

It was obvious from the moment ChatGPT went live that this was going to intellectually stunt junior developers.

skeptrune• 1 year ago

I have been asking people questions about git a lot. It's useful to figure out whether or not they care about the craft.

sramam2• 1 year ago

I recently completed a take-home assignment with the following instructions:

This project is designed to evaluate your ability to:

  - Deconstruct complex problems into actionable steps.
  - Quickly explore and adopt new frameworks.
  - Implement a small but impactful proof of concept (PoC).
  - Demonstrate coding craftsmanship through clean, well-architected code.

We estimate this project will take approximately 5–7 hours. If you find that it requires more time, let us know so we can adjust the scope.

Feel free to use any tools, libraries, frameworks, or LLMs during this exercise. Also, you’re welcome to reach out to us at any time with questions or for clarification.

</instructions>

I used LLM-as-a-junior-dev to generate 95+% of the code and documentation. I'm just an average programmer, but tried to set a bar that if I was on the other side of the table, I'd hire anyone who demonstrated the quality of output submitted.

  - The 5-7 hour estimate was exceeded (however, I was the first one through this exercise). 
  - IMHO the quality of the submission could NOT have been met in lesser time.
  - They had 3 tasks/projects:
     - a data science project, 
     - a CLI based project and
     - a web app
  - They wanted each to be done in a different language. 
  - I submitted my solution <38 hours of receipt of the assignment. 
  - In any other world, the intensity of this exercise would cause a panic-attack/burn-out. 
  - I slept well (2 nights of sleep), took care of family responsibilities and felt good enough to attack the next work-day.

I've been on both sides of the table of many interviews.

This was by far the most fun and one to replicate every chance I get.

[EDITS]: Formatting and typos.

johnnyanmac26• 1 year ago

5-7 hour interview take homes is already a nightmare. LLM assistance or not, I would absolutely not bother with such an assignment unless I was far into the process. Meanwhile, I'm given such tasks half the time before I speak to any human.

sramam2• 1 year ago

That is a fair point.

This was the final technical screen so definitely something worth doing in my case.

The reason I posted a reply was there is a lot of negativity around AI in the hiring process. This was an excellent example of using AI to the benefit of all parties.

Instead of nit-picking on stylistic things from a smaller code-sample, one can nit-pick on the implemented complexity. I think it is a higher quality signal.

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

I recently did an interview that that involved making pull requests for code updates across a time period

That seemed to thwart AI use, at least thwart one-shotting, and require understanding and experience with working in an organization

I liked that

Aachen2• 1 year ago

What does that even mean? Trickling in changes you want to make via multiple pull requests, spaced across days or months or whatever, instead of submitting it at once?

yieldcrv3• 1 year ago

across a few hours but, yes, exactly that

Perenti• 1 year ago

Can I hallucinate answers in an interview, and have them rated as acceptable?

MathMonkeyMan2• 1 year ago

Yes, it's called lying effectively.

WatchDog• 1 year ago

The last interview I ran was back when copilot came out.

My company at the same had been using the same coding exercise for years, and many candidates inevitably published their code to github, so copilot was well trained on the exercise.

I had a candidate that used copilot, still flubbed the interview, while ignoring perfectly good suggestions from the LLM.

_sword• 1 year ago

Even before LLMs were popularized, the shift to remote work made hiring awful in my experience. In finance roles, I had candidates who aced their tests and projects but then showed up to the job unable to competently use excel or write coherent sentences in English. Phone / zoom interviews all went fine, but clearly there was rampant cheating during remote projects.

DustinBrett4• 1 year ago

"when problems are trivially solvable by GPT" only the fake leet code ones that were never really what you'd do at work anyway. Sadly that is what people are giving devs in interviews.

Screen share to avoid cheating via AI, same as we were doing before AI when people could get friends or Google to help them cheat.

tzury• 1 year ago

Google. StackOverflow. ChatGPT/Claude et al. Those are all tools. Tools of the craft, so a professional candidate should be using it proficiently.

How good one is in understanding a problem (the scope and source), and how good are they at designing a solution that is simple, yet will tackle other "upcoming" problems (configurable vs hard coded, etc).

This is what one should care about.

* StackOverflow early days raised the same question, and so were Google. trust me. I am old enough to remember this.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

We now consider the employees that we hired prior to the arrival of AI to be the equivalent of “low background steel”. They have much stronger job security.

Everyone hired after that is more suspect, and if they screw up too much or don’t perform well we just fire them quickly during the probation period, whereas previously it was rare for people to get fired during the probation period.

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

> now when problems are trivially solvable by GPT.

Only the trivial problems. We don't use AI during interviews but many try and it's always obvious. Delay after any question problem; textbook perfect initial answer; absolutely nothing when asked to go deeper on a specific dimension.

It's nice because interviews that are scheduled for an hour are only lasting ~20 minutes in these situations, and we can cut them short.

EGreg• 1 year ago

I mean, it could be really bad

Online, you don't know if the person you're interviewing is an AI or not.

They could have an AI resume, AI persona, AI profile, and then someone shows up who looks like that and it could be a deepfake, then they do the coding challenges, and then you hire the person remotely, and they continue to do great work with the AI, but actually this person doesn't exist, they just created 100 such people and they're just AI agents.

It sucks if you want to hire humans. And it sucks for the humans. But the work gets done for the same price and more reliably. So dunno

fsloth• 1 year ago

Trick problems and whiteboarding was always “jump through the hoops” bs IMHO.

In-person dialogue with multiple team members and sufficiently complex take-home assignment remains a pretty good method. LLM are excellent API docs and should not be avoided.

RomanPushkin• 1 year ago

One must not forget that cheaters are now everyone, and it's likely you gonna be interviewed by a cheater. I've seen this multiple times already, recent is Meta interview ~8 months ago. Very low quality interviewer - complained about bug in the code, while there was no bug. Can't keep the conversation going, the same for system design - poor guy didn't even want to listen, and was pretty much rude.

