[HN Gopher] Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI
Author : justswim
Score : 371 points
Date : 2025-04-04 01:41 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kapwing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kapwing.com)
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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_wizard wrote:
| >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.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Some parts of the IT industry do lean on certs.
|
| IIUC, network engineering in particular is an area where
| vendor certs play a big role (mainly Cisco).
|
| AWS, Azure and GCP all have certs. There are certs for
| Windows and Linux administration. Java has certs.
|
| (I don't know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but
| they do exist.)
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think in part, the difference in what I mean about
| certification (perhaps licensure is better word here) is
| an industry body - accepted and respected generally by
| the businesses within our industry - that will
| demonstrate some form of competence
| 9rx wrote:
| I am not sure we can come to agree on what competence is.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I think if we try hard enough we can get there.
| 9rx wrote:
| If we can divide the industry into many small
| subindustries, each with their own licensing, _maybe_. If
| we want to treat it as the one big industry like we do
| right now, no chance. We won 't even be able to find
| agreement on surface level things, never mind the nitty
| gritty.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I would love to see a trade union-style group, where you
| are sponsored to join by an existing member and expected
| to do some work along side existing members before being
| certified as journey-level and recommended to employers.
|
| It would require that group to agree on what being a
| "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one
| and if you don't agree with this one you could form your
| own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write
| testable code and be able to label design patterns, and
| another expects pure functional programming, and another
| expects deep security expertise, and companies could know
| which of those they are looking for and inquire
| appropriately.
|
| We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or
| ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you
| can be sure that if someone spent five years there they
| know their stuff. But we could have a version where
| workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than
| relying on a specific for-profit company.
|
| It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the
| least-competent person who holds it. But the informal
| versions of this are pretty powerful.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'd rather it be like passing the bar, accounting exams
| (CPA etc) or actuarial exams. They test very relevant
| deep knowledge and act as a proof of fundamentals - and
| software engineer does have technical fundamentals that
| could just as well be tested for in a meaningful way.
| roguecoder wrote:
| That is an instructive example.
|
| In regular systems administration, having certs kinda
| suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job
| without a cert. Even people who had them would only
| include them on the resume when they were explicitly
| called for in a job description.
|
| With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at
| Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and
| run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about
| configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that
| world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS
| cert is just testing if you know the six different names
| Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more
| helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually
| understand LDAP or DNS.
|
| If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe
| certs will finally become useful for developers too.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > I don't know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but
| they do exist.
|
| The clients in some consulting projects definitely do.
| roguecoder wrote:
| We have some certs. The problem is that software
| development is about thirty different skills in a trench
| coat, and half of them we don't know how to evaluate (like
| slicing, or abstraction.)
|
| What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a
| bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's
| ability to memorize trivia.
|
| It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or
| Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer
| certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.
| rjsw wrote:
| People do take university courses in doing creative
| stuff, a fair number of sucessful novelists seem to have
| done one, RPG proposed that we could have something
| similar for software [1].
|
| [1] https://dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would be nice if there was at least a _bare bones_
| certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least
| some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop
| and if statement is. You'd still have to interview the
| candidate but you wouldn't have to start at Hello World
| or FizzBuzz.
|
| I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior
| Software Engineer who didn't know how to write a function
| that takes an integer parameter and then prints every
| integer from 0 to the argument passed.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > We should strongly consider this in our industry.
|
| These were very hot for system admins in the late 1990s and
| early 2000s. Is it still a thing today? Do high quality
| employers still care about these certs in 2025? I doubt it.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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_74 wrote:
| 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?
| Tcepsa wrote:
| If they do it properly and walk through it with you
| afterwards, it can be a good opportunity for _you_ to
| assess cultural fit as well based on the conversation that
| you have; are they hypercritical of unimportant details? Do
| they acknowledge good design and decisions? Do they offer
| their own insights, and if so, what do you think of those
| insights?
|
| Also, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position
| of looking to find a job without already having one; many
| people find that a compelling reason to "jump through hoops
| for nothing but middling compensation"
| roguecoder wrote:
| The best-paying companies jerk you around for months with
| hours and hours of in-person quizzes and expect you to
| memorize a bunch of trivia you will never use day-to-day so
| they can use their MIT intern interviews for everyone.
|
| Take-homes are a much more reasonable expectation than
| memorizing how to implement quick-sort on a white board.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Given a choice between studying for admittedly
| meaningless leetCode style interviews and making $250k+
| as a mid level developer at a BigTech or adjacent company
| and working really hard and slowly doing the corp dev
| grind for years to become a senior doing enterprise dev
| making $160K, why wouldn't anyone who is young and
| unencumbered with kids not try to do the former instead
| of dismissing those types of interviews?
|
| The $160K-$180k is about the median for a senior dev in
| most non tech companies in most cities not on the west
| coast. You can verify this on salary.com.
|
| Yes I know most of the 2.8 million devs in the US are on
| the enterprise dev side and that's where you will end up.
| But why not shoot for the moon?
|
| For context, I am 50. Spent all of my career until 2020
| on the "enterprise dev" side of compensation until a
| pivot and a position at BigTech in the consulting
| division fell into my lap (full time direct hire with
| cash + RSUs like any other employee).
|
| But I tell every new grad to do whatever it takes to get
| on to the _public_ tech company gravy train if possible.
|
| That being said, at 50, I would rather get a daily anal
| probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech again.
| I'm good with where I am working for a smaller company.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| 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
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Well I find conversations with people in interviews to be
| less of a game than giving them "homework" to do, given
| that unless they're totally green with no work experience,
| I'd assume they would actually have some stuff they've
| worked on and would like to talk about.
|
| It's completely bizarre to me that take home assignments
| have been normalized as part of an interview with
| professional working people.
| bitlad wrote:
| Sounds like all the interviews I do in india.
| tandr wrote:
| Would you be kind and share some examples?
