Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/what-its-like-to-interview-a-software-engineer-preparing-with-ai/

by justswim • 1 year ago

415 700 1 year ago

theamk3• 1 year ago

An interesting story!

I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution.

Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times - the simple ones that candidates can do in reasonable time is too easy for AI, and if we do realistic system, it's too hard for honest candidates.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times

Take-home projects were never meant to be evaluated in isolation.

It was common for candidates to have their friends review the take-home or even do it for them.

You had to structure the take-home so the candidate could then explain their choices to you and walk you through their thought process. When you got a candidate who couldn't answer questions about their own submission, you thanked them for their time and sent the rejection later that evening.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

The difference is that AI can now feed them explanations as well. Their friends (who IME were usually also mediocre coders: everyone I've seen who actually did well on a take-home actually was that good) didn't have the patience to sit around and help them memorize a bunch of extra nonsense.

At some point it feels like it would be easier to just get good at programming, and yet...

Freedom2• 1 year ago

IMO take home projects still have value, provided you do a comprehensive follow-up interview with their project (which is the _actual_ interview, I feel). Those who just used AI on it are far less likely to talk about any tradeoffs, do deep dives, or even simple extensions of the project in the follow-up interview.

thefourthchime• 1 year ago

I think take home still has value, if it's of any size and they just vibe code it'll be full of long messy methods, unused variables, and lack of any thoughtful design.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

They are, if anything, a more-accurate example now of the kind of code a candidate is going to produce on the job.

If we expect people to use AI, and it is available in most companies now, then being able to appropriately refactor, test, and sense-make of AI-generated code is even more important. The key is raising the bar on quality beyond mediocre, and not relying on those take homes to test skills they are no longer testing.

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

I've had situations where I submitted a take-home exercise, only for me to get feedback that it didn't match their required level.

After some back & forth I was able to (politely) prove their feedback was not correct, which actually granted me a follow-up interview.

Unfortunately, this was a unicorn, most companies don't give feedback, let alone admit they were wrong.

But, take-home is preferred, I want to use my IDE, with my keyboard shortcuts etc.

Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.

Next to that they don't allow you to work in an environment you're comfortable in. No debugger, etc. When an HVAC company hires a new tech, do they tell him/her to do a 1.5 hour repair with only a hammer and a lighter to diagnose and fix an issue? No, it's stupid. Why do developers have to do this then?

And the same applies to live coding exercises. While there is an opportunity to explain yourself, you're still in an extremely uncomfortable environment. Why is there such an emphasis to put people in an environment where they are not set up to succeed?

loloquwowndueo2• 1 year ago

It’s like a scene in Swordfish where a hacker (Hugh Jackman) has to infiltrate a system while getting a blowjob and having a gun pointed at his head.

“If you can do the job under these constraints, imagine what you can do under optimal, normal conditions!! Hired!”

no_wizard5• 1 year ago

When an HVAC company hires a new tech

HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.

throwaway20374• 1 year ago

    > Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.

This does not mirror my experience. Many times that I have interviewed with hackerrank/leetcode questions, I wasn't able to get all of the test cases to pass. After time was up, I explained my solution to the interviewer and talked about the failing test cases. Sometimes I passed the interview; and other times not. It was not binary: Imperfect means 100% fail.

angra_mainyu• 1 year ago

Take home projects >>>>> live coding sessions, unless you're interviewing for some kind of twitch streamer position.

Just have a 1 hour or 2 hour call with candidate where you guys go through the project.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

I would never spend time doing a take home test. The best paying companies never require it, so why would I jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation on the other side?

squiffsquiff3• 1 year ago

I think the better/mature response to this cultural change is to design takehomes anticipating the use of AI and then seeing where the canddiate got lost in the weeds or gets lost when cross questoined about it

laichzeit02• 1 year ago

Don't see the point of these "take home projects". Just ask them what's the most difficult technical thing they had to do before, and have them walk you through it, probe, ask questions. If you don't like the one they talked about, ask about another one, or another one. You can generally weed out the bullshitters, they talk alot about "we" and hardly ever use "I" meaning they didn't do anything.

hackable_sand• 1 year ago

I would say "we solved this issue" if all someone did was hand me a coffee while I was debugging.

What compels you to play lingual games with peoples' livelihoods?

bitlad• 1 year ago

Sounds like all the interviews I do in india.

tandr• 1 year ago

Would you be kind and share some examples?

esafak8• 1 year ago

I've seen it more with candidates in Asia. And they claim to be based in the US :) A few even used digital face transplants, stuck in the uncanny valley, to hide it. I imagine it will be hard to tell in a few years.

squiffsquiff3• 1 year ago

I'm sure that we'll still be able to spot candidates doing the needful, and kindly reverting the same

whatamidoingyo• 1 year ago

... you do realize that India is in Asia, right?

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

It says "Prepared with AI" in the title, but the article is about someone who blatantly lied about their past experience in the interview.

The AI was used as a tool to generate false stories, but that's not what I assumed when I read the title. It's common for people to "prepare" with LLMs by having them review resumes and suggest changes, but asking an LLM to wholesale fabricate things for you is something else entirely.

I do think this experience will become more common, though. There's an attitude out there that cheating on interviews is fair or warranted as retaliation for companies being bad at interviewing. In my experience, the people who embrace cheating (with or without LLMs) either end up flaming out of interview processes or get disappointed when they land a job and realize the company that couldn't catch their lies was also not great at running a business.

ChicagoBoy112• 1 year ago

I had interpreted it as some of the answers being given during the interview had been generated by an LLM, which then choked when it was met with a more sophisticated query of how several of the answers connected together. Was this not the case?

inertiatic• 1 year ago

I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks.

Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on to another topic.

mathgeek7• 1 year ago

Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.

madeofpalk4• 1 year ago

The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.

neilv9• 1 year ago

What might have happened is that AI tools helped them fabricate, maybe including one or more of:

* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.

* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.

* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.

myself2482• 1 year ago

It sounded like the candidate froze mid-interview to ask the AI to provide more detail about the things it'd already fabricated.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

I guess they will have to get the AI to listen in on the call next time.

foobahify3• 1 year ago

My memory had held back my career I am sure. I can't regurgitate the minute details of impact I did even 12 months ago, just broad strokes... so I prep as best I can but it probably sounds like I am lying. Now with AI and everyone is suspicious it is worse. Got downleveled to 4yoe level yoe from where I am 20yoe but I needed a job so.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

It’s called a career document or a brag document. I update mine every quarter. It’s a detailed summary of the projects I worked on in STAR format including challenges I faced.

alabastervlog4• 1 year ago

I have what probably qualifies as the relatively-recently-named "severely deficient autobiographical memory".

Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.

Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)

yojo2• 1 year ago

I think in this case the candidate didn’t even know enough to embellish the resume unassisted. Their nonsense response on rate limiting showed that they had no idea why you would rate limit or under what circumstances. Ditto for paginating data.

AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.

lurker919• 1 year ago

I recently interviewed an engineer who was somehow using ChatGPT realtime on another laptop beside him. The irony was that the questions were pretty simple overall and our rubric also wasn't very strict, so he likely would have passed if he just used his memory and common sense. Though the answers weren't wrong overall, I still felt cheated because of the deception and had to reject him later.

crooked-v3• 1 year ago

I rejected an applicant earlier this year who was obviously reading off another screen for every answer (as in, blatant pauses while I could literally see their eyes moving back and forth). I don't understand if they thought I wouldn't notice or what.

MrDarcy2• 1 year ago

This situation terrifies me as an autistic person. I can’t fathom maintaining eye contact while taking the time to think about a response to an interview question, even over a video call.

I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.

masfuerte• 1 year ago

You can get an AI tool now to fix the eye movement. Sadly.

I enjoy remote work but I wouldn't want to start working for a company where I had never met anyone. It seems like a great way to get scammed.

One real-life interview would surely be beneficial for both sides.

xmprt2• 1 year ago

I sometimes take notes/talking points about things I want to cover in my interviews and reference those. This could arguably be considered cheating but definitely not as egregious as using ChatGPT but I worry it would almost appear the same to an interviewer (referencing notes vs ChatGPT).

heelix• 1 year ago

I've had some fun ones, when interviewing folks - back in the days when people where hiring.

* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.

* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.

* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.

* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.

* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.

neilv9• 1 year ago

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example:

1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.

2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

criddell• 1 year ago

Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.

myself2482• 1 year ago

If the unredacted parts of the resume were entirely fabricated, what harm is there in having the lies out there? The candidate will be scrubbing from their honest version going forward anyway.

Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.

reneretord• 1 year ago

Generally I agree with this advice, but if the goal is to make the dork findable with a modicum of plausible deniability this is fine.

jere• 1 year ago

I'm often surprised when someone will paste a screenshot of a tweet with the name blurred (presumably to protect them from harassment). The contents of the tweet are easily searchable...

sundarurfriend• 1 year ago

Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.