I would say that if it wasn't a pattern. So let's not pretend they're not cheaters. Call them out.

prakhar897• 1 year ago

I interviewed a while back and wrote about it here: https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/ai-is-the-reason-intervi...

The kind of core conclusion is that companies need to do in person interviews now. There's no other way to prevent cheating.

topkai222• 1 year ago

I’m trying something new on my next interview- I’ve had an LLM solve a coding problem and I’ve uploaded the output to github, I’m going to ask the candidate to evaluate the generated code adapt it to new technical and non functional requirements.

madduci• 1 year ago

Do people still insist on coding tasks? Why don't simply formulate questions that await a broader and deeper knowledge of things, which helps to know how far the candidate can go?

And for questions, I don't mean "it's better a list or a set?", but something like: "you have an application like this, how can you improve it to perform X?"

edanm2• 1 year ago

Because most people who've been involved in tech interviewing have arrived at the same conclusion - these kinds of questions are too easy for candidates to answer in ways that make them appear great, while they can't actually program.

mrweasel2• 1 year ago

People still cheat, or try to. Some of our interviewers have seen candidates start out the interview being completely unable to answer the most basic questions about a programming language, only to flip around a few moments later and give almost encyclopaedic answers, with release dates for specific feature and comment on implementation details. One minute you can't do array slicing and now you're able to talk about the inner workings of the garbage collector?

We're trying to be fair in hiring, every resume is manually read, interviews a conversations, there are no leet code, no tricks, no AI screening, but they are done remote and so far two out of three candidate clearly cheat, during a live interview, to cover up an impressive lack of general knowledge.

andoveragain• 1 year ago

everyone

Who is everyone?

low_tech_punk2• 1 year ago

I'm actually glad AI use is revealing misalignment:

If the AI is so good at it, why are we still hiring human to do the job? It just shows how the interview process is not measuring the right thing to start with.

dinkumthinkum2• 1 year ago

I don’t really see why it’s so hard to interview someone remotely because of AI or speech to text. I’m not aware of any system that is so advanced or fast enough that having a video call and decent conversation skills and carefully listening to the candidate can’t identify 99.99% of people using AI. Even without video, it’s no hard to have a conversation and guage their skill level and ask questions and listen to the answers carefully. You can tell when the conversation is not fluid or the answe given is at a level that is a mismatch with their apparent sophistication. You can ask an unreasonably obscure or difficult question and see if you get an LLM answer. You can suss it out. You don’t have to do in-person interviews.

fhd27• 1 year ago

The last time I've used a leet code style interview was in 2012, and it resulted in a bad hire (who just happened to have trained on the questions we used). I've hired something like 150 developers so far, and what I ended up with after a few years of trial and error:

1. Use recruiters and network: Wading through the sheer volume of applications was even nasty before COVID, I don't even want to imagine what it's like now. A good recruiter or a recommendation can save a lot of time.

2. Do either no take home test, or one that takes at most two hours. I do discuss the solution candidates came up with, so as long as they can demonstrate they know what they did there, I don't care too much how they did it. If I do this part, it's just to establish some base line competency.

3. Put the candidate at ease - nervous people don't interview well, another problem with non-trivial tasks in technical interviews. I rarely do any live coding, if I do, it's pairing and for management roles, to e.g. probe how they manage disagreement and such. But for developers, they mostly shine when not under pressure, I try to see that side of them.

4. Talk through past and current challenges, technical and otherwise. This is by far the most powerful part of the interview IMHO. Had a bad manager? Cool, what did you do about it? I'm not looking for them having resolved whatever issue we talk about, I'm trying to understand who they are and how they'd fit into the team.

I've been using this process for almost a decade now, and currently don't think I need to change anything about it with respect to LLMs.

I kinda wish it was more merit based, but I haven't found a way to do that well yet. Maybe it's me, or maybe it's just not feasible. The work I tend to be involved in seems way too multi faceted to have a single standard test that will seriously predict how well a candidate will do on the job. My workaround is to rely on intuition for the most part.

fhd27• 1 year ago

To add: I can very well imagine this process isn't suitable for FAANG, so I can understand their university exam style approach to a degree. It's easy to arm chair criticise, but I don't know if I could come up with something better at their scale. These days, I'm mostly engaged by startups to help them build an initial team, I acknowledge that's different from what a lot of other folks hire for.

mnky9800n2• 1 year ago

Is your job consulting for hiring technical positions?

adastra224• 1 year ago

Why not? Plenty of large organizations hire this way. My first employer is bigger than any FAANG company by head count, and they hired this way. Why is big tech different?

kamaal3• 1 year ago

>Do either no take home test, or one that takes at most two hours. I do discuss the solution candidates came up with, so as long as they can demonstrate they know what they did there, I don't care too much how they did it. If I do this part, it's just to establish some base line competency.

The biggest problem with the take home tests are not people who don't show up due to not being able to finish the assignment, But that those people who do, now expect to get hired.

95% people don't finish the assignment. 5% do. Teams think submitting the assignment with 100% feature set, unit test cases, onsite code review and onsite additional feature implementation still shouldn't mean a hire(If not anything, there are just not enough positions to fill). From the candidate's perspective, its pointless to spend a week working and doing every thing the hiring team asked for and still receive a 'no'.

I think if you are not ready to pay 2x - 5x market comp you shouldn't use take home assignments to hire people. There is too much work to do, and receive a reject at the end. Upping the comp absolutely makes sense as working a week to get a chance at earning 3x more or so makes sense.