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| I'm sure that we'll still be able to spot candidates doing
| the needful, and kindly reverting the same
| whatamidoingyo wrote:
| ... you do realize that India is in Asia, right?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mathgeek wrote:
| 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".
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Doesn't seem to function all that differently from _'
| higher education'._
| mathgeek wrote:
| Fair for the ones who don't put in any effort, but I don't
| buy this generalization for the folks who are real people
| in the middle between "completely unqualified" and "telling
| the truth about their experience".
| roguecoder wrote:
| Any effective screening strategy is going to catch the
| liars who do it only a little with some probability.
|
| Not least because being willing to be dishonest during an
| interview is a strong signal the candidate will be
| dishonest while they are employed as well, and companies
| want very much to not hire those people.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Fair, but that's different from everyone who uses AI
| ending up with the same keywords and content on their
| application (see GPP)
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess they will have to get the AI to listen in on the call
| next time.
| foobahify wrote:
| 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_74 wrote:
| 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.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| A lot of folks (and good engineers) arent that career
| oriented.
| foobahify wrote:
| I have to do a bragsheet now anyway and yeah like
| gritting teeth. It is documenting your job basically!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's not about being careee oriented. It's knowing that
| eventually you are going to need to interview for a job.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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)
| yojo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-v wrote:
| 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.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Look at the camera, not at the other person's eyes on your
| screen. You are not maintaining "eye contact" but the other
| person will think you are. Genius!
|
| It's actually fun how in video calls everybody thinks
| they're doing eye contact by looking at other people's
| faces on screen which in reality makes them look down and
| not straight at the camera.
| yojo wrote:
| I know Apple corrects for this in FaceTime at least - see
| the "EyeContact" feature. Not sure about other video call
| providers.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I share my room with my family and turned my camera to an
| angle to avoid filming them.
|
| The weird thing is, it looks like I'm looking at the off-
| screen when I'm actually watching the video, and vice
| verse.
| tekla wrote:
| You know you can just not make eye contact during a video
| call. I dont remember the last time I ever bothered.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| Fellow autist here, I don't think you have anything to
| worry about, the eye movements of someone reading are very
| different to autistic scanning while thinking. Reading has
| a rhythmic left right pattern to the eye twitches while
| scanning (at least for me) tends to either be fixed in
| place or rolling in a way that is basically impossible to
| confuse with reading.
| ern wrote:
| You're assuming that the person interviewing you can
| distinguish between those eye movements. That's a big
| assumption.
| zanecodes wrote:
| Closing your eyes is always an option, if you're trying to
| think deeply and without distraction. It helps a lot to
| explain your stream of consciousness as you think, even if
| it's disorganized, and you're definitely not cheating if
| your eyes are closed!
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Thanks, I hadn't considered this before.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| My AI implants projects text onto my closed lids, so
| checkmate!
| neilv wrote:
| That sounds worth trying. And it would definitely be
| something to practice in advance...
|
| When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking
| behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I
| automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting
| things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet,
| or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it
| seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While
| the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about
| the immediate problem and related things.
|
| (In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of
| the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about
| the job opportunity that's the real point of the
| exercise.)
|
| I don't understand how that works, but it usually works
| very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.
|
| If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by
| closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually
| contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's
| Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.
|
| Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview,
| trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking
| problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look
| like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other
| mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're
| suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences,
| disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant,
| redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but
| energized and commanding manner. You might get
| permabanned from that company, for coming across like an
| aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky
| interview process. :)
| crooked-v wrote:
| With current trends, I'm starting to wonder if telling
| people to answer all the questions with their eyes closed
| is a viable interviewing strategy.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I'm not looking for eye contact, and if that person had
| been just the same but with their eyes closed I would have
| thought much better of them. I would have still rejected
| them anyway, because the whole performance wasn't great,
| but it obviously wouldn't be any ChatGPT thing.
|
| But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place
| off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly
| went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and
| repeating the same thing for literally every question, even
| the ones that were intentional freebies based on their
| resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Most people have eye movements when recalling a memory,
| rather than maintaining eye contact
| (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-
| neuroscience/arti...)
|
| To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work
| is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits
| their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts
| speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across
| as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's
| intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up
| what to say.
|
| If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing
| some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I
| know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y
| and I'm trying to think if I could work around that...
| okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so
| that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming
| from.
| masfuerte wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I'd be very curious to see exactly what 'fixing' the eye
| movement actually looks like. Like are they always staring
| directly into the camera? Or are they sometimes randomly
| looking around all over the place? Cause that would look
| totally normal..
| insin wrote:
| Example video with a side-by-side view of the real and
| and adjusted video:
|
| https://twitter.com/1030/status/1615342312296534017
| xmprt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your
| text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Well, let's see you do it! Can you deblur something like
| the first 2-3 letters of a name?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Well, let 's see you do it!_
|
| That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just
| trying to provide some helpful info.
|
| If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the
| person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret
| knowledge.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| So then I'm going to interpret that as not being
| possible.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You can interpret it however you want. That doesn't mean
| you'll be interpreting it correctly. Good luck.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Knowing that it is possible is different than having the
| tools, having the expertise, and wanting to take the time
| to do it for a random HNer.
|
| There are several papers on the topic if you're that
| interested.
| goldchainposse wrote:
| 3. This probably counts as copyright infringement, unless it's
| chatbot output.
| neilv wrote:
| IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was found to be
| legitimate fair use.
| highwaylights wrote:
| 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)
| sethammons wrote:
| > 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.
| alexdowad wrote:
| I'm together with sethammons in that "rounding error". I
| actually go further and explicitly list things which I'm
| _not_ good at on my resume.