I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating?

As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.

crazygringo4• 1 year ago

Regular sharpening doesn't work.

But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.

This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.

There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.

goldchainposse• 1 year ago

3. This probably counts as copyright infringement, unless it's chatbot output.

neilv9• 1 year ago

IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was found to be legitimate fair use.

highwaylights2• 1 year ago

There’s a few red flags here on the hiring side too.

I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.

Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.

OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.

OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.

(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)

sethammons6• 1 year ago

having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time

Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.

jkhanlar• 1 year ago

I was sharing this story and responding to various comments (here) in my conversations elsewhere on the Internet, and as part of my statements I questioned about quoting/paraphrasing the "word gets around" to determine if this is best way to reference the point, and thought I may as well share it here too. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_c0378709-b716-48af-8996-a0e4...

mortar• 1 year ago

On 2, I was surprised the author included the screenshot in their write up so I did some very pointed searches on some of the strings, and was surprised to see just how many profiles on LinkedIn were sourced for this farce. Good work LLMs

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

I ended by saying that the software community is smaller than it seems, and integrity and reputation goes a long way.

Well who are they? How would the next member of the community know this is a fake candidate. I like the idea in general of finding a way to eliminate these time-wasters but how would that work? The candidate can adjust a bit and improve the AI "foo" to come up with online answers for them.

esafak8• 1 year ago

Report them to LinkedIn.

edit: I'm talking about egregious cases where the name, location, picture, and work history are false, not the exaggerations you mention. The profiles have few connections since they do get flagged and recreated with a new false identity...

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1338436/repor...

If you feel that a profile may be fake or that it is inappropriate, you can report it. A profile may be fake if it appears empty or if it contains profanity, fake names, or impersonates public figures

They may use a real name and they may have worked some of those companies just lie about their technical level, experience, what part of the projects they worked on, etc. Those may not be covered by the reporting guidelines.

ChicagoBoy112• 1 year ago

Oddly one impact on me from reading this is that Kapwing seems like probably a nice place to apply for a job -- simple enough application process, human review, sane and respectful take-home and no live pressure coding. I'm not affiliated in any way nor am I a FT software developer, but this seemed like a pretty sane process (which sadly the article reveals may not be sufficient to properly vet candidates).

mavsman• 1 year ago

I think this was the whole point of the blog post. As someone else mentioned, this didn't have much to do with AI so referencing AI seems purely like an attempt to capture some eyes for publicity.

I'd actually say that _not_ using AI to prepare for an interview is mistake, putting you at a major disadvantage (and there are plenty of honest ways to use it).

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

As an interviewer, I'm not testing for things AI is likely to help you with. I want to know how you are going to do the job, and experience first-hand how you collaborate in our shared profession.

You can practice with AI if you want, but it is definitely not necessary. I would much rather have someone say "I don't know that one" (and have hired many people who did), rather than have someone provide some content ChatGPT gave them the day before.

ludicrousdispla• 1 year ago

You may want to reconsider. They have written an article criticizing the applicant while posting half of the applicant's resume online. The only hope for Kapwing is if this story turns out to be fabricated.

vonneumannstan• 1 year ago

Had an interesting live coding screen where the candidate was coding a solution, dropped from the call and screenshare for 20 minutes, showed back up with a full solution different from what they had before dropping and carried on as if nothing happened.

qoez• 1 year ago

Weird that they wouldn't just use whisper to pipe the interview questions into AI to reply better. If you're gonna cheat at least do it well.

esafak8• 1 year ago

They do do that. If it was merely for translation it would be okay, but usually it doesn't stop there.

madeofpalk4• 1 year ago

Has someone who’s interviewed candidates that do this, I like to think it’s fairly obvious when the candidate doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

I've seen this and it is always super-obvious when they are reading instead of having a conversation. I wish candidates would just stop: some of them we might have otherwise have hired, but instead it becomes a waste of time for us and them.

greenavocado• 1 year ago

It doesn't matter because I can always pry past the candidate's work in front of me to see if there is anything behind the facade. Usually there isn't even if their take-home assignment is done perfectly with of LLMs but there is no understanding behind the work being showcased.

Glyptodon2• 1 year ago

AI definitely makes take homes and non live coding exercises less viable (and even live ones to an extent).

Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

Somewhat less but if you are having them do a monorepo with the latest major releases of the frameworks involved, AI will mess it up because there is a 4-6 month knowledge gap

madeofpalk4• 1 year ago

I don’t think take homes should really be about the code, but about the developer being able to reason about why that was the code they wrote.

Asking developers to explain why they wrote that code mitigates against using LLM coding tools - if the candidate can’t back it up then they’ll do poorly in it.

I recently had a candidate submit an otherwise average exercise that was a big mish-mash of coding styles (inconsistently using var/let/const in js, for example). When asked about it, they weren’t able to explain their choice at all and just stumbled through it.

throwaway20374• 1 year ago

I agree that live coding is very hard on a lot of candidates. How do you feel about asking candidates to read code and explain it? I had that only once and I thought it was genuinely innovative. Even if I couldn't understand all of it, we can discuss various points about it.

Glyptodon2• 1 year ago

I think if that's prompted well and designed well it might work. But if not careful it might just be a signal that reflects your own taste.

neilv9• 1 year ago

Incidentally, I really-really like that they asked questions based on the person's resume.

That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money.

(And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been institutionalized.)

You can ask questions based on a resume without them disclosing IP, nor the appearance of it.

That resume-based questions thwarted a cheater in this case was a bonus.

markus_zhang• 1 year ago

I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed. Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?

esafak8• 1 year ago

They read the CV but placing too much weight on it makes it difficult to compare candidates objectively.

raincom2• 1 year ago

At the company I work for, we are forbidden to ask questions based on resume, as it introduces biases. Reduction of bias means "ask same questions of every candidate".

neilv9• 1 year ago

Is that because

* they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or

* they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or

* DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or

* some other HR theory?

fma• 1 year ago

I had a conversation with someone from a well known startup. He was complaining how in the last year he has noticed the trend of unqualified individuals passing HR screens and some even passed technical interviews (they are uncovered when they can’t even commit code). Their whole background is a lie. They would also send connection requests to people at the companies listed so recruiters don’t question it.

He proudly said they don’t ask questions based on resume, because they don’t care where you worked or where you went to school…as long as you know your stuff. In fact he only looks at the resume after the interview.

I wonder how long they will stick to this stubbornness.

jgilias• 1 year ago

That’s mental. Why have a resume in the first place then? Any info in the resume introduces “bias”. Well, actually, even wanting to hire the best candidate for a job is already a bias of its own.

So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process?

/s But only slightly.

rsynnott• 1 year ago

Are you doing technical interviews, or manager-conversation-type interviews? This makes sense for the former (whether someone was a Senior Whatever in Googlebook or wrote CRUD apps for a bank is irrelevant if you're just seeing whether they can find a bug in a library or whatever, but it may influence the interviewer's _perception_ of their performance, thus it is strictly better than the interview doesn't know), but seems quite impractical for the latter.

yieldcrv2• 1 year ago

Anyone that’s been on the market lately know that some companies encourage AI use in various ways

so all I can say is fix your assessments because this whole “they cheated” idea isnt universal, and more likely matches what people do on your job already

but for anyone that didnt read this article yet, this one is just about embellished experience custom tailored to get the interview, and there was no technical assessment

madeofpalk4• 1 year ago

If someone used an AI tool, but they can’t talk about its output sufficiently, then they’ll cheated. They did themselves a disservice.

jorgesborges2• 1 year ago

Despite how bad the job market seems at the moment it's things like this make me feel confident for when I have to search again.

saulpw• 1 year ago

How do you make your "real" resume stand out among the thousands of fakes though?

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

You talk to real humans.

Plenty of candidates are willing to lie and as we see here AI has made lying much cheaper. There is nothing you can put on your resume that AI couldn't have put there for anyone. But AI can't yet fake a network.

Personally, I'll put in second-degree referrals to my company: if someone I have worked with has worked with the person and is willing to personally vouch for them, I'll put their resume in and ping the recruiter (yes, it's gotten so bad even internal referrals don't break through the slush pile without a specific ping.) But I get the recruiter's attention because I only recommend people I have reason to think are actually good.

jorgesborges2• 1 year ago

I have a footnote at the end of my resume about my interests -- it's short, authentic, and more of a way to showcase my personality than my actual interests. It's always been a point of contact during the interview process. If an organization thinks that's stupid or a human isn't reading it in the first place it's not somewhere I want to work anyway.

imhoguy• 1 year ago

This and many other cases are literally burning remote interviewing and offshore candidates. Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references. I guess this is your point.

ramesh312• 1 year ago

Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references.