Fr3dd12• 1 year ago

We did a lot of these assignments and no one assumed that they will be hired if they complete it. Its about how you communicate your intent. I always told the candidates, that the goal of the task is 1. to see some code and if some really basic stuff is on point and 2. that you can argue with someone about his or her code.

mavhc• 1 year ago

If you're expecting a week's worth of work from them you'd better pay them for their time, if they turn up.

wkat4242• 1 year ago

From the candidate's perspective, its pointless to spend a week working and doing every thing the hiring team asked for and still receive a 'no'.

Uhhh yeah. That would really piss me off. Like reviewbombing glassdoor type of pissed.

sage76• 1 year ago

Most of the time, those take home tests cannot be done in 2 hours. I remember one where I wasn't even done with the basic setup in 2 hours, installing various software/libraries and debugging issues with them.

Stratoscope14• 1 year ago

When I was interviewing candidates at IBM, I came up with a process I was really happy with. It started with a coding challenge involving several public APIs, in fact the same coding challenge that was given to me when I interviewed there.

What I added:

1. Instead of asking "do you have any questions for me?" at the very end, we started with that general discussion.

2. A few days ahead, I emailed the candidate the problem and said they are welcome to do it as a take home problem or we could work on it together. I let them know that if they did it ahead of time, we would do a code review and I would ask them about their design and coding choices. Or if they wanted to work on it together, they should consider it a pair programming session where I would be their colleague and advisor. Not some adversarial thing!

3. This the innovation I am proud of: a segment at the beginning of the interview called "teach me something". In my email I asked the candidate to think of something they would like to teach me about. I encouraged them to pick a topic unrelated to our work, or it could be programming related if they preferred that. Candidates taught me things like:

• How to choose colors of paint to mix that will get the shade you want.

• How someone who is bilingual thinks about different topics in their different languages.

• How the paper bill handler in an ATM works.

• How to cook pork belly in an air fryer without the skin flying off (the trick is punching holes in the skin with toothpicks).

I listed these in more recent emails as examples of fun topics to teach me about. And I mentioned that if I were asked this question, I might talk about how to tune a harmonica, and why a harmonica player would want to do that

This was fun for me and the candidate. It helped put them at ease by letting them shine as the expert in some area they had a special interest in.

asalahli• 1 year ago

Love the 3rd point! I might start using that in my future interviews

vanceism7_5• 1 year ago

That sounds really cool. I wish I was running into more job interviews like the one you describe. The adversarial interviewing really hurts the entire feel of the process

radium_raven• 1 year ago

In my email I encouraged the candidate to teach me something unrelated to our work, or programming related if they preferred that.

What if I decide to teach you something about the Quran and you don't hire me?

Perhaps this is just urban legend but from the stories I've heard hiring for FAANG-type companies there are people out there interviewing with their only goal being baiting you into a topic they can sue you over.

Worst instance I have heard of is when an interviewer asked about the books the candidate liked to read (since the candidate said they're an avid reader in their resume) and he just said that he liked to read the Bible. After not getting hired for failing the interviews he accused the company of religious discrimination.

I'm by no means an expert in US law and don't know the people this happened to directly so maybe it's just one big fantasy story but it doesn't seem that far fetched that

- If you are a rich corporation then people will look to bait you into a lawsuit

- If you give software engineers (or any non-lawyers) free rein on how to conduct interviews then some of them can be baited into a situation that the company could be sued over way more easily than a rigid leetcode interview

I think nothing came of the fellow who liked reading the Bible but I would imagine the legal department has a say in what kind of interview process a rich company can and can not use.

biztos4• 1 year ago

What, what? Harmonicas are tunable? TIL...

rvba2• 1 year ago

This post is some unintentional satire how IBM operates (nobody invents anything in IBM anymore).

The opening question is a copy of what was done before (probably by someone who doenst work at IBM anymore) and all the new stuff is stolen from outsiders.

roenxi4• 1 year ago

(3) is biasing the process strongly in favour of people who spin a good story. If you're looking for a certain team culture then OK but this is going to neatly screen out anyone who just wants to do their job well and doesn't particularly know how to sell the extra-curriculars they have.

DrNosferatu2• 1 year ago

Really nice!

I wish more bosses were like you.

snickerer2• 1 year ago

I immediately want to learn about all these cool things you listed.

I work as a developer and as an interviewer (both freelance). Now I want to integrate your point 3. into my interviews, but not to choose better candidates, just to learn new stuff I never thought about before.

It is your fault that I see now this risk in my professional life, coming at me. I could get addicted to "teach me something". 'Hey candidate, we have 90 minutes. Just forget about that programming nonsense and teach me cool stuff'

herval• 1 year ago

very thoughtful idea!

martypitt• 1 year ago

Kudos to you - this sounds like a fantastic interview format.

I especially like that you're prepping them very clearly in advance, giving them every opportunity to succeed, and clearly setting a tone of collaboration.

In person design and coding challenges are a pressure cooker, and not real-world. However, giving people the choice, seems like a great way to achieve the balance.

Honestly, I'm really just commenting here so that this shows up in my history, so I can borrow heavily from this format next time I need to interview! :) Thanks again for sharing.

chucksmash• 1 year ago

"Teach me something" is how the test prep companies would interview instructors. Same idea—have a candidate explain a topic they are totally comfortable with—but they were more focused how engaging the lesson was, how the candidate handled questions they didn't expect, etc. moreso than I expect you would if you use this in a IC coding interview. It's a neat idea though, I can imagine lots of different ways it would be handy.

ddingus6• 1 year ago

I spent a decade and change doing adult instruction in CAD. Early on, many were still transitioning off 2d hand drawings. Boy, was that an art! I got to do a few the very old school way and have serious respect for the people who can produce a complex assembly drawing that way. Same for many shapes that may feature compound curves, for example.

But I digress!

Asking them what they wanted or would teach me was very illuminating and frankly, fun all around! I was brought a variety of subjects and not a single one was dull!