| wat10000 wrote:
| If you're really good at what you do, there's no need to
| embellish. Company is looking for five years of
| experience in something that's only been available for
| four years? Screw 'em, you don't want to work at such a
| stupid place anyway. Good employers know how to find good
| employees.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Yes me too, zero, and I'm pretty sure it's closer to zero
| than to 100% among others also, here where I live
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Me, too.
|
| But, sadly, OP is right.
|
| When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill
| the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest
| possible non-trivial question I can ask.
|
| For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills
| on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:
| SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;
|
| (EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER
| BY id;)
|
| I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask
| whether the result would show the newest employee at the
| top or the bottom.
|
| You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it
| wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't
| disqualify you.
|
| Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.
|
| I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you
| can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably
| haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill
| on your CV.
|
| You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests
| just like this one.
|
| (I won't use this particular one again.)
| hashmush wrote:
| > You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
|
| What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB?
| Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time
| (simplified, I know).
|
| I would be fine if it was "... _near_ the top or bottom "
| though.
|
| (Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Sorry, I wrote this in a hurry. Of course I would have
| included an ORDER BY clause.
| hashmush wrote:
| The one without that clause was still fun to think about,
| so no harm done!
| jkhanlar wrote:
| 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...
| highwaylights wrote:
| Thanks, interesting point and it hadn't occurred to me that
| it would read like a direct quote.
|
| I can't edit it now, so will leave this here to say that
| it's not a direct quote.
| mortar wrote:
| 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
| rdtsc wrote:
| > 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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...
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| They do do that. If it was merely for translation it would be
| okay, but usually it doesn't stop there.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed.
| Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?
| esafak wrote:
| They read the CV but placing too much weight on it makes it
| difficult to compare candidates objectively.
| neilv wrote:
| The CV is a starting point for conversations. On topics
| other than whether the person happened to memorize whatever
| Leetcode question was rolled on the dice. And it can more
| closely approximate actual work.
|
| Regarding cheating, and the widespread organized sharing of
| "which questions did this company ask, and what are the
| answers", the conversation isn't so vulnerable to that.
| raincom wrote:
| 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".
| neilv wrote:
| 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?
| raincom wrote:
| A combination of all three.
| xmprt wrote:
| The problem with modern hiring practices is that they're
| throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hiring based on
| past experience _is_ biased and often can lead to either
| subpar candidates (lemons) or overpaying. You 're either
| left with the people who didn't succeed at their previous
| job (but are good talkers) or people who have a brand name
| college/company but aren't really exceptional. On the other
| hand, trying to completely ignore past experience means
| you're left asking questions completely unrelated to real
| world work.
| fma wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| From the candidate's point of view, most companies' hiring
| processes are indistinguishable from a lottery.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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
| madeofpalk wrote:
| If someone used an AI tool, but they can't talk about its
| output sufficiently, then they'll cheated. They did themselves
| a disservice.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How do you make your "real" resume stand out among the
| thousands of fakes though?
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| This is very much not true: there are extremely-well-
| compensated roles still available in remote companies.
|
| It does require knowing how to collaborate remotely and
| being an already-skilled developer, but just because the
| bar is higher (and many people seem uninterested in meeting
| it) doesn't mean it has "failed".
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >there are extremely-well-compensated roles still
| available in remote companies.
|
| There always have been. Companies have made remote
| exceptions for decades.
|
| What we lost was the chance to normalize it for everyone.
| The bosses put that delusion to bed _real_ quick.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| 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.
| aaomidi wrote:
| > 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not
| come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the
| people who depend on that output will know. Totally
| unrelated people should reserve judgment.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > firing should not come as a surprise.
|
| The surprise was for the people around them, not the
| person being fired.
|
| > Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
|
| In the real world, they don't.
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one
| of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they
| took their own life. It's a known phenomenon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
| aaomidi wrote:
| Layoffs are generally random firing. Especially when we
| talk about % points.
| sethammons wrote:
| What's your point? The thread is about how other people
| being fired is stressful.
| ghaff wrote:
| You might be surprised how many totally oblivious and un-
| self-aware people there are out there.
| neilv wrote:
| Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are
| bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace
| come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?
|
| If so, a question is _why_ they aren 't bothered by that.
| Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic?
| Oblivious?
| Aurornis wrote:
| People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't
| mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that
| there was more to the story that they saw.
|
| The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and
| get spooked. One person would get fired and then two
| people around them would panic and start looking for
| other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back
| into their previous jobs.
|
| It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd
| discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.
|
| There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often
| teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because
| they had to deal with someone who lied through the
| interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle
| restarted.
| neilv wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to
| the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted,
| and how they related to new hires.)
|
| Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
| enasterosophes wrote:
| I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just
| this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen
| all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The
| company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the
| people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired
| quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief
| and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time".
| The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold
| mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move
| onto somewhere less cut-throat.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Yikes!
|
| That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are
| stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn
| successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired
| and then further stress out everyone else around them.
|
| Cortisol has never improved a line of code.
|
| Doing an explicit probationary period could at least
| reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems
| like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The
| company should probably be praying its employees are
| unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the
| mess they are making.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Maybe? But the idea of being on probation for a few
| months is basically how employment works in most
| countries of the world.
|
| So I think what I'm suggesting does have precedence and
| from my research there's not that big of an opposition to
| it.
| charlie0 wrote:
| This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The
| following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't
| want to fire people and will do our best to help you
| succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to
| stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will
| provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.
|
| Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious
| who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2
| months of their employment.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| If I'm not that interested in a company, I won't waste my
| time to contact them (or pay attention to their efforts to
| contact me). Having interest in them does not imply that I
| have an interest in travel, however. If I had an interest
| in travel, I'd have become an airline pilot or something
| like that instead.
|
| But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire
| to man a ship or be a touring musician - cool. A good fit
| isn't a good fit.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's fine to have quirks. And yes that is largely a
| quirk. And it's fine for others to decide that's it's
| more trouble than they want to deal with. I would
| probably be one of those people-/absent compelling
| reasons.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> It's fine to have quirks._
|
| Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their
| choice to make.