Anyone paying attention has started planning accordingly for this over the last couple years. The remote work revolution has resolutely failed, and it's clear in retrospect it never had a chance.

no-dr-onboard2• 1 year ago

I keep coming back to this phrase used in this post: "it was scary".

Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.

The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.

- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.

- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

aaomidi4• 1 year ago

Companies just need to fork the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.

IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that.

They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.

One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.

ghaff9• 1 year ago

If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI

I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.

Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.

There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.

esafak8• 1 year ago

It definitely did change with AI. Imposters are becoming harder to detect, at a cost to the company.

Joeboy• 1 year ago

I suspect the people saying nothing's changed are not people who've been conducting interviews recently.

NullPrefix2• 1 year ago

There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent

How is it not logically consistent?

kevinsync• 1 year ago

My personal theory is less that it's reducing the guilt of lying if the machine fabricates it but rather more that the average person has historically been not so good at fabricating a fib (and they now have instant access to plausible-sounding lies)

aforwardslash5• 1 year ago

I've conducted interviews where the candidate asked if he could use google to try to get an answer. I often say "sure". If a guy can read an explanation out of context, understand it in a way he can explain it using his own words, and reason about corner cases in a couple of minutes, he's hired. The same goes with AI; canned responses work when you ask canned questions, not so much on open-ended ones.

ghaff9• 1 year ago

And people may lean on their networks more (though they already do).

I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.

If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)

Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.

9rx10• 1 year ago

But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them

Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.

Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.

MisterTea• 1 year ago

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

You assume we aren't going to end up wearing them daily in order to get promotions. The same elitist power trip that drove RTO is also likely to produce the "dress like us & be rewarded" dynamics that push for conformity.

UncleOxidant2• 1 year ago

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No, business casual is just fine. Who wants to try to do a grueling technical interview in a suit? No thanks. I sweat enough as it is in interviews.

eikenberry3• 1 year ago

You are right about hiring not being that much different but your prognostications are way off IMO.

- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.

Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.

- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.

My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.

creato• 1 year ago

Requiring people to be able to interact with other people is not "bigotry".

PantaloonFlames• 1 year ago

Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.

Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.

donnachangstein3• 1 year ago

Classic bigotry.

Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.

Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.

tayo42• 1 year ago

Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore

While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.

motorest12• 1 year ago

Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.

I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.

You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.

If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.

This is not bigotry, is it?

_blk2• 1 year ago

If you have a really desirable job I wouldn't think twice about a few hours long drive/flight but eventually creativity wins the game for the hiring side. E.g. No offices, no problem: Either you recruit where you already have people or find trustees. I'd be happy to hold remote interview assist in the Colorado Springs (pot. Denver) area in my small 3ppl office if anyone from a remote-only corp doesn't have anyone on-site and wants to give it a shot...

pramsey• 1 year ago

Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.

Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.

jaredklewis• 1 year ago

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)

Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.

drivingmenuts• 1 year ago

The general rule seems to be if you’re not customer-facing, then no suit is needed. Just wear clean, neat clothes and that’s usually enough. If a suit or uniform is needed, that would be noted up front.

siva7• 1 year ago

I wouldn't take that advice seriously. Suit in tech would be awkward (even for most mgmt roles). Tech pioneered the concept that you don't need a suit to get the pay of a suit. You can be yourself.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 1 year ago

I was once turned down by Microsoft (in the 1990s), because I wore a suit to the interview. They made a point of mentioning it.

crabbone4• 1 year ago

The only programmers I've ever seen wearing a suit to work were the ones working in a bank. Not sure if that was a requirement or just a local tradition. Just saying that it happens, but seems very rare.

barbs• 1 year ago

I wore a suit to my very first tech interview on the advice of my well-meaning but ill-informed mother.

I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!

phaedryx• 1 year ago

I've made it a point to always ask beforehand: "what is the dress code expectation? I've seen everything from t-shirts to suits in the tech industry and I'd like show up dressed appropriately."

I always get a positive response.

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

I was told by a recruiter to "suit up" for an engineering position 15 years ago. I was met by the VP of engineering wearing cutoff jeans. I never listen recruiter sartorial advice.

tartoran2• 1 year ago

- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again

It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.

baq4• 1 year ago

It's not expectation of sameness, it's that they will be working with 'normal' people and need to meet some standard to not be a net negative for any team they're in.

godsinhisheaven• 1 year ago

Neurodivergent people have always had to learn social skills, plenty of people come off as weird/insane/awkward over zoom

no-dr-onboard2• 1 year ago

Hm, it turns out suggesting that someone buy a suit for a job they need is a litmus test.

DaSHacka2• 1 year ago

You've had multiple comments about orgs explicitly not hiring candidates that show up in suits, yet call it a "litmus test" if someone doesn't?

You sound like a typical classist MBA; don't you have Linkedin posts to make and employees to micromanage?

bluefirebrand• 1 year ago

And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit

No company worth working for would refuse to hire someone just because they didn't wear a suit to their interview

Dress nicely, sure. Wear a collar? Yeah probably. A tie? Meh.

Let's get rid of this old fashioned boomer nonsense from hiring please

pkaeding• 1 year ago

My advice is to ask to hiring manager who invites you to come in about the dress code expectation / norms, and try to be on the higher end of the range they give, without going over.

I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.

microtherion• 1 year ago

And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.

yencabulator3• 1 year ago

Perhaps the suit wasn't the one level up that people are talking about? If you accidentally go 3 levels too formal, you've definitely ruined the initial impression.

Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.

The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.

Cyphase• 1 year ago

People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries.

Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-nāṣir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...

LandR• 1 year ago

Man, how annoyed do you have to be with someone to carve your complaint into stone!

ozgrakkurt• 1 year ago

it is very easy to understand if someone is saying useless ai soup or he knows what he is talking about if you are good in your field. At least in software it is.

veunes5• 1 year ago

I get where you're coming from, especially on the cost of bad hires: it really is one of the riskiest bets a company makes. But I'm not convinced going back to the "fly them out and grill them on a whiteboard" era is the right answer either.

baq4• 1 year ago

There's an opportunity for wework for hiring - rent out a conference room for a couple hours and have a third party be present during the interview. The first one to figure this out and not go bankrupt a year or two later wins. Probably not a unicorn business, though.

throwaway20374• 1 year ago

In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason. It is not an expensive as people think to fire someone who deceived your hiring process. However, institution inertia is real.

That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason.

In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.

yardie• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, in very large organizations the onboarding process can take a while. It can be months before you have credentials to the repository. By then, full benefits will kick in, worker protections, etc.

And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.

__turbobrew__• 1 year ago

If you make a bad hire you stop looking to fill that role, and then if you fire them 2-3 months later you are back at square zero.

prakhar897• 1 year ago

wrote something similar a while back: https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/ai-is-the-reason-intervi...

pjc50• 1 year ago

The industry is probably going to have to consider the concept of a "qualification", that is a test you take once and then present to employers rather than have each employer make up a different one.

I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.

Imustaskforhelp3• 1 year ago

I mean, aren't great degrees such tests, though they don't check the practical knowledge.

We just need some sort of qualification which tests practical knowledge.

Lutger• 1 year ago

Did you ever work with developers? Maybe if you hire for consultants in some industries some of this is relevant (I doubt it), but with social skills + suit part alone will make sure you miss out on a significant pool of talent.

I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.

Cthulhu_3• 1 year ago

I knew some colleagues who were alright as developers (maybe over-eager, e.g. building a microservices architecture by themselves when that didn't actually solve the real problems the company had) who had a suit phase for some reason.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

No Computer Science degree = forget about it.

In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.

Cthulhu_3• 1 year ago

I'm inclined to agree, but at the same time, I've worked with people who proved themselves in the industry already. My senior developer at the time, had 15 years experience but no formal relevant education.

sgarland• 1 year ago

Except you can use AI (against the rules, but there is 0% chance they’re catching everyone) for a degree.

The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”

aforwardslash5• 1 year ago

Id say it depends on the specifics of the job role; In most cases, "the fundamentals" arent relevant at all; they are items on the runtime library of a given high level language of choice. There are exceptions, obviously, but you do not need to be a rocket scientist to maintain an ERP or an e-commerce application; on the other hand, there are plenty of "hard problems" where computer science is also mostly useless, because the steepness of it is advanced math, not algorithm design.

otabdeveloper42• 1 year ago

it's time to buy a suit

Yeah, no. I'd deduct points if the candidate wears a suit. What a huge red flag, missing all sorts of context and appropriateness cues.

BhavdeepSethi• 1 year ago

This is insane to read. You don't get brownie points for what you're wearing, but deducting points for someone trying to impress folks by dressing more formally than what you're typically used to?

jillesvangurp2• 1 year ago

In most countries, you have trial periods where you can terminate without too much hassle. Here in Germany, that's usually six months and I know of people in pretty senior positions that got screwed over and terminated towards the end of that period.