Seems I had experiences similar to yours.

One of my questions was influenced by someone who I respected highly asking, "what books are on your shelf at home?"

This one almost always brought out something about the candidate I would have had no clue about otherwise. As time advanced, it became more about titles because fewer people maintain a physical book shelf!

rrrx3• 1 year ago

I love this. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to steal it for when I am back in the saddle interviewing folks. We need much more of this and a lot less of the adversarial BS.

chipsrafferty• 1 year ago

Are you still interviewing?

axegon_2• 1 year ago

I feel like take home tests are meaningless and I always have. Even more so now with LLMs, though 9/10 times you can tell if it's an LLM-people don't normally put trivial comments in the code such as

// This line prevents X from happening

I've seen a number of those. The issue here is that you've already wasted a lot of time with a candidate.

So being firmly against take home tests or even leetcode, I think the only viable option is a face to face interview with a mixture of general CS questions(i.e. what is a hashmap, benefits and drawbacks, what is a readers-writer lock, etc) and some domain specific questions: "You have X scenario(insert details here), which causes a race condition, how do you solve it."

throwaway20375• 1 year ago

    > I feel like take home tests are meaningless and I always have. Even more so now with LLMs

This has been discussed many times already here. You need to set an "LLM trap" (like an SSH honey trap) by asking the candidate to explain the code they wrote. Also, you can wait until the code review to ask them how they would unit test the code. Most cheaters will fall apart in the first 60 seconds. It is such an obvious tell. And if they used an LLM, but they can very well explain the code, well, then, they will be a good programmer on your team, where an LLM is simply one more tool in their arsenal.

I am starting to think that we need two types of technical interview questions: Old school (no LLMs allowed) vs new school (LLMs strongly encouraged). Someone under 25 (30?) is probably already making great use of LLMs to teach themselves new things about programming. This reminds me of when young people (late 2000s/early 2010s) began to move away from "O'Reilly-class" (heh, like a naval destroyer class) 500 page printed technical books to reading technical blogs. At first, I was suspicious -- essentially, I was gatekeeping on the blog writers. Over time, I came to appreciate that technical learning was changing. I see the same with LLMs. And don't worry about the shitty programmers who try to skate by only using LLMs. Their true colours will show very quickly.

Can I ask a dumb question? What are some drawbacks of using a hash map? Honestly, I am nearly neck-bearded at this point, and I would be surprised by this question in an interview. Mostly, people ask how do they work (impl details, etc.) and what are some benefits over using linear (non-binary) search in an array.

dheera2• 1 year ago

If you are evaluating how well people code without LLMs you are likely filtering for the wrong people and you are way behind the times.

For most companies, the better strategy would be to explicitly LET them use LLMs and see whether they can accomplish 10X what a coder 3 years ago could accomplish, in the same time. If they accomplish only 1X, that's a bad sign that they haven't learned anything in 3 years about how to work faster with new power tools.

A good analogy of 5 years ago would be forcing candidates to write in assembly instead of whatever higher level language you actually use in your work. Sure, interview for assembly if that's what you use, but 95% of companies don't need to touch assembly language.

vanceism7_5• 1 year ago

Wow, that was a great write up. Can I interview with you? Lol, everything you wrote was really spot on with my own interview experiences. I tend to get super nervous during interviews and have choked up on many interviews asking for live coding on crazy algorithm problems. It state of hiring seems to be really bad right now. But I'll take your advice and try to get in contact with some recruiters

throwaway20375• 1 year ago

    > Put the candidate at ease - nervous people don't interview well

This is great advice. I have great success with it. I give the same 60 second speech at the start of each interview. I tell candidates that I realise that tech interviews are stressful -- "In 202X, the 'tech universe' is infinitely wide and deep. We can always find something that you don't know. If you don't have experience in a topic that we raise, let us know. We will move to a new topic. All, yes, all people that we interviewed had at least one topic where they had no experience, or none recent." Also, it helps to do "interview ramp-up", where you start with some very quick wins to build up confidence with the candidate. It is OK to tell them "I will push a bit harder here" so they know you are not being a jerk... only trying to dig deeper on their knowledge.

dmoy• 1 year ago

Putting candidate at ease is definitely important.

Another reason:

If you're only say one of four interviewers, and you're maybe not the last interviewer, you really want the candidate to come out of your interview feeling like they did well or at least ok enough, so that they don't get tilted for the next interview. Because even if they did really poorly in your interview, maybe it's a fluke and they won't fail the rest of the loop.

Which is then a really difficult skill as an interviewer - how do you make sure someone thinks they do well even if they do very poorly? Ain't easy if there's any technical guts in the interview.

I sure as shit didn't get any good at that until I'd conducted like 100+ interviews, but maybe I'm just a slow learner haha

biztos4• 1 year ago

As someone with a pretty long career already, and who's comfortable talking about it, I was a bit surprised that in three interviews last year nobody asked a single thing about any of my previous work. One was live coding and tech trivia, the other two were extensive take-home challenges.

To their credit, I think they would have hired "the old guy" if I'd aced their take-homes, but I was a bit rusty and not super thrilled about their problem areas anyway so we didn't get that far. And honestly it seems like a decent system for hiring well-paid cogs in your well-oiled machine for the short term.

Your method sounds like what we were trying to do ten years ago, and it worked pretty well until our pipeline dried up. I wish you, and your candidates, continued success with it: a little humanity goes a long way these days.

palerdot• 1 year ago

So, did you find a company that you are happy with (interviewing or otherwise)? I would be really interested to know how you are dealing with tech landscape changes lately, and your plans for staying in tech ...

Wishing you all the best for your career!

jkaplowitz3• 1 year ago

How does that process handle people who have been out of work for a few years and can pass a take-home technical challenge (without a LLM) but cannot remember a convincing level of detail on the specifics of their past work? I’ve been experiencing your style of interview a lot and running up against this obstacle, even though I genuinely did the work I’m claiming to have done.