|
| _> I would probably be one of those people- /absent
| compelling reasons._
|
| Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling - there
| are jobs everywhere - but for the right business deal you
| can look past certain things.
| spzb wrote:
| What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not
| involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is
| not the barrier it was five years ago.
| baq wrote:
| Location isn't. Verification that you aren't a North
| Korea agent or just plain fraud is.
| ghaff wrote:
| Mostly the latter but still. What some people on this
| thread don't get is that unless you're a known industry
| luminary, companies are not going to accommodate odd
| preferences without a legit reason like a physical
| disability. The resume probably won't even make it out of
| HR. One key is both the company and candidate making
| requirements like travel clear up front. Saves everyone a
| lot of time.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Yeah. I'm not interested in a company that values my time
| so little that they demand that from me.
|
| You're absolutely right this would filter out candidates
| like me.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| esafak wrote:
| It definitely did change with AI. Imposters are becoming
| harder to detect, at a cost to the company.
| xigency wrote:
| With all the unemployed tech workers, would it just make
| sense to hire someone who knows their salt to do recruiting
| and interviews? Recruiters always seem to have a blast
| moving between random high-level companies and ghosting
| people over text, socials and the phone. If they lack both
| the social skills and the technical knowledge, I don't know
| what their value proposition is, but compared to chronic
| underemployment after actually learning Java, C, C++,
| they're clearly winning.
| theamk wrote:
| The problem is "knowing their salt to do recruiting" is
| very hard. In all places I've been, the kinds of
| interview we are talking about here (technical problems,
| etc...) are delegated to regular engineers. So those
| technical interviewers are likely great at reading and
| writing the code, but they many not be the best at
| spotting fake AI.
|
| (The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like
| resume filtering, general information and benefits.
| Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview,
| that is usually some sort of middle manager from the
| department doing the hiring)
| Arwill wrote:
| Interviewing has also become harder too. You try to search
| the net during the interview, because you forgot the name
| of a thing, and the interviewer will assume you are running
| with an AI chat, and are cheating the interview.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Looking things up on Google without being transparent to
| the interviewer was always cheating the interview.
| Arwill wrote:
| Its not about transparency, it about what the interviewer
| assumes about you, first hand. Just like you assuming
| that whoever is looking up things must be doing it in
| secret, with the intention of cheating.
| noirbot wrote:
| It depends - I'm conducting interviews now and I'm
| totally ok with people screen sharing and showing me
| their internet searches and AI prompts as part of the
| interview. Part of the skills I'm hiring for is "can you
| find the docs/information you need to solve this", so
| knowing how to use whatever tools you prefer in order to
| do that is important.
| aforwardslash wrote:
| This is actually a great idea, thanks!
| Joeboy wrote:
| I suspect the people saying nothing's changed are not people
| who've been conducting interviews recently.
| 9rx wrote:
| I haven't seen the use of AI in interviewing (non-tech)
| yet, but something has definitely changed: People are now
| applying in droves.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I have seen wild things in the last year.
|
| People taking minute-long pauses before answering
| questions. People confidently saying things that are
| factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they
| would say that. People submitting code they don't
| understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote
| something that way.
|
| I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a
| bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful
| software and are betting their entire business on these
| spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They
| just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate
| and the interviewer alike.
| whstl wrote:
| I interviewed every single candidate for development
| positions in a 300-400 company for the last three years
| and I saw some incredibly crazy stuff.
|
| - A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see
| the reflection of ChatGPT.
|
| - A candidate that would pause and look in a different
| specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds
| whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always
| the same direction, so it could have been a second
| monitor.
|
| - Someone who provided us with a Resume that said 25
| years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT,
| full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the
| interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20
| minutes.
|
| - Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone
| for an internship who was getting directions from someone
| whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot
| to mute the mic a couple times.
|
| Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super
| social are getting the short end of the stick. Some
| haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
| ilamont wrote:
| > I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting
| directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to
| hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
|
| What do you do when something like this happens in an
| interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee,
| make a joke about it?
| dpb001 wrote:
| I would tell the interviewee that I want to continue the
| interview with the other person since their answers
| indicate they'd be a good fit for the position.
| whstl wrote:
| I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way,
| then ask HR to reject the candidate.
|
| I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
|
| I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates,
| but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-
| of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something
| that I'd give feedback on. :/
| NullPrefix wrote:
| >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?
| sidrag22 wrote:
| >How is it not logically consistent?
|
| i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think
| its fair game to use their words to lie.
|
| screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of
| AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance
| of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be
| used to lie.
|
| most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI,
| just certain uses of it.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Using AI to review and improve your CV would make sense,
| just as you can ask a person for help and review.
|
| But not using it for creating lies and pretending you're
| skilled in areas where you're not.
|
| Or would you say that if HR uses humans to screen CVs, you
| can cheat by using a friend's CV instead (using a human,
| like HR)
| Aurornis wrote:
| Because it's a nonsensical reduction and false equivalence.
|
| It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores
| were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you
| steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does
| not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong.
| It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery
| store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.
|
| That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't
| make a right and you don't even know if the people you're
| interviewing with are the same as the people doing the
| thing you don't like.
| kevinsync wrote:
| 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)
| aforwardslash wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's missing the point. The goal is to have a level
| playing field for the interview.
|
| If your interview format allows people to use outside help
| but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level
| playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness
| to ask. In most interview formats it would not be
| acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.
|
| If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you
| should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret
| for people to discover.
| aforwardslash wrote:
| The questions dont require google; but what do you do
| when you don't know a specific thing? You search for it.
|
| The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a
| thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When
| was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or
| tree traversal algorithm from memory?