The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.

And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.

I've been on both sides of the table.

My process for hiring is:

- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.

- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).

- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.

- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.

Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.

FirmwareBurner13• 1 year ago

a string of meh employers

What's a meh employer?

subjectsigma• 1 year ago

AI has definitely changed the dynamic; more people think they can get away with lying without getting caught. They trust the AI’s ability to lie more than their own.

Bluescreenbuddy2• 1 year ago

And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa

dan_quixote• 1 year ago

awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

Whatever future interviews look like, I sure as hell hope we don't maintain this ^ attitude.

hansmayer• 1 year ago

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No man, it's not and never was - unless you are aiming for a "career" at JP Morgan and the likes.

martin82• 1 year ago

A suit is just another one of those lies that people have been doing for centuries.

mock-possum• 1 year ago

I’ve literally never, in almost 20 years in the industry, been asked to or expected to wear a suit. I’ve never ever had anyone say anything to me about my clothes period. It’s simply not a consideration in my experience. In fact the one time I worked for a place that had a dress code, it specifically exempted my department (software engineering) from the policy - and if that hadn’t been the case I wouldn’t have taken that job.

The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.

janalsncm• 1 year ago

A more motivated candidate might have had an LLM ideate potential follow up questions for their resume and then think about the answers themselves. I’ve done this live with ChatGPT voice mode, it’s quite nice for practicing.

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

I suspect that's what the candidate did! It's just that the AI didn't anticipate the question.

The thing with interviewing is that ultimately the questions are fundamentally unpredictable. No coach, or AI, can truly anticipate what the questions will be.

hbsbsbsndk• 1 year ago

I've interviewed some candidates (more senior than TFA) and I agree with OP that it is a uniquely uncomfortable experience.

Candidates who rely on AI seem to just be totally turning their brains off. At least a candidate who was embellishing in the old days would try to BS if they were caught. They could try and fill in the blanks. These candidates give plausible-sounding answers and then truly just give up and say "ummm" when you reach the end of their preparation.

I've been interviewing for 10+ years across multiple startups and this was never a problem before. Even when candidates didn't have a lot of relevant experience we could have a conversation and they could demonstrate their knowledge and problem-solving skills. I've had some long, painful sessions with a candidate who was completely lost but they never just gave up completely.

Developers I've worked with and interviewed who rely on AI daily are just completely helpless without it. It's amazing how some senior+ engineers have just lost their ability to reason or talk about code.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

I suspect we are seeing the first wave of programmers who got a promotion to "senior" on the basis of being an early AI adopter at a place that valued lines of code written or tickets closed or other similarly-game-able metrics.

Alternatively, there are people who haven't been promoted but think their AI-fu is so good they obviously should have been, without realizing that "senior" is actually a different role, with additional responsibilities.

I've found asking about their pedagogy when coaching junior engineers is a great sorting strategy right now. It isn't something a lot of people have written about so ChatGPT's answers are full of useless platitudes, and mid-level engineers often don't even know that it is part of the job.

foobahify3• 1 year ago

This has nothing to do with AI. They lied in an interview like you could have done in 1980. You can prepare with AI and lie and you can prepare with AI and not lie. I have done the latter.

VohuMana• 1 year ago

As someone who has conducted interviews with candidates almost certainly using AI in both the phone screen and coding portion. The biggest giveaway is the inability to explain the why of things. Even some of the simple things like "why did you initialize that class member in this method rather than in the constructor?"

I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.

veunes5• 1 year ago

Yep, it's less about if you're using AI and more about how you're integrating it into your workflow. At this point, using AI tools is becoming a baseline expectation in many roles, not a red flag. But yeah, the moment someone can't explain the rationale behind a decision (especially in their own code) that's a huge issue.

kazinator• 1 year ago

A kindergarten pick up app can be a CGI application written in shell scripts, keeping all data in text files, and running on a Pentium.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

But we want to be modern!

That way we can spend massive piles of money on cloud compute, monitoring, documentation, not to mention the constant maintenance to mitigate the security issues in the multiple layers of libraries we depended on.

UncleOxidant2• 1 year ago

The title seems to say that it's a bad thing to use AI to prepare for an interview, when in fact it can be quite useful to use AI (and before AI there were dozens of "Preparing for the technical interview" books). The real issue is that the candidate lied about their experience, not that they used AI to prep. They could just as easily have lied about their experience without using AI to prep.

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview. Other people think an interview is just a matter of finding the "magic words" to get the job.

What I don't understand is, what did the candidate do with AI? Did they use the AI as a coach? Did they use it to suggest edits to the resume?

---

I once interviewed a candidate who was given my questions in advance. (I should point out that it was quite time consuming for me to design an interview, so I couldn't just make up new questions for every candidate.)

When the candidate started taking the "schoolboy" tone of a well-rehearsed speech, I realized that they had practiced their answers, like practicing for an exam. I immediately threw in an unscripted question, got the "this wasn't supposed to be on the test" response, and ended the interview.

mystraline2• 1 year ago

Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview.

So marketing works in the company's favor, and not the candidates? Its a tough pill to swallow, but bending the truth and lying seems to be the way folks get jobs now.

Perhaps not lying... But I've thought about the 1pt font white on white mega-tech-list attached to Workday resumes to get past THEIR ai-slop filters. And even had my SO get insta-rejected when whatever AI term wasn't explicitly there.

As a candidate, the market is horrific. Ghost jobs, fake jobs that gather market intelligence, scam jobs, blatantly lying candidates, AI blusters, and more. I can look at the usual places, or even HN. I've even applied to my share of HN jobs without so much as a 'no' as response.

It puts us who actually want to be honest at a pretty severe disadvantage.

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

Well, everyone tells their interpretation of the facts in a way that puts them in the best light.

For example, in 2003, I was fresh out of college and the job market was slow. I applied at a retail store so I could have some beer money. I was honest that I was looking for a job in tech and that I wasn't going to stay forever. Then I said I'd probably be there for 3-4 months.

I was there for 2 weeks, and I don't list the job on my resume.

Was I telling the truth when I said 3-4 months? I certainly gave them the longer end of the estimate in my head.

Was I telling the truth when I left the retail job off of my resume?

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people can sue you.

It is one thing to frame your experiences in ways that are relevant to what the job is looking for: it is not only unethical to fabricate experiences, it is counter-productive. I will be checking references, and if their reports of the role you played on a project don't match yours I will not be hiring you. If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you. All you have done is waste my time and yours.

The sheer number of applications from auto-submit-to-every-job application processes have completely broken the system. There is simply no way for every recruiter to consider ever candidate, which is what they are now being asked to do. I know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.

We will eventually figure out how to defeat these candidate-spam bots. In the meantime the only hiring pipelines that are still functional are human-to-human individual networking.

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

I couldn't just make up new questions for every candidate.

Ask each candidate the same questions?

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

Yes. It was a programming exercise that took me a few hours to create. It was not practical to re-make it for every candidate.

BTW, it's industry normal for companies to come up with a programming exercise and reuse it.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

Follow up questions will vary, but the bulk of most interviews is the same for every candidate, and candidates are then judged based on a rubric that is the same for every candidate (though often tailored to the specific role).

The consistency lets interviewers compare across candidates, and avoids the cognitive pitfall of defining a rubric after-the-fact that lets us hire the candidate who appealed to our lizard brains.

Even at startups, questions are also usually tested on several existing employees before it is used on the first external candidate, for calibration. Companies put a lot of time and money trying to hire for actual competence.

ghaff9• 1 year ago

The first part sounds like what I’d expect a serious candidate to do. Didn’t you look at the questions we sent you?

The second part sounds like areal curveball unless you made it clear that the questions sent out were only representative/samples of what you’d ask.

gwbas1c8• 1 year ago

The candidate wasn't supposed to know the questions in advance.

The second part sounds like areal curveball

That was the point. The candidate wasn't supposed to know the questions in advance. Once the candidate can practice / memorize, there's no way to evaluate the candidate.

dakiol5• 1 year ago

One can easily rehearse answers that sound natural. You could start with a partially wrong answer, realize midway and correct it. Easily fakeable. All the “ums”, “let me think for a second”, and even failing to answer 10% of the questions on purpose is easily doable.

veunes5• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is the gray area we're all bumping into now

tryauuum• 1 year ago

I was in this situation on the candidate side :) however I started with "I had your question list beforehand and I searched wikipedia for the answers". I got the job

lysecret2• 1 year ago

The way I read it is they used ai as a coach and ai probably told them some variation of “it’s ok to exaggerate”.