Especially people with ADHD don’t remember details as long as others, even though ADHD does not make someone a bad hire in this industry (and many successful tech workers have it).

I do prefer take-home challenges to live coding interviews right now, or at least a not-rushed live coding interview with some approximate advance warning of what to expect. That gives me time to refresh my rust (no programming language pun intended) or ramp up on whichever technologies are necessary for the challenge, and then to complete the challenge well even if taking more time than someone who is currently fresh with the perfectly matched skills might need. I want the ability to show what I can do on the job after onboarding, not what I can do while struggling with long-term unemployment, immigration, financial, and family health concerns. (My fault for marrying a foreigner and trying to legally bring her into the US, apparently.)

And, no, my life circumstances do not make it easy for me to follow the common suggestion of ramping up in my “spare time” without the pressures of a job or a specific interview task. That’s completely different from when I can do on the job or for a specific interview’s technical challenge.

fhd27• 1 year ago

I can't say I've interviewed someone to which this applies - unfortunately! Probably just doesn't get surfaced by my channels.

I would definitely not expect someone out of work for a while to have any meaningful side projects. I mean, if they do, that's cool, but I bet the sheer stress of not having a job kills a lot of creativity and productivity. Haven't been there, so I can only imagine.

For such a candidate, I'd probably want to offer them a time limited freelance gig rather quickly, so I can just see what they work like. For people who are already in a job, it's more important to ensure fit before they quit there, but your scenario opens the door to not putting that much pressure on the interview process.

sbarre4• 1 year ago

This is slightly tangential to your questions, but to address the "remembering details about your past work", I've long-encouraged the developers I mentor to keep a log/doc/diary of their work.

If nothing else, it's a useful tool when doing reviews with your manager, or when you're trying to evaluate your personal growth.

It comes in really handy when you're interviewing or looking for a new job.

Julia Evans calls it a "brag doc": https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

It doesn't have to be super detailed either. I tell people to write 50% about what the work was, and 50% about what the purpose/value of the work was.. That tends to be a good mix of details and context.

Writing in it once a month, or once a sprint, is enough. Even if it's just a paragraph or two..

apercu3• 1 year ago

Just a suggestion, but I have done 3-5 projects a year for a long, long time, and as an executive (for almost a decade) had dozens of projects annually I was overseeing and/or contributing to. I am not a fan of LinkedIn, but I did eventually start logging at least some of the projects I do in their "projects" section. That helps me remember and revisit some of the projects, and when you go back 10 years later it's sort of joyful walk down memory lane sometimes.

joshvm2• 1 year ago

I’ve done the “at home” test for ML recently for a small AI consulting firm. It's a nice approach and got me to the next round, but the way the company evaluated it was to go through the questions and ask "fundamental ML bingo" questions. I don't think I had a single discussion about the company in the entire interview process. I was told up front "we probably won't get to the third question because it will take time to discuss theory for the first two".

If you're a company that does this, please dog food your problems and make sure the interview makes the effort feel valued. It also smells weird if you claim it's representative of a typical engineering discussion. We all know that consultancy is wrangling data, bad data and really bad data. If you're arguing over what optimiser we're choosing I'd say there's better ways to waste your customer's money.

On the other hand I like leetcode interviews. They're a nice equalizer and I do think getting good at them improves your coding skill. The point is to not ask ludicrously obscure hard problems that need tricks. I like the screen share + remote IDE. We used Code which was nice and they even had tests integrated so there wasn't the whiteboard pressure to get everything right in your head. You also know instantly if your solution works and it's a nice confidence if you get it first try, plus you can see how candidates would actually debug, etc.

neilv2• 1 year ago

2. Do either no take home test, or one that takes at most two hours. I do discuss the solution candidates came up with, so as long as they can demonstrate they know what they did there, I don't care too much how they did it. If I do this part, it's just to establish some base line competency.

You need to do this to establish some baseline competency... for junior hires with no track record?

silverlake• 1 year ago

If they pass step 2, the first technical interview is to extend the solution to add/modify features.

giantg2• 1 year ago

"Use recruiters and network: "

Recruiters have been notoriously bad in my experience. Relying on network has the potential to create bias and avoid good candidates that simply don't have an "in".

coldtrait• 1 year ago

Are you hiring now?

hnlurker22• 1 year ago

I would never show an interviewer how I code. Let alone allow them to give me 2 hours to solve a problem. It's contradicting that you know that developers "mostly shine when not under pressure", yet you set 2 hours to solve a problem (Sounds like you don't want to pay them for the take home). The positive feedback you're getting for your flawed process just shows how worse other, more common, recruiters are.

bilekas2• 1 year ago

I've given a few interviews with take home screening small projects that I have been able to identify very quickly were majority generated, I usually don't mind it too much but when I asked why they chose certain patterns or why they went with their approach they couldnt give any "true" answer a week later.

I feel that smaller things like syntax etc make perfect sense. But for larger things that involve a slightly higher complexity it becomes a bit grey. I likenit personally to writing. When I write things down as I'm trying to work things out or even trying to learn something I find I retain the data so much better and have a better picture in my mind of what's going on. That might just be personal preference for learning but if I copy straight from claud I know 100% I'm not going to remember anything about it the next day.

VPenkov• 1 year ago

My employer sends a take-home test. It is relatively easy and not very time-consuming. Its main purpose is to act as a basic filter and to provide some material to base an interview on.

