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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's actually a horribly awesome idea.

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

It's pretty obvious when someone's input focus changes to nothing or when their mouse leaves the screen entirely, or you could just ask to see the display settings to begin. Doesn't solve for multiple computers but it's pretty obvious in real time when someone's actual attention drifts or they suddenly have abilities they didn't have before.

Either way, screen sharing beats whiteboards. Even if we throw our hands up and give up, we'll be firing frauds before the probationary period ends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My take is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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