However, this to me would be a red flag because they somehow try to blame Ai for misrepresenting their experience. So they can’t even take responsibility for that.

ikrenji• 1 year ago

let me get this straight ~ someone took the time to prepare for the interview and you basically penalized them for the preparation? people are truly ridiculous

tetromino_• 1 year ago

I had done a few remote coding interviews in recent months where I suspect the candidate was cheating using AI. It's a bizarre experience: each individual answer is produced confidently and quickly, makes sense in isolation, occasionally is even optimal, but the different answers don't connect into a coherent whole. Contrived example: the candidate confidently states that one should use algorithm X to solve a particular type of problem because of such and such reason - and then five minutes later when it comes time to write some code, they rapidly type in, with no erasing or backtracking, a solution which uses algorithm Y, and seemingly no awareness that they switched from X to Y...

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

The company cheats by being a tightwad and by conducting an online interview (which have always been prone to cheating or embellishing, and companies perfectly know it) and the candidate cheats by using this opportunity.

I can't stop repeating it, just invite the candidate to your office. That's it, that's how simple the problem is solved.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

Wow.

Just in case anyone else in the audience is curious, this is what self-justification of egregiously bad behavior looks like.

If you can't be trusted to work remotely, absolutely stick to in-person roles. If you think your coworkers are any less deserving of your respect and candor because they aren't in the same room as you, you definitely aren't qualified to work remotely.

whywhywhywhy• 1 year ago

Honestly doing in person filters for so many red flags and the most egregious of remote work scams like over-employment and just fake candidates.

You also just get a much better idea if the person will work well in the team and if they're passionate about the work.

Stopped hiring people who can't show up for a chat.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

The next stage of our interview process, had this candidate moved forward, is to implement a take-home project that we have specifically designed for prospective candidates to complete. Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

So why bother with it?

Foofoobar123454• 1 year ago

We get a few thousand fresh grads applying to us each year. It’s practically impossible to interview every one of them. At the same time, any sort of coding assignment we give is easily defeated by AI—so that’s not useful either and there are very few signals there.

What we do instead is send out a test - something like a mental ability test - with hundreds of somewhat randomized questions. Many of these are highly visual in nature, making them hard to copy-paste into an AI for quick answers. The idea is that smarter candidates will solve these questions in just a few seconds - faster than it would take to ask an AI. They do the test for 30 minutes.

It’s not expected that anyone finishes the test. The goal is to generate a distribution of performance, and we simply start interviewing from the top end and make offers every week until we hit our hiring quota. Of course, this means we likely miss out on some great candidates unfortunately.

We bring the selected candidates into our office for a full day of interviews, where we explicitly monitor for any AI usage. The process generally appears to work.

On a different note, things are just getting weird.

narnarpapadaddy2• 1 year ago

We still do a coding assignment, but a significant chunk of the technical interview is dedicated to a walkthrough of the code. Thus far, that’s been able to detect those who relied solely on AI.

…If you used AI and can still explain to me why code works and what it does, even better. You have learned how to use new tools.

(have not tried the randomized question approach to compare, but I’m curious to try it and see what happens)

koyote• 1 year ago

We do it similarly and it's pretty easy to tell if someone knows their stuff, especially as the assignment is just a platform to dig deeper in the face to face interview.

However, the coding assignment was a really good filter and allowed us to dismiss the majority of candidates before committing to a labour-intensive face to face.

I haven't interviewed anyone since AI took off, but I am assuming that from now on the majority of candidates that would usually send us crap code will send us AI code instead; thereby wasting our time when they finally appear for the face to face.

Have you encountered that yet?

umbra07• 1 year ago

when you say "visual questions" - are you referring to questions in the style of Mensa/gifted tests?

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Foofoobar123454• 1 year ago

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

jannesan• 1 year ago

As a candidate, this sort of test gives me the worst possible impression of the company.

- 0 effort on your side - very stressful for me - completely unrelated to job - ridiculous definition of someone being “smart”

Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.

wat100002• 1 year ago

Seriously. I’m interviewing as a programmer and you give me some ridiculous “which cube is next in the sequence” nonsense that probably has three different arguably correct answers for every question? Pass.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.

Unpopular observation: Many people say this, but when they actually want or need a job they change their mind quickly.

I've lost count of how many of my peers went from "I will never grind LeetCode!" to working their way through LeetCode challenge lists as soon as a recruiter from a big tech company contacted them.

I talked to one hiring manager at a company who tested their mobile developer applicants by having them make an entire demo app with some non-trivial functionality. I assumed they wouldn't have any applicants, but his current problem was that too many qualified applicants were applying for every position and begging to do the test.

Foofoobar123454• 1 year ago

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

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

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

intalentive2• 1 year ago

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

Foofoobar123454• 1 year ago

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

boscillator• 1 year ago

I'm still mad at IBM for giving me one of those tests for an internship after 4 years. It required a lot of fast mental arithmetic, which is, medically speaking, not my strong suit. I thought the job was programming computers, not being the computer, but the test suggests otherwise.

I probably should have figured out how to request an ADA accommodation... oh well.

levocardia• 1 year ago

something like a mental ability test

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

rahimnathwani5• 1 year ago

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

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

crazygringo4• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what this has to do with AI, except for being a buzzword to add to a title.

People have been lying about their experience since time immemorial. You don't need an AI to do it, you can just ask a friend with experience to invent a few plausible projects you could have worked on, and solutions you might have found. Or just look at a bunch of resumes online and read a few blog posts of people describing their work.

I'm not surprised this happened. I'm surprised by why the author was surprised. Maybe "Sam" was exceptionally bad at "faking it" in person, but I've done tons of interviews where the candidate had exaggerated their experience and couldn't answer basic questions that they should have been able to.

Honestly, this is why some companies do whiteboard coding interviews before getting to the interviews about experience, because it does a decent initial job at filtering out people who have no idea what they're doing.

saxelsen• 1 year ago

Yup.

I personally wrote that I had experience in a programming language I didn't, back for an interview in 2010. I got called out on it too..!

My wife has run a couple of marathons and her friend called her up to hear about her experience, because she was putting it on her resume for a job. She got it (probably not because of her running experience).

dpkirchner2• 1 year ago

I had a recruiter do that to me when I was 19 or so. Said I had some amount of c++ experience. Somehow the interviewers picked up on the fact that I did not.

robocat• 1 year ago

For prospective job candidates, my advice is still that "the truth will set you free"

Is that really good advice?

If you have the wisdom of knowing when to embellish and when to blur, then you're more likely to get a job and more likely to fit in.

I'm a spectrum, and generally I'm over-truthful and I notice my habit regularly affects me negatively.

roguecoder25• 1 year ago

Providing too much information will weigh against candidates, sure. Filtering information to what is relevant is a very useful skill: it saves time, helps listeners focus by not overwhelming their working memory, and lets the speaker communicate clearly with show-not-tell.

Saying something that is untrue is completely different from blurring or glossing over some of the details. The interviewer can always ask follow up questions if they want to hear more details: lying removes the opportunity for accurate understanding.

Saying something that is untrue might sometimes help someone fraudulently land a job: if it is believable, if they can back it up when asked, if the company never finds a way to check and if they never contradict themselves at all.

But it is just as likely that the answer "I don't have any experience with that, but I would google '<phrase>' and start from there" would have done a better job with no possibility of being summarily and appropriately dismissed if they get caught.

Clubber• 1 year ago

The next stage of our interview process, had this candidate moved forward, is to implement a take-home project that we have specifically designed for prospective candidates to complete. Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

I have no doubt as well, but I couldn't help but noticing, "Don't bother with take home tests," wasn't on the list of remedies.

forthwall• 1 year ago

I had a similar but different run in with bad AI use in interviewing earlier this month. I was interviewing a candidate during a technical screen, and I had earlier noted that it was ok to use AI, as that was how modern development is going forward, I would just observe how someone would develop with it. In my technical product screens I try to tell the developer, it's time for them to show off what skills they feel the most comfortable at.

What happened though was the candidate decided to paste the entire challenge prompt into cursor and I watched cursor fail at completing the assignment. I tried to nudge them to use their own skills or research abilities, but alas did not come to fruition, and had to end the interview.

The crazy part was they had 8 years of experience, so definitely have worked before not using AI, so it was very strange they did that, especially since they remarked that the challenge was going to be easy

isbvhodnvemrwvn3• 1 year ago

Why do you assume the 8 years of experience were real?

ofrzeta2• 1 year ago

The position's still open. It's ironic that it requires "Stay up-to-date on new AI technologies, including LLMs and generative models. Prototype and test new technologies to evaluate quality and improve performance."

isbvhodnvemrwvn3• 1 year ago

Why is it ironic? Usage of AI doesn't mean you can just lie or not know what you are doing.

ofrzeta2• 1 year ago

Sure, you are right. Still it seems that the candidate did "test new technologies to evaluate quality". Don't take it too seriously. No one likes cheaters.

ipunchghosts• 1 year ago

Something I don't see mentioned here but is implicitly assumed is that the candidate wants the job. Given the lottery of passing leet coding interviews, interviews are a place to practice interviewing. Some candidates may not want the job but simply want to try different things during the interview and see what happens with the goal of practice for an interview for a role they really care about.

disambiguation2• 1 year ago

AI is a problem, so is lying, but this is a non issue already solved by the ancient tradition of in person interviews.