In the recent couple of years I have seen a lot more people ace the test and not do very well during the actual interview. Take-home exams feel like they would always be ineffective now.

fergie• 1 year ago

In my experience the real objective of the take home exercise is to gauge how compliant the candidate is, and how many obligations they have outside of work. Otherwise it always makes more sense to conduct simple, in-person assessments.

qq66• 1 year ago

Why do you have to evaluate the person without AI? Unless they won't be able to use AI on the job (for security reasons or whatever) it seems like it makes more sense to have them pull up their favorite AI and use it to solve a problem. Give them some buggy code and ask them to fix it with any tools they want.

mr90210• 1 year ago

Some recruiters have tried to record our initial interview with one of those services that automatically captures notes. I REFUSED.

anothernewdude• 1 year ago

I make it clear on my resume that I won't work for companies that use AI in their hiring processes.

alkonaut• 1 year ago

It's not the solution itself that is interesting to me, it's first finding out whether the person can go through the motions of solving it. Like reading instructions, submitting solutions etc. It filters out those who can't code at all or who can't read instructions. A surprisingly large chunk. If the person also pipes the problem through an LLM, good.

To then select a good developer I'd test communication skills. Have them communicate what the pros/cons of several presented solutions are. And have them critique their own solution. To ensure they don't have canned answers, I might just swap the problem/solutions for the in-person bit. The problem they actually solved and how they did it isn't very important. It's whether they could read and understand the problem, formulate multiple solutions, describe why one would be chosen over another. Being presented with a novel problem and being asked on the spot to analyze it is a good exercise for developers (Assuming software development is the job we're discussing here).

Just take the time to talk to people. The job is about reading and writing human language more than computer programming. Especially with the arrival of AI when every junior developer is now micro managing even more junior AI colleagues.

yodsanklai• 1 year ago

You can always interview in person. This has often been the norm, after some initial screening. I think it's the best option.

Even remotely, normally a coding interview isn't a candidate typing things for 45 min on a screen. There are interactions, follow-up questions, discussions about trade-offs and so on... I suppose it's possible for a good candidate to cheat and get some extra points, but the interview isn't broken yet.

You could also let the candidate use AI, and still gather all the relevant signals.

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

The coding interview I designed back in 2022 is still out of reach of all LLMs on the market while still being good at selecting people (I hired 6 people with it, all of them where great fit, out of 30ish applications so it doesn't seem to have a high false-negative rate either).

The main takeaway is that if you make design your interview questions to match the actual skill you're looking for, AI won't be an issue because it doesn't have those skills yet. In short: ask questions that are straightforward in surface but deep beneath with trade-offs that must be weighted by asking questions to in interviewer.

nathias• 1 year ago

the biggest change I've seen as a remote dev is considerably less replies to my non-AI made cv, I think the competition for cheap labor got much harsher

johnnguyen-etsy• 1 year ago

CoolCold• 1 year ago

not a problem yet - we still start asking hard question first - on differences on TCP and UDP and which one is better and why - very deep rabbit whole I must say. Then simple questions - how do you manage k8s clusters and what you suggest for multi DC setups

shafkathullah• 1 year ago

it makes sense, because interview questions often lack novelty, it's usually very repeated, and almost all AI is very good at these, i think asking to switch of AI and doing a live coding or thinking outloud is the way forward. or else just give them a sample story point and see how well they respond, if they can do it well means they can work well in the company.

ionwake• 1 year ago

PREFACE: LONG RANT

I dont know but Ill always remember the funniest thing I noticed once during my career in England..

A company called tripadvisor based in a very very small town where I was at the time a senior dev, working on my own things, had never reached out. yet I saw their ads and finally an actual article in a newspaper, basically where they were bragging about their latest hire. Let call him Pablo, who had apparently aced every single technical interview question, and so they had hired him, after interviewing tens of people. They were so happy with their hire, the article had been based on him and the "curiosity" that they were the first company to have hired him after he had failed I think it was something like 50 interviews.

Obviously they couldn't believe how lucky they were to have finally found someone who could have completed all the technical tests perfectly.

Now I have nothing against Pablo, and rooted for when when I read the article. But I found it hilarious, and still do almost a decade later, that this top tier company, based in a university town with perhaps the most famous university, had not realised they had simply over fitted for someone who could answer their leetcode selection perfectly. Not only not realised this but then commissioned the article.

Eventually they reached out for an interview with me where the recruiter promised there was no test for me, then I was "surprised by one" in a room with a manager who hadnt had time to read my expection ( which is fine ), but when he walked in and saw I hadn't done it I was "walked out". The whole interview having taken less than about 10 minutes, when I was the most qualified senior developer for hundreds of miles who was available at the time. No Im honestly not tryign to brag Im just saying the town was so small there just couldnt have been more during that short time period I was available.

I know this reads bitter,( my life is great now ) , I just remember it because, my point was at the time I was at my peak, and would have accepted the job if offered, but I was walked out within 10 mins.

Honestly just sharing this insight, the moral of the story I think for me is companies never were great hiring and well if anything the advent of LLMs might actually improve as LLMs start to assess people based on their profiles and work? One can hope, I dont, I want an edge in this market with my company.

_heimdall• 1 year ago

I went through a round of interviews the second half of last year. Interviewing felt the same as it had over the last 5 or 10 years honestly.

I had a few coding challenges, all were preinterview and submitted online or shared in a private repo. One company had an online quiz that was actually really interesting to take, the questions were all multiple choice but done really well to tease out someone's experience in a few key areas.

For what its worth I don't use LLMs and the interview loop went about as I'd expect in a tough job market.

MathMonkeyMan2• 1 year ago

I've had the same experience lately, though I think I might be getting lucky with a few of these interviews. The leetcode questions, in particular, have been softball. I do appreciate that...

joshstrange• 1 year ago

It doesn’t affect our process, we even let people use AI/LLMs on the coding test.

Just asked to add a small feature or make a small change after the present the initial code (without AI help). That makes it really easy to see who doesn’t understand the code they are presenting.