|
| and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of
| information in less than a minute, why should I refuse
| it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with
| analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.
|
| In most companies, the development process is
| collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings;
| why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely
| on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the
| power is down?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Seems pretty alien to my experience. A lot of senior talent
| was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway. I've certainly
| always interviewed in person and would probably turn down
| any company that didn't offer as an option aside from
| COVID. But maybe there were a lot of companies that were
| willing to compromise on face to face so they could get any
| supposed talent to sign on the dotted line. Of course, they
| didn't have much choice for a time even if they
| subsequently laid people off and/or largely froze hiring.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a
| lot anyway._
|
| Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps.
| Otherwise no - senior talent time is _way_ too valuable
| to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.
|
| The interview is the time to discuss if there is any
| benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after
| everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and
| you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are
| past interview territory at that point.
|
| They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview
| is deemed important.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I have had executives fly to meet me more often than the
| other way around.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > - 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| In more detail, in a glutted market with an unknown
| percentage of fakers, companies look for costly signals
| they can use to sort.
|
| This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set
| aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the
| workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies
| demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI
| adoption.
|
| If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to
| be something else. But one advantage suits have is that
| they have served as that signal for so long that they are
| extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take
| what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is
| very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a
| variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
|
| The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected
| programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession
| those things previously only top payers could demand
| cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think
| this prediction is wrong.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Man, as a 6'5" guy I wish getting a suit was that simple.
|
| > It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there
| are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice
| versa.
|
| This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor?
| Am I tailoring my own suit?
| sterlind wrote:
| > The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected
| programmers to wear suits to the interviews.
|
| this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be
| right, but it's just sad.
|
| personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most
| non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more
| likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe
| it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look
| for suits like quants at an investment bank.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Which highest paying dev jobs do you have in mind?
| sethammons wrote:
| Outside of fintech, none of the highest paid devs are in
| suits. Not sure if it is even still a thing in fintech
| actually.
|
| I am FAANG/FAANG adjacent. People making 400-700k/yr. I
| only see suits at holiday parties.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > - 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.
| eikenberry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Requiring people to be able to interact with other people is
| not "bigotry".
| eikenberry wrote:
| No, but ignoring their disabilities and saying to just
| learn to do better is not good enough. It is no different
| from telling a deaf person to learn to hear with their
| other sense, it doesn't make sense as their disability is
| what prevents it. People do need to be able to interact
| with other people, it just doesn't work like it does with
| non-neurodivergent people. It takes an effort on both
| sides. Quit putting it all on the person who cannot do what
| you want. That is the bigotry.
| qkeast wrote:
| I'm deaf and rely on real-time captions for calls. In an
| in-person interview scenario, I'm at a huge disadvantage
| and not able to perform at my best. In a video call, I'm on
| equal ground.
|
| It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to
| interact with other people."
| donnachangstein wrote:
| Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would
| comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a
| legitimate disability e.g. providing a deaf person the
| interview questions on paper or even having an ASL
| interpreter present.
|
| In fact many mention it up front on the screening call
| before any questions are asked.
| niccl wrote:
| > Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would
| comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a
| legitimate disability
|
| so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
| nradov wrote:
| That depends on several factors. You should read the
| official guidance.
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-
| reas...
| donnachangstein wrote:
| > so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
|
| It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able
| to function well around other humans is a job
| requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why
| do you think behavioral questions are often asked during
| interviews?
|
| For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair
| could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or
| a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of
| any accommodation provided.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yeah but software / digital is a great equalizer, where
| all kinds of people can contribute even with disabilities
| or neurodivergence. The whataboutism doesn't really work.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Sure. But if you are unable to really explain yourself
| and your thought process in the hiring process, they
| might feel like you are unfit for the interview. they are
| way more likely to pick a guy who might be a little worse
| than you in coding but they actually liked him in the
| interview.
|
| I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a
| fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI
| and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going
| anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might
| have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that
| they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote
| interviews?
| shade wrote:
| Yep, I'm in the exact same situation as you.
|
| The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't
| frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend
| time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually
| see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is
| better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_
| that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace
| about this, but who knows.
|
| As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and
| completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a
| collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and
| was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made
| there.
| qkeast wrote:
| I'd love to read this collection of reviews!
| atoav wrote:
| I am pretty sure my current employer could make an
| exception if you can show proof of your condition (which
| would benefit you either way in Germany). But we also
| like to see collegues in person, as this is what the
| interaction for many positions might look like anyways.
| mariusor wrote:
| Demanding said proof is very illegal in multiple
| jurisdictions.
| biztos wrote:
| "Prove you're deaf" would be a pretty rude thing to say,
| but you also don't want to hire someone who's lying about
| a disability. Presumably you'd do some kind of vetting
| before an in-person interview, and certainly before a
| hire.
|
| Anyway in Germany I bet there's a Taubenausweis
| (Gehohrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of
| official status marker, and the employer would expect you
| to show it to HR.
| mariusor wrote:
| Sorry for the snark, but yeah, I agree, human dignity and
| empathy have no place in the capitalist work place. You
| must prove you're disabled or else.
| relativ575 wrote:
| I've worked under communist regime. A real one, a few
| decades ago, and let me tell you, they also demanded
| proof of disability. Did you have different experience?
| mariusor wrote:
| I wasn't trying to claim that only capitalists dehumanize
| people. But that's what we mostly see today because
| that's the majority of our society.
|
| When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being
| discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to
| say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of
| organisation that treats employees as "resources" will
| work in a decent way.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| What's wrong with asking people to prove they're
| disabled? There definitely exist people that lie about
| being disabled too. Many places have a persons with
| disability certificate given by the government, so
| "proving", just means entering the ID of that certificate
| in a form.