I assume the folks at kapwing are monitoring the responses, so if you're really open to ideas then i offer the following for your consideration:

The best interview I've had to date has been a live debugging challenge. Given an hour, a printed sheet of requirements, and a mini git repo of mostly working code, try to identify and solve as many bugs as possible, with minimum requirements and bonus goals for the ambitious.

This challenge checks all the boxes of a reliable and fair assessment. It cant be faked by bullshittery or memorized leetcode problems. Its in person so cheating and AI is out of the equation, but more importantly it allows for conversation, asking questions, sharing ideas, and demonstrating, rather than explaining, their problem solving process. Finally its a test that actually resembles what we do on a daily basis, rather than the typical abstract puzzles and trivia that look more like a bizarre IQ test.

Stumbling upon this format was such a revelation to me and I'm stunned it hasn't been more widely adopted. You'll meet many more "Sams" as your company grows - many will fool you, some already have. But a well designed test doesn't lie. Its up to you and your company to have the discipline to turn down cheap and easy interviewing tactics to do things the right way.

dakiol5• 1 year ago

Please, no. I don’t want to travel hundred of kilometres each time I want to apply for a job.

disambiguation2• 1 year ago

Why would you interview with a company far away if you aren't willing to travel and eventually relocate there?

Job hunting has become a game of shotgunning your resume while employers cast the widest net, and this has been hugely detrimental. Internships, junior positions, and onsite training are disappearing across the board. Everyone instead wastes time shopping around without any real evidence that this way improves outcomes.

designAndCode• 1 year ago

Just do onsite interviews if you are that concerned.

atoav2• 1 year ago

A colleague of mine got his job using an AI assisted cover letter. I was part of the interview where he still convinced everyone that he knew his shit. I am happy with his hire now, a year later.

WesolyKubeczek• 1 year ago

I never know what to write in those so it doesn’t just repeat highlights from my CV in a paragraph form. I would sure use some chatgippity to help me there.

oulu2006• 1 year ago

"It didn't make sense that the Twilio API would not be able to handle sending 30 SMS messages at once - this seemed like a scaling issue that would be easily resolved through upgrading the plan"

Twilio indeed can't handle batching of SMS requests -- even to this day several years after I asked them to :)

To be specific, what I want is what sendgrid offers, copy + replacements, so I can send the copy I want to send, a list of recipients and a list of replacements for each recipient in a single request.

MoonGhost• 1 year ago

Twilio indeed can't handle batching of SMS requests

It's still a good idea to try to bullshit candidate on topic he claims to know well.

gregncheese2• 1 year ago

I am in the process of recruiting a software engineer. You're on spot when saying "ask about human experience".

To add to your experience, I became increasingly suspicious of the "perfect fit" resumes. it's insane how so many people just put the right keywords. I think it might work to pass in larger companies where HR use automated systems to triage applicants.

dakiol5• 1 year ago

If your resume is not a perfect fit, you don’t get an interview. So either it’s a almost perfect fit or no chance to get the job. What’s wrong about that?

gregncheese2• 1 year ago

I don't conduct interviews in that manner. It is more important for me to know that I can trust your words and that you are aware of your limits, so you can learn any missing skills on the job.

For example, if you have 3 years of working experience and claim, "I know Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Python, React, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and networking extensively," in 99% of cases, I can no longer trust anything you say.

As for the 1% hidden gem I might miss out on, I likely won't have the budget for them anyway.

colonial• 1 year ago

I think it might work to pass in larger companies where HR use automated systems to triage applicants.

I don't know if this is true per se, but many job seekers in online forums seem to believe it is. Typically, keyword stuffing is thought to placate some nebulous "AI system."

Whether such systems actually exist is unclear to me.

dakiol5• 1 year ago

The guy had to invent “cool” scenarios because companies think they are Google and working in backend doing normal things won’t get you hired. One could easily have prepared the whole interview with AI without failing to explain details (like what data was being paginated) just by lying a bit more. Not lying on your actual knowledge but on what your previous jobs were about. E.g., I have used k8s in pet projects but not at work, but this job ad for a backend position asks knowledge about k8s, so I’ll put k8s as skill under my last job and invent a credible story that I can talk about based on my experience during my pet projects.

I think the message here is: don’t ask for the moon, you are not Google.

frogulis• 1 year ago

While I think this view is probably apt in other situations -- and to be clear, I don't know much about the company -- all of the specific techniques mentioned on the candidate's CV and in the article are fairly "garden-variety".

The pagination example seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for both sides to want to talk about, and which becomes relevant at a level of scale much smaller than Google.

dakiol5• 1 year ago

imho I think the pagination example alone wouldn’t get you hired even if told correctly. In over a decade of experience my “coolest experience” related to pagination is about not using LIMIT and OFFSET because it’s not performant… but that’s 101 knowledge and doesn’t sell.

never_inline4• 1 year ago

The message is: good lie is not too far from truth.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

They weren't asking Google questions. They were asking about basic pagination, which is an entry-level topic.

Hard to argue with their interview process when it successfully unmasked someone who didn't have the basic experience to discuss a simple topic.

thih9• 1 year ago

Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

Off topic, why have such a take home exercise then?

veunes5• 1 year ago

On one hand, yeah, misrepresenting your experience, even if "AI-assisted," is a red flag, especially when the role clearly requires real, practical knowledge. But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of outcome we should expect in the age of LLMs: people will use every tool available to bridge gaps, especially when under pressure in a hypercompetitive job market.

thaumasiotes3• 1 year ago

We've also been the target of hiring scams in the past, so one policy we have is to only conduct "phone screens" on live video calls with the camera turned on.

Why are we calling these "phone screens"?

msravi3• 1 year ago

I don't think this has anything to do with using AI for prep. 20 years ago I was interviewing candidates who had somewhat lied on their resume, knew some of the things that they'd written about, but had everything fall apart under a little more questioning of what exactly they'd done and why.

matsemann• 1 year ago

I think the difference is that you used to need a certain knowledge to be able to bullshit. You could still do it, but it would mainly be to embellish stuff you already somewhat know. With LLMs, it's easy to make it write a whole page of interview prep you can use to hide your tracks, without any prior knowledge. My guess is they saw that kapwing wanted experience in X,Y,Z and made an LLM create projects that sounds real in a way you otherwise wouldn't be able to do as easily.

msravi3• 1 year ago

From the article:

but it had been some time ago, and they never worked on any of the features

It appears that the candidate might have actually worked on the daycare app, but not on what they said they worked - i.e., the ratelimiting and pagination. It appears that they might have been working on the frontend, and took the liberty of "expanding" their role - this used to be extremely common in a big sample of the resumes, and I'm guessing it still is. They might have used AI to prep - they used to use google earlier, but the prep was (and is) still inadequate if you've not actually worked on and implemented it. I don't think it was an entirely LLM created project...

throwaway743• 1 year ago

Wouldn't be surprised if the whole post was actually written up by AI as a "subtle" way of promoting the company, fueled by riding out the outrage from hiring managers on linkedin

JSR_FDED• 1 year ago

Use this to your advantage. Tell the interviewer you’d much rather meet in person, because you’re 100% confident you have the required skills/experience and you’d like to avoid a bad culture fit situation.

coolThingsFirst2• 1 year ago

Integrity and reputation goes a long way?

Except it doesn’t if he hadn’t stretched the truth in his bombastic resume he would never have received an interview.

I will defend him because companies do the same thing of stretching the truth.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 1 year ago

This guy sounds like a good manager, that took his responsibilities in vetting candidates, seriously. Kind of a "unicorn," these days, it seems. Many managers are tossed the CV, ten minutes before the interview, and are yanked off of whatever critical project they were stressing over, to do an interview.

I would probably have been fooled by the applicant's screening interview, but it would have rapidly come apart, in the ensuing steps.

My team was a very small team of high-functioning C++ programmers, where each member was Responsible for some pretty major functionality.

This kind of thing might be something they could get away with, in larger organizations, where they would get lost in the tall grass, but smaller outfits -especially ones where everyone is on the critical path, like startups- would expose the miscreant fairly quickly.

ed_mercer• 1 year ago

integrity and reputation goes a long way.

Was it really necessary to take the moral high ground and lecture the candidate? As if companies are honest and well-meaning in interviews. You caught him and that's the end of it.

bayindirh• 1 year ago

When I'm in similar positions, if I see the honesty and feel the connection, I change the tone a bit to take off my corporate/higher up hat and make friendly remarks like that.