I don’t care how much AI you use if you understand the code that it writes and can build on top of it.

thih9• 1 year ago

Not everyone is using AI; and speaking as one such developer, interviewing is not fun.

sarchertech• 1 year ago

I do not understand the obsession with proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that an interviewer can code.

Not being able to code is by far the easiest failure mode to deal with and I can deal with it more quickly by looking at resumes and firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly.

What is much harder to detect is the person who gives up at the first sign of trouble. Or someone who likes to over abstract everything. Or someone who likes to spend all day nitpicking PRs.

The absolute most damaging employee is the technical tornado midlevel who has prolific output and is good at figuring out how to get PRs through the code review process.

I can only bring to begin imagine the kind of damage a person like that could do with an LLM, an inattentive manager, and a buddy willing to rubber stamp PRs.

benjiro• 1 year ago

firing people for outright lying about their abilities very quickly

I assume your from the US? The issue with firing people quickly after hiring them is:

* You need to pay whatever headhunter or other personnel that is involved. Some offer a cashback or reduced rate to find a new person, but your still out of the pocket. Do it a few too many times and the headhunter dump you.

* You just wasted a ton of time of other employees, setting up this persons accounts, social benefits, contract negotiation, training time, and more. Again, this is not free.

* Now you are back to looking for other people. You know those people that you rejected, well, the change is reduced that they will come back to your company, maybe they got hired somewhere else, maybe your rejection left a bad impression as you hired that lying person over a actually well qualified person that just did not ace the interview (happens to so many people, often because of nerves).

The trick is, to have a that person (and others in the interview process) work a few days in your company, but this is not covered by a official work contract but a interim contract (of course, you pay those people, some companies are real bastard and do not pay).

That can weed out the people that are good at lying about their skills. But to be honest, if you can not spot them during the interview stage, ...

We had people coming in for Senior positions, and their CVs looked good, they knew how to talk the talk. But when asked for some incredible basic SQL question, they fumbled so much, because they used ORMs their entire life. But loved to place SQL skills on their CV. Seen multiple of those... And so often they then switch to going after the interviewer, thinking that by attacking the interviewer before the boss, that will help them. Yea, "Senior material"...

With AI its going to be the same. People get comfortable using AI, but when you ask code questions without that AI to back them up, that skill gap will exposé themselves very fast during the actual interviews.

I love using AI because it can remove so much boilerplate / repeat / great for finding doc info but you need to know your language. If you grew up with only AI, and do not grow beyond AI to solve every issue, your nothing more but a copy/past dev (AI is just a extension of that dev type).

Or someone who likes to over abstract everything.

No no, the most annoying ones are those that come in and then want to implement everything into a style they are familiar with! Code rewrites to fit them, framework changes because they are familiar with them... Nothing more fun as hiring somebody to write Angular for 13k/month (talking almost 10 years ago), and then this person pushing Vue, to even rewriting part of the codebase into Vue. Like, we hired you with a insane salary because we are desperate for a Angular developer, if we wanted to rewrite everything to Vue, we will have hired somebody cheaper.

hyperkinetic• 1 year ago

Asking experienced engineers to do a coding test is stupid and will only give you candidates that can't think for themselves.

lordhexd• 1 year ago

Unless it’s for a senior role, why not just find the candidate you and your team can work best with? Skim through CVs and drop the first 20 an email asking them about their last team/boss or their day or to tell you the last thing they learnt. Something personal, the goal is to note their communication style. Pick 10 you feel matches the energy you want. From those 10 get 2 in the office every day for 2 weeks to see how they work with peers/competitors and your team. By the end of two weeks you should have a relatively good hire which you can work with to fit the team.

miah_• 1 year ago

I feel like I'm one of the few people who won't touch the tech for anything work related. I've used it to generate character backstories in Dungeons and Dragons, but I wouldn't trust it for anything reality based. I don't know what everybody is smoking.

acedTrex• 1 year ago

we are doing in person interviews, I just interviewed someone a few days ago that was VERY CLEARLY using chatGPT audio to cheat. You could see his eyes jumping from word to word and the things he was saying was clearly gpt output.

Its a sad world out there these days.

syrusakbary• 1 year ago

Pro tip: ask about their previous experience and go deep there. It will be impossible for the AI to generate fake experience on a user, and very easy to catch for the interviewee

bl4ckm0r3• 1 year ago

I have wrote an article a year ago about this. https://medium.com/fever-engineering/on-hiring-great-talent-...

tbh it's very hard, in general, to assess someone skills in ~1 hour, with the diverse set of problems we face everyday and people/companies often focus too much on "previous relevant experience" (do you know this?) instead of thought process and depth of understanding (how much have you understood what you have done) which, to me, gives more insights on someone personality and attitude and ability to learn new things and becomes harder to cheat on (you can memorize "cracking the code interview" and be a hero on leetcode and still have no idea about how to write good software, take decisions or work in a team :)

code_for_monkey2• 1 year ago

Ive been interviewing at start ups to get out of my contractor job, but recently I gave up.

I had this one interview where I had to remove nodes from a linkedlist. Pretty trivial, right? It is, but as I was writing out the solution, probably for the 200th time, I thought "Ive never used a linkedlist, ever"

And I thought, I just cant do it anymore. I cant reverse one single more binary tree. I cant listen to some CTO tech bro in his early 30s explain to me why I need to be in an office he'll never set foot in for the 'company culture'.

Ive had so many interviews just like this. Ive done 7 hour on sites where you break down algorithms, system design, app development. Its brutal out there, no one seems to have any idea what their looking for so they just put you through the ringer.

So now im not interviewing, Im happy and content in my bank programming job. Im probably not a very good programmer, thats okay, Im a wonderful partner, family member, musician. Ill get by, hopefully, for another decade until everything collapses.

z3phyr• 1 year ago

Who do I want to work with? A person who can work with me, get stuff done and somewhat match vibe with their coworkers. They can be good in spelling bee, swimming, chess, marathon or leetcode, its on them. I do not get much useful information out of it.