| mariusor wrote:
| > What's wrong with asking people to prove they're
| disabled
|
| It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually
| ends up having people trivialise the problem a person
| might suffer from.
|
| As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from
| executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a
| position behind "you need to be able to function in
| society" is an indecent request to people that have
| difficulties doing so.
|
| And from personal experience, once you're in the second
| half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and
| then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy
| required to get a government approved "stigma
| certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's
| provision of spoons.
|
| I for one would like my manager and my employer to
| understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open
| spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would
| prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.
|
| How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an
| office severely impairs my ability to reason about
| problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher
| bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people
| enough?
| itishappy wrote:
| > As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from
| executing their contractual obligations [...]
|
| That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being
| asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for
| accommodations.
|
| > And from personal experience, once you're in the second
| half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and
| then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy
| required to get a government approved "stigma
| certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's
| provision of spoons.
|
| I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well.
| Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding
| a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to
| obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.
|
| > How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in
| an office severely impairs my ability to reason about
| problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher
| bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people
| enough?
|
| Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified
| professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also
| how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often
| come with suggestions tailored to your specific
| disability.
| itishappy wrote:
| In the US, the ADA allows employers to request proof of
| disability.
| qkeast wrote:
| I had an interview cut short early once because the
| interviewer said "I have to make sure we're allowed to
| hire you."
|
| This was in Germany.
|
| Ultimately, accommodations help but they don't place me
| on even ground: they still single me out and make people
| consider whether I'm capable based on accessibility, not
| skill.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| > Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.
|
| Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the
| team.
| eikenberry wrote:
| So fly them to multiple destinations? I was hired 1 year
| ago and interviewed with ~14 people all living in different
| locations. That could be paired down, but it won't ever
| reach the single destination that the OP is referring to.
| E_Bfx wrote:
| Yes but it only one face to face meeting is needed in the
| process to see if someone is using AI to answer
| interview. The 13 other interviews can then be online.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| this is a great suggestion actually!
| Aurornis wrote:
| Nobody is seriously suggesting you perform _every_
| interview step in person. The suggestion is to consider
| doing the last interview in person. It could even be with
| one other person.
| sjamaan wrote:
| You can always rent a conference room for an hour or so
| somewhere in between.
| donnachangstein wrote:
| > 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.
| re-thc wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks
| or sits in a room with anyone?
|
| > Hiring is all about finding the best candidate.
|
| Then what is leet code about?
| motorest wrote:
| > This assumes that was the job? What if the job never
| talks or sits in a room with anyone?
|
| That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't
| require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company
| and project has its own requirements.
|
| This does not reject the value of soft skills and being
| able to interact with other people.
|
| You can also frame this from another perspective. How far
| should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and
| straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber
| have the right to advance in hiring processes just
| because others found him unpleasant to work with?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Sitting in a conference room under pressure after
| potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't
| test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've
| known many excellent engineers that buckle under that
| conditional.
| motorest wrote:
| > Sitting in a conference room under pressure after
| potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't
| test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've
| known many excellent engineers that buckle under that
| conditional.
|
| You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness
| of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the
| value and importance of soft skills.
|
| Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable
| skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when
| being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue
| that that's your hiring decision when other candidates
| are able to perform in similar circumstances.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Literally no other industry except for the performing
| arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior
| people to perform "work samples" under pressure, they
| just talk to them and dig into past work.
|
| All of the really damaging hires, I've seen in the last
| couple decades have been engineers with high negative
| productivity who were great at passing high pressure
| technical interviews.
|
| Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups
| to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never
| experienced anything even remotely similar to a
| performative technical interview. Even when everything is
| on fire, it's not even close to the same thing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've always wondered: is there a LeetCode equivalent for
| doctors? When a hospital interviews a surgeon, do they
| roll out a cadaver and ask them to remove the gall
| bladder in 15 minutes while the interviewer scrutinizes
| how they hold the scalpel?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked
| _credentialism_ , is closer to traditional craftsmanship
| and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than
| the "every hacker for themselves" world of modern tech.
| re-thc wrote:
| > is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the
| progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the
| "every hacker for themselves".
|
| Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like
| this?
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| In the US, candidates to become physicians go through a
| 5-7 year residency which has low pay, dangerously long
| hours, and has a supervisor watching over them who can
| flunk them for failing to meet their standards. That's
| _after_ a normal bachelors degree and then medical
| school. Does that sound like something anyone would like
| to go through to become a software developer just to
| avoid technical interviews?
| lores wrote:
| I remember reading an article linked here (which I can't
| find anymore) about a lawyer who converted to software
| engineering. He was contrasting tech interviews, with 3,
| 4, 6 rounds* and live coding and high-pressure testing
| with the exactly one deep chat for a lawyer about to
| handle multi-hundred-million dollars lawsuits. Insanity.
|
| * special demerits to Canonical
| motorest wrote:
| > Literally no other industry except for the performing
| arts interviews like this.
|
| No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring
| process is notorious for culminating with an on-site
| interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all
| topics they find relevant.
|
| Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process
| focuses particularly on soft-skills.
|
| Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job
| where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural
| fit?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable
| skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when
| being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue
| that that's your hiring decision when other candidates
| are able to perform in similar circumstances.
|
| I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last
| time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do
| this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under'
| and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews
| can push on you.
|
| I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10
| or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops
| diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not
| when identifying critical client crashes.
| motorest wrote:
| > I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last
| time you've seriously worked under pressure?
|
| Jetbrain's 2023 Developers' Lifestyles survey states that
| around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
|
| Having to work weekends is the last resort when working
| under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they
| are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of
| "crunch time".
|
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I asked you, specifically. I'll bite anyways, but I'll
| expect an actual answer from you.
|
| > Having to work weekends is the last resort when working
| under pressure
|
| No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a
| live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every
| eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on
| the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug
| that was causing relatively minor headaches but they
| wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible.
| This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the
| bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down
| my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on
| the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
|
| It's often the result of either shitty management or
| people that cannot log off.
|
| > No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
|
| Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I
| would know, I've worked in professional game development.
| And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If
| a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to
| work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk
| away.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > Then what is leet code about?
|
| At FAANG and friends? Discouraging job hopping to slow
| wage growth.
|
| Elsewhere? "FAANG does it and they're rich, so if we want
| to become rich we should also do it".