When caught in vulnerable positions, some people are very open to sincere remarks, but the situation is fragile. Not wounding the person further is the key.

I always try to remind myself, that I don't need to cut with the sword of truth. I can (and shall) point with it, too.

phito• 1 year ago

Of course it is. If nobody tells them that what they are doing is wrong and that it might have consequences, they will continue cheating.

austin-cheney• 1 year ago

This is why I will not interview for any job that mentions any of: React, Angular, Vue, Spring, or Rails.

The people in these positions are scared to death to write original code and then have the balls to whine about people who use AI to provide unoriginal answers.

slcjordan• 1 year ago

With AI, the onus is entirely on you to prompt the AI to perform an ethical practice interview and avoid gaining an unethical advantage by having AI make up answers for you.

It just makes me wonder about the importance that an understanding and commitment to ethics will play as people start to use AI more and more in their daily life.

acjacobson• 1 year ago

I've run into something similar twice now in the last month. A candidate pauses or says 'let me think about that' on a relatively simple question as if to give an LLM time to respond. After the pause they give an overly long detailed answer - again like an LLM response.

One candidate was absolutely stumped and could not answer why and when they became interested in technology. They couldn't say anything about themselves personally. It was baffling.

yahoozoo• 1 year ago

The poor grammar in the resume should have been a red flag. English not being a first language isn’t an excuse. If they can use AI to cheat, they can run their resume through it.

jamesgasek• 1 year ago

"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.

never_inline4• 1 year ago

In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!

FirmwareBurner13• 1 year ago

They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?

Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

sidrag222• 1 year ago

this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.

i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.

Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.

IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.

zemo• 1 year ago

The issue is lying about your experiences

I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.

mytailorisrich• 1 year ago

That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.

autoexec• 1 year ago

I'm not sure that it's a good thing if "ability to produce convincing lies" is something that a company requires in a job candidate. People getting into jobs who aren't exceptional liars when they couldn't have otherwise seems like win to me.

dennis_jeeves22• 1 year ago

The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.

gspencley• 1 year ago

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt.

Really? That's the bigger issue?

Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?

I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."

Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.

The two are not remotely comparable.

This promotes lying

No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]

_bin_• 1 year ago

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology.

That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.

jajko2• 1 year ago

Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.

This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.

before_the_law2• 1 year ago

I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems

I've been really impressed with how much a of performance lift working on leetcode with AI is. It's so much easier to focus on developing rapid problem decomposition skills and working with an interviewer during the problem.

Unfortunately it's also necessary to improve this process because the current standards for the companies still doing leetcode interviews are getting pretty wild these days. Meta requires 2 med-hard question solved in 20 minutes or less each for the screen these days! Even if you have solid algorithmic thinking solving and implementing solutions that quickly requires you to be insanely prepped.

giancarlostoro4• 1 year ago

English is not my first language, and yet I'm fluent, but some of the questions I've been asked to solve are insanely confusingly worded and so I have a harder time because the interview process at some places is unrealistic.

exabrial2• 1 year ago

I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful.

It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.

rblatz• 1 year ago

I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal.

If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.

If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.

apwell23• 1 year ago

Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

i got a high paying job at meta once i started see it as 'presentation' and not a 'conversation' .

I play this stupid ass game to make money

crabbone4• 1 year ago

I told them that I feel that its important to be honest with their experiences

Oh my... I don't think I've ever seen a resume that didn't embellish or straight up lie about the applicant. AI does make lies more convincing and allows to go further with lies though.

Also, I'm impressed and upset that it takes so much effort to get a job doing something that sounds like entry-level Node.js / React stuff :( And the effort on the part of the applicant to manufacture this fake identity and experience to apply for this kind of job... and they are a masters student! Like... shouldn't this alone qualify you for the kind of low-stakes undemanding job?

lysecret2• 1 year ago

I used to do a lot of hiring interviews long before ai and this exact situation has happened many times. People have been added to some project doing x haven’t really done much or engaged in it. They then see you need someone doing x then they add it to their resume. However, I do agree not being able to fully talk about a thing you have been working on and worse misrepresenting the extend of your involvement are red flags. Has nothing to do with AI though. Also sounds a bit like they wanted to say: “Ai encouraged me to exaggerate a bit” which again just means they wanted to shift the blame which is another red flag.

giantg2• 1 year ago

This isn't an issue with "preparing" with AI. This guy is just a liar. The ironic part is, this author is just as much a liar by claiming this as due AI preparation as the candidate was about his experience at the daycare app.

nsonha• 1 year ago

Nothing about AI here, just a candidate making shit up, not even unique to software engineering.

Actually it would be interesting if the interviewer had an AI to counter these tactics

Bluescreenbuddy2• 1 year ago

Moral of the story? Don't tell em you used AI to prepare or they will write a whole article about you

a_t482• 1 year ago

On the topic of interview prep - is it weird that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it? I can’t be the only one, right? As best as I can tell it’s never really hurt me (okay, there was a Google interview I failed where grinding a few leetcodes might have helped…).

astroalex• 1 year ago

If you are trying to advance your career, I feel prepping for interviews is probably the number one most important thing you can do, unless you are freakishly gifted at acing interviews with no prep.

hliyan2• 1 year ago

The number one most important thing you can do is to learn how to actually do the job. Your ability to pass interviews will follow from that. If the place you're applying to has an interview process that does not align well with the job, then you might not want to apply there -- they will be hiring a lot of people who are not a best fit for the role, and that's the environment you might end up working in.

gosub1006• 1 year ago

I agree with you but only for junior engineers. You have to distinguish yourself. A senior should be expected to show competency in something already on their resume, and be able to learn whatever is thrown at them. The bigger priority with interviewing a senior is making sure they aren't bullshitting.

hliyan2• 1 year ago

You're not, and thank goodness for that. I hired about 10 engineers during the past six months, and as far as I could tell, at least 9 out of 10 didn't use AI in the interview process, as in, they demonstrated in day to day work, the same level of proficiency they demonstrated in the interview. If that's because they continue to use AI in day to day work, I have no problem with it as long as they don't exfiltrate IP and data in the process.

fancyfredbot2• 1 year ago

If you never prepared for the interview then you probably never really wanted/needed the job and so the requisite motivation wasn't there for you.

Nothing wrong with that - nice position to be in actually.

hnbad2• 1 year ago

Or they might simply have some ADHD/autistic traits which make these things require additional effort.

I have a list of past projects I'm comfortable talking about. I can go to great lengths talking about any of them in detail if prompted. I'm also comfortable talking about technical topics including those I'm not intimately familiar with - that's part of my job after all. But most importantly, I'm confident enough that I can say "I don't know what that is, can you elaborate?" and "I'd need to look into that and get back to you".

I've you're going to leetcode me, I'm going to underperform. I've never had to do leetcode for a job. I also don't typically apply to the kind of companies that think leetcode is a good filter. Why should I waste their time and mine to apply to a job at a company I'm probably going to hate working for?

ar_lan2• 1 year ago

I'm the same, and it makes me paranoid. I feel like I'm investing purely in one company instead of any defensive diversification.

But my job is very demanding and I have 4 hours after work to spend with my wife and kids before I have to start all over again. I'm just not in a season where interview prep (which may as well be a university 16-week course) is reasonable.

gosub1006• 1 year ago

That's exactly what they want: to filter out anyone who lacks time to prep. Such as those older candidates who have families and things to do outside of work.

hnthrow90348765• 1 year ago

It's been typical for me to get hiring managers/interviewers who don't feel it's a good question format for the job (this might be a .NET/C# cultural thing though).

Since the day-to-day job rarely requires it, and I've gotten jobs without it, there's little incentive to change unless I want to.

viccis• 1 year ago

I usually have to grind some leetcode problems because interviewers love to ask the in-place linear time array questions that absolutely don't resemble any work I do on a regular basis.

Aurornis13• 1 year ago

There are levels to this. Most people will at least prepare a resume and visit the company's website. That's interview prep.

You have to match the level of prep to the jobs you're pursuing. You don't need to grind LeetCode to have a SWE career. Most people never do that.

However if you're trying to get the more competitive jobs then some prep is necessary, as you already discovered with your Google interview.

The reason so many people do interview prep is that the ROI can be extremely high. Spending 100 hours grinding LeetCode sounds like hell to most people. Spending 100 hours doing practice problems to get a $100K raise for a job where you stay for 3 years suddenly becomes a $3000/hour career booster. That high paying job opens doors for more high paying jobs in the future, so the real number is even higher.