What I usually do is case study that I also do not know at the start of the interview. The case study does not imagine spherical cows and are not usually leetcode style. Its a case of role playing a problem. We brainstorm it together and I determine if I can work with them.

vanceism7_5• 1 year ago

Thats a good point. That's probably a way better way to run an interview than anything else. Back in my highschool band, our band director used to say "play how you practice, and practice how you play" - this sounds like that rule applied pretty effectively. At the end of the day, our colleagues are people we problem solve with, so we should test things like that when we're hiring

sebazzz• 1 year ago

I think it is actually more of a potential disappointment for the candidate than the employer. Because when the candidate becomes the employee, the employer will notice this person will never stick out, never stands out, and will only be handed basic tasks. Implementing basic product features. But something more difficult won’t be entrusted.

matrix87• 1 year ago

I just got done interviewing with a big tech company and a successful outcome, I really don't understand how someone could even pull that shit off in an interview. It sounds harder than just doing it the honest way

CharlieDigital• 1 year ago

About 18 months ago, I interviewed with a YC startup and the first round was actually a code review. It included an API which included some SQL commands as well as a SQL schema. I pointed out missing validations, missing error handling, lack of indices, alternate data types, possible XSS vectors, etc.

It was a really great format and I think one that creates better separation between good candidates and great candidates because it is more open-ended and collaborative. One of my favorite technical interviews I've engaged in.

I think that now, with AI coding assistants becoming even more integral than those early days 18 months ago, this approach is more relevant than ever since it gives insight into how efficiently a candidate can quickly review AI generated code for correctness, defects, performance issues, and other gaps in quality.

I liked this format so much that I ended up creating a small open-source tool for it to make it easier to manage this process: https://coderev.app (https://github.com/CharlieDigital/coderev)

(The interviewer had to create a private GH repo and the repo itself didn't support commenting inline; I took my notes in a text file and reviewed it interactively with the interviewer).

fragmede3• 1 year ago

Here's the question, here's the code ChatGPT produced, what's wrong with it, and why?

yesiamyourdad2• 1 year ago

About 20 years ago, I used to do interviews that were "write a program to add two numbers together" (I think specifically I asked for a web application). It's trivial, right? There's actually a lot going on. They have to parse input, and sometimes you get strange things like "well if I make it use doubles then I'll cover all scenarios". You have opportunities to talk about error handling (bad characters in the input, int overflow, etc). You can talk about refactoring (now make it handle -,* & /). You can ask them about writing tests. Ask about how they'd handle arbitrarily large numbers. There's a bunch of ways you could take the conversation and really just talk about average developer activites.

What I liked about that process is that it relied less on their ability to suss out a solution to some problem they'll never have to solve on the job and focused more on average activities. Sometimes I'd get a candidate who would go "wait, is this a trap?" and start asking a lot of questions - good! Now I got to see them refine requirements.

Having them review a PR is a good exercise too, you can see how they are at feedback.

koliber• 1 year ago

I've been recruiting a lot over the past 8 years. First as a manager, later as an engineering department leader, and most recently in the role of a specialize recruiter.

I've seen a few things change.

The interviews themselves are for the most part unchanged. Occasionally I see someone who seems to be using AI during the interview. It's sort of obvious. They fist give a vague answer. It's as if they repeat the question. Then they answer while not maintaining eye contact. When asked a followup or a "why" question, they fall apart. They do poorly.

I find more people pass the written screen nowadays and then bomb the interview. I'm guessing they use AI. C'est la vie.

It seems that a lot more people are looking for work now than 3+ years ago. It seems that for roles that require top-notch coding ability, there are relatively few people on the market. Im guessing that great people are staying at their jobs longer now. Makes sense.

After a candidate gives an answer, probe. Ask why they think that. Ask what alternatives they might consider. Watch their body language and how quickly they answer.

For context, I hire very experienced developers in Poland for very demanding remote roles in the US.

tharne• 1 year ago

What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

Two main things I've seen:

1. Recommendations are a heck of a lot more important

2. Internal applicants are suddenly at a big advantage

michelb• 1 year ago

I think this mainly highlights how bad interviews were in general before AI.

ciwchris• 1 year ago

This question came up on Soft Skills Engineering[1]. To cut through the noise it's more important to have a blog or a project you contribute to which you can point to. And then yes, whiteboard type of questions which unfortunately are not reflective of day to day work.

[1] https://softskills.audio/2025/02/03/episode-446-wading-throu...

andyish• 1 year ago

For tech and nontech, it's terrible.

Nontech roles are just a sea of prompt-generated answers, they don't tie into the applicants' experience and are usually about 200 words of waffle. If you're applying for something, type out a few sentences then give it to a prompt to refine. Don't just paste the question in.

Tech roles we focus on the combination of soft skills and technical skills and so we've gone back to a 'pair' programming exercise and a whiteboard architecture exercise. In reality, it's just a spectator sport that we nudge them forward if needed.

In Java looking for them to cover the basics of debugging a problem, writing a test, and mocking out some services. I would say 50% are unable to or unwilling to write a test to prove the error or don't know how to mock out a service.

Whiteboard exercise looking for them to explain a system they've worked on in the past. We question some of their decisions and see how they handle themselves. Not many get defensive (though some do).

aristofun• 1 year ago

If your interview process can be solved by AI - it only means your interview process sucks.

Which is the case for >90% of the companies I interviewed with (big and small)

nvarsj• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure the majority of people I interview (in big tech) are now cheating with some kind of assistance. Usually it's obvious, but not always. I am just plodding along though, and hoping my company moves back to on-site interviews. Alternatively, interviews need to be designed for AI assistance (e.g. much more complex problems).

Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?

Related Stories