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Everything you just said also applies to someone who's
| deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
|
| Apply that same logic to someone with one of those
| conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > Everything you just said also applies to someone who's
| deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
|
| A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically
| impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A
| deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who
| cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an
| hour is not a good employee where that is required. What
| makes the last one special compared to others? They can
| be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session
| musician/mover, I just don't see controversy
| watercolorblind wrote:
| A physically impaired person can be a good yoga
| instructor: they'll suggest alternatives,
| different/better cues, or provide more accessible classes
| such as yin or seated yoga.
|
| Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't
| mean they were before, and an instructor won't
| necessarily move through the poses with the class since
| they can have 2-3 classes per day.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| If you don't like yoga instructor just replace it with
| crossfit trainer or olympic athlete or tree surgeon or
| personal bodyguard
|
| Edit: replaced "triggered" with "don't like"
| adwf wrote:
| Because an autistic person can be an amazing programmer?
| As could a blind person, a deaf person, etc...
|
| Simple accommodations can be made if needed and then
| there's no need to exclude people on old-fashioned
| prejudice.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Where did I mention being an amazing programmer? If
| that's the requirement then why not. The comment was
| replying specifically about environment where you gotta
| sit through hour long meetings and that is what I wrote
| about
|
| maybe there is a company where being an amazing
| programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed
| programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate
| anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to
| work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries
| the project and interacts nicely with customers when
| needed. The last one was probably the most valuable
| adwf wrote:
| > Where did I mention being an amazing programmer?
|
| I mean... that's what the title and context of the
| discussion thread is all about?
| throwaway290 wrote:
| If you are an amazing programmer but can't function in
| the 1 hour sitdown meeting which is part of your job
| activities then you are de facto worse candidate than the
| next amazing programmer who can, that's just how it is.
| ellen364 wrote:
| I'm curious about this. When I've hired, I've always
| wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are
| required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them.
|
| People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's
| obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend
| lots of time defining the technical skills required for a
| job and handwave the rest.
|
| I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it".
| But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests
| that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an
| hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces
| that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places
| where the important thing was being able to go away and
| make progress on something for a few weeks.
|
| I suspect there are people with autism reading these
| threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave
| with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to
| make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half
| way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk
| about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget
| that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like
| neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
| sjamaan wrote:
| I like this idea of making the soft skills explicit. Both
| to the interviewers and the candidate (i.e. in the job
| posting itself). This would save everyone involved a lot
| of time, too!
| housecarpenter wrote:
| As somebody with autism, one thing I'd say from my
| experience (I don't know how many people will agree) is
| that interviewing has felt like a much more severe stress
| test of my soft skills than anything I've had to do while
| actually being employed. While employed, the vast
| majority of my social interactions are oriented around
| some technical task that I need to work on with other
| people, and conveying information effectively so as to
| bring about the completion of this task. This is
| precisely the kind of social interaction that I feel most
| competent in--I feel like I'm pretty good at it,
| actually! What I struggle with are social interactions
| that are more open-ended, that are more about emotional
| connections and getting people to like you, and I feel
| like interviewing is an interaction of the latter type.
|
| In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode.
| LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business
| requirements are both "coding" but they're quite
| different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the
| former is probably good evidence they can do the latter,
| but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter
| without being able to do the former. So it is, in my
| view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on
| the job.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what
| soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a
| candidate has them.
|
| Being able to communicate clearly and interact with
| coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most
| jobs.
|
| Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to
| interviews because you have to communicate as part of the
| interview. Don't overthink it into something more
| complicated.
|
| > being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an
| hour is an important part of their job. In some
| workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
|
| I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to
| converse with coworkers in a conference room is an
| interview proxy for being able to communicate with
| coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their
| ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to
| be in a conference room because that's where the
| interview takes place.
|
| The internet is always full of arguments that some people
| might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job.
| That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of
| the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview
| (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers,
| or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't
| disappear after those candidates are hired. People are
| usually trying their hardest during the interview to look
| good, so often those characteristics become worse, not
| better, once they're hired.
|
| It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to
| think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to
| maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates
| brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but
| in real jobs clear communication is really important.
| baketnk wrote:
| there is a world of difference between interacting with
| three people you don't know for an hour for the explicit
| purpose of stress testing your experience and knowledge and
| interacting with three people that you talk to every day
| talking about a project that is well familiar to you.
| lores wrote:
| There is a big difference between being in a conference
| room for an interview where you are judged, and on a
| regular work day. There is for me, and I'm old and have
| done dozens and dozens of interviews, largely successfully.
| Don't summarily judge people, especially if they're not
| neurotypical, as often happens in software.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > 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.
| motorest wrote:
| > 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?
| ang_cire wrote:
| > they will of course favor those who they are able to
| effectively interact with. This is not bigotry, is it?
|
| If "those who they are able to effectively interact with"
| ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like
| them, then yes it absolutely is.
| sayamqazi wrote:
| Adding to your point. Why arent we saying that the
| "noraml" people are the ones bad at interacting with
| neurodivergents. Their supposed social skills are so
| limited that they can only work with people who act and
| behave like them.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| That's an uncharitable interpretation. But if that is
| what it ends up meaning then i do agree, that's bigotry.
|
| A more charitable interpretation might mean "the
| candidate is able to clearly explain (through some
| medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and
| why they picked that solution. They were also able to
| correctly answer follow up questions". If _that_ is what
| is meant, then that's not bigotry IMO.