That's why people do it. You don't have to do it and it's not guaranteed to get you the high paying job by itself, but for people in the position to take advantage of it, the ROI is huge.

iamleppert• 1 year ago

It's really easy to catch these scammers. Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written. Actually take the time to read through the code and understand at least a part of it. In an interview, ask them some questions about it. People who actually wrote the code or did the thing can talk at length about about what they did, the history behind it, trade offs, have colorful stories about it, etc. I don't even care exactly about the technical details of it, I'm looking for signals that they are a liar.

If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag. If they can't describe how something works, that's a bigger red flag. You're not looking for photographic memory, but it's very obvious once you do it a few times who is real and who is lying.

It's common sense, if you don't put in at least a tiny bit of effort in your hiring process, you can only expect to attract similar low effort candidates.

wijwp• 1 year ago

"Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written."

I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.

spongebobstoes• 1 year ago

Spending a few hours to write some open source code seems like a reasonable tradeoff to get a high paying job.

It is surprising to me that folks looking for a new job would not do this proactively.

alkonaut• 1 year ago

Everyone can produce _something_ they have written. Yes there are people who literally clock in at work and code 8-5 for 10 years and never touched a hobby project or contributed to an OSS project. And you might not want to filter that group out completely. But if I was in that group and I was considering switching jobs, I'd definitely make sure I had some of that proprietary code stashed away so I could show a potential future employer. Yes you won't be allowed to do that. And it would be understandable if in some cases (like you work as a defense contractor) it's completely impossible. But for most people it should be possible to show something.

droopyEyelids• 1 year ago

Very easy but time-consuming

aforwardslash5• 1 year ago

If one cant take 30mins to vet a candidate code sample, one should not be hiring. Or working in anything that requires proper reasoning - its akin to not writing tests or do code reviews because "they take time".

polishdude203• 1 year ago

If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag.

If I just have to give a code example of mine on the spot during an interview with no prep, I'm sure as hell not going to remember why I took a certain approach unless there are comments.

giancarlostoro4• 1 year ago

If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag.

Is it? I can think of projects I've worked on that have come up with friends that I have no idea how they worked anymore, just barely if at all. If the project was within the last 2 years, then yeah, but if its 8 year old plus code, I don't expect anyone to remember. However, they could have looked at it when they sent it over and refresh their minds.

rahimnathwani5• 1 year ago

OK, so ask them for something they've written in the past 2 years.

intalentive2• 1 year ago

Consistent use of indefinite "they" is jarring and unnatural. It's one person, so use he/his or she/her.

outside1234• 1 year ago

Meanwhile, the company is free to lie to you nonstop about your prospects and then just randomly fire you one day.

myrandomcomment• 1 year ago

I linked this to my team and got back "I had almost identical experience with some candidates though no one admitted faking" and "One candidate just disconnected and was never heard back from after being asked to remove virtual background".

Interviewing is hard. Over the years the one thing I have learned is that for a technical role you want to interview people for how they THINK and REASON. This is hard and requires a time investment in the interview.

Back in the day when interviewing people for roles in networking, data center design, etc. I used to start by saying I am going to ask you a question and unless you have seen this very specific issue before you will NOT know the answer and I do not want you to guess - what I care about is can you reason about it and ask questions that lead down a path that allows you to get closer to an answer - this is the only technical question I will be asking and you have the full interview time to work thought it. I have people with 4+ CCIE family certs (this is back when they were the gold standard) and 10 year experience have no idea how to even reason about the issue. The candidates that could reason and work the problem logically became very successful.

For coding at my company now we take the same approach. We give candidates a problem with a set of conditions and goal and ask them to work through their approach, how they would go about testing it, and then have them code it in a shared environment of their choosing. The complexity of the problem depends on the level the candidate is interviewing for. For higher level engineerings besides the coding, we include a system architecture interview, presenting a requirement, taking the time to answer any questions, and then asking the candidate how they would implement it. At the end we do not care if it complies, what we care about is did the candidate approach the problem reasonably. Did they make sure to ask questions and clarifications when needed. Did their solution look reasonable? Could they reason on how to test it? Did their solution show that they thought about the question - IE, did they take the time to consider and understand before jumping in.

Anyone can learn to code (for the most part). Being able to think on the other hands seems to be something that is in short supply.

sam36• 1 year ago

[flagged]

speckx• 1 year ago

Ha! One of my clients who was interviewing about a dozen candidates had the same experience with most of them, they have a few left to interview.

All the candidates did really well on the online intake questions and the general meet and greet over video. However, once they arrived for the in-person part of the interview, and it got relatively technical, most did nowhere nearly as good as they did on the online. Only one or two admitted to using AI.

feverzsj• 1 year ago

It's called vibe interviewing.

mk89• 1 year ago

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

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

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

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

rDr4g0n• 1 year ago

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

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

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

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

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

sashimimono• 1 year ago

Regarding "Insist on camera ON phone screens.", DON'T do that.

Remember you try to hire a ${coder, admin, } not the next tv-news-presenter, beeing on screen is not a mandatory needed skill in most jobs.

By asking for something, that makes people uncomfortable, you will exclude a lot of likely brilliant candidates.

People who refuse to do video interviews may be for example: - people who value privacy, not only their own, but most likely yours too - people who feel very uncomfortable beeing watched by strangers and who think or even know that they will perform significant worse than in an audio-only interviewsituation - people who simply don't own a camera - people who use textonly computers offjob - poeple who have experienced that your 'standard'-videochat-app may not work, maybe because they use linux, bsd, os/2 or nonstandard operatingsystems - people who don't have broadband internet, yes there are still people like that - people who pay for every bit send, and yes having a not so cheap phone/internet contract is still common in some areas - people who feel uncomfortable to let strangers in their bedroom, even virtualy - people who have disabilities or cosmetic issues that they fear may distract you - people who have disabilities where moving and out-of-sync pictures distract them - people who tend to refuse unreasonable requests and who therefor regard you as unqualified to be their next employeer - ...

All of them have good reasons not wanting video interviews.

You, as an employer, may miss your best fit.

Flozzin• 1 year ago

It's also about what you are avoiding. Its clearly a trade off, as you lay out. But then you are opening up another set of problems you will have to tackle. For the interviewer in the article, they prefer cameras.

It's not much different than choosing to interview people who will come into the office. Of course you are limiting yourself to people in the area. But employers know this.

Also, this idea that there is a single best candidate is rubbish. There are multiple candidates that are just as good as the next. And every person has their ups and downs, as well as trade offs. I also find it hard to believe that most employers are going to be able to tell the difference on such a fine scale as to not be able to choose certain limiting factors.

vunderba• 1 year ago

Given that the norm before remote work was literally face to face interviews and being seen on a daily basis in an office, I buy the "privacy excuse" for about 5 seconds.

The level of trust is simply too low - if being seen for a few hours over a web camera is that much of a dealbreaker for a candidate, there's plenty of candidates to take their place.

minimally• 1 year ago

Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

Yes, developers use AI in 2025 and this will only increase as the technology gets better. Shaming the use of AI is like taking away a plumber's toolbox because you'd prefer they work with thier hands alone. Developers at all levels have a use for AI, and given two developers with the same skill level why wouldn't you prefer one who could use AI as a tool.

If you are already hiring an engineer on their output over their comprehension, rate the output that they give you

p0sixlang• 1 year ago

Hi, please don't produce dishonest clickbait content.

j45• 1 year ago

Was it really preparing?

Because the preparation ended up not being sufficient.

Assuming people doing the hiring can be outsmarted in all cases like this is part of the problem.

Maybe 'preparation' can evolve to the candidates asking AI for a crash course and way to start using it instead of talking the talk.

It never ceases to amaze me that it's surprised it's hard to BS your way through tech jobs at tech companies. Maybe it works with tech positions at non-tech companies.

Juliapierson1• 1 year ago

Am given this testimony from the deepest part of my heart, first i want to thank Dr Wealth for raising me from nothing to something, i used to work in a hospital as a cleaner until i met Dr Wealth online through a testimony i read about a woman he prayed for and gave a lottery winning number and the woman won 950,000$ i also decided to give it a try, so i contacted Dr Wealth through his email and he instructed me on what i need to do which i did without stress, the second day which was on Monday night he sent me some numbers and said i should go and play them on Tuesday draw which i did without hesitation, and i went to check the result the following day and to my greatest surprise my numbers were on the board as the winning numbers i never believed it at first i had to clean my eyes properly to confirm and behold i was the winner, i really can't thank Dr Wealth enough, i promise him i will share my good news to the world, if you have been playing lottery without success this is your opportunity to also be a winner, you can contact him through his Email at drwealthmag@gmail.com WhatsApp number: +18077891081

fgonzalesv• 1 year ago

This article highlights the AI part just as clickbait. The interviewed could have used job descriptions or interview guides/videos to exaggerate its resume, with the same result. Saying you used AI nowadays to find ANY information shouldn’t be more surprising than saying that you Googled a question.

Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

Related Stories