| ljm wrote:
| I wouldn't say uncharitable, just that the best-
| intentioned version is pretty naive, especially in the
| current political climate where every effort to bring
| that kind of inclusivity and open-mindedness to the table
| is being actively regressed.
|
| For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove
| unconscious bias from these decisions as much as
| possible, because they genuinely want to find the most
| capable person for the job regardless of their personal
| preferences, there's still a whole world out there where
| that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
| motorest wrote:
| > If "those who they are able to effectively interact
| with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or
| believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.
|
| It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.
|
| That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills.
| Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your
| organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly
| work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't
| need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who
| are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers
| filter them out. Problem averted.
| _blk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| thruway516 wrote:
| You're merely reinforcing their point. Its so out of
| fashion it would be considered a bold or even edgy choice
| just as dressing casually once would.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| > - 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sethammons wrote:
| The general rule is to dress one step up from those in the
| role. Everyone in hoodie and shorts? Wear pants. Everyone
| in collared polos? Go business casual with maybe a blazer.
| Showing up a level lower makes you look unprepared. Showing
| up some levels higher, like in a suit to a hoodie shop,
| shows lack of research and reading a room.
|
| In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just
| on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot
| impression wise.
| j1elo wrote:
| That's the point. One of my first interviews in tech was
| with a CEO who dressed with an Iron Maiden t-shirt. That
| settled to me the question about whether I would need to
| worry too much about looks at the office! :)
| dagw wrote:
| _whether I would need to worry too much about looks at
| the office_
|
| 'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns
| white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go
| out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very
| uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who
| wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as
| judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored
| Italian suits.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Tech uniforms: instead of spending $2500 on four Brooks
| Brothers suits (seasonal sales), spend $2500 on fancy
| Nordic hiking clothes that you'll mostly wear sitting at
| a desk, as if an Arctic expedition might suddenly break
| out at the office and you'll need to at least have your
| base and mid layers ready.
|
| Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are
| $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.
| crabbone wrote:
| Erm... no?
|
| The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was
| the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk
| to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it
| wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front
| of some fifty men, including senior management of the
| said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a
| pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show
| up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)
|
| Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.
|
| Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast
| majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will
| raise more questions about your sanity than score any
| points on preparedness.
| sethammons wrote:
| What is wrong with the advice? You are saying nobody was
| wearing a suit. I said dress a step up (for the
| interview). Sr. Management in graphic tees? Wear a polo
| shirt. Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic
| tee. And if the CEO wears a tee-shirt and all the rest
| are in some other category of dress, base your interview
| attire based on everyone else.
| crabbone wrote:
| Mmm... because I'd prefer the approach of Donald Knuth:
| wear dashiki to special events (like interviews)? I don't
| mean I endorse West-African style literally. Just either
| wear something that says something about you, if you are
| into that, or be neutral and approachable. No need to
| plus one anyone.
| ljm wrote:
| > Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee.
|
| I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the
| front. The very definition of smart casual.
| sethammons wrote:
| I hired a guy who did that :) If you're on, hi Minh
| :wave:
| borroka wrote:
| A few months ago, the 60-year-old CEO of the previous
| company I worked for, employing 100,000 people, showed up
| at our satellite office with other senior executives and
| EVPs for an official visit.
|
| He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt
| combination (the same as the other executives) and it
| looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the
| jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I
| thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there,
| who cared about looking presentable given the importance
| of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked
| much better than the power-ups.
|
| In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about
| the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but
| that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
| baketnk wrote:
| is it bad form to just like, ask your HR screener what the
| general dress code/vibe is like?
| yencabulator wrote:
| These days, the screener is often external to the company
| and has never visited the office.
| siva7 wrote:
| 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.
| _blk wrote:
| As I learned, you can also be yourself, never wear a suit
| on the job and still wear one for the interview. First
| impressions count. Once people know I can wear a suit they
| just don't seem to mind me in shorts anymore.. So I might
| have a social skill after all :D
| tuvang wrote:
| First impressions do count but I think the above poster
| has a point, a suit can actually harm your chances in an
| environment where no one wears suits.
| roenxi wrote:
| I'd want to see some actual hard evidence before I
| believed that. The usual way social cues work is they are
| devastatingly effective even if people claim they are
| not. Much like how most interviewers are honestly
| convinced that their approach is unbiased but in practice
| they tend to hire people who are like themselves.
|
| My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get
| better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-
| skill roles but I'd assume still present.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Wearing a suit to a tech interview in silicon valley
| would without a doubt send the signal that either (a)
| they have absolutely no clue about SV work culture, or
| (b) they're a "look at me" guy who dresses odd on purpose
| lores wrote:
| If they're young it can also be because that's what
| they've been told to do, if they're from a different
| culture (even an American one) it may be shockingly weird
| not to wear a suit to an interview, and there are even
| people who wear suits all the time because a well-made
| suit is very comfortable, with no more showing off
| involved than dressing up any other way. An interview is
| not a regular work day, best not to summarily judge
| people like that.
| khazhoux wrote:
| > If they're young.... if they're from a different
| culture...
|
| These are just instances of my point (a): not having a
| clue about SV work culture.
|
| > there are even people who wear suits all the time
|
| Not in silicon valley tech. I mean, sure, maybe there's
| one guy and the number is not zero.
| lores wrote:
| My point is that even knowing the work culture of SV does
| not mean that people necessarily believe it applies to
| interviews too, or that a suit will be a negative point,
| rather than good or neutral. There is a strong culture of
| looking smart at interviews that overrides knowledge of
| day-to-day attire. If you really care about people being
| in casual clothes, mention it in the invite, rather than
| looking down on them for doing what has been ingrained to
| be appropriate.
| ljm wrote:
| Rather than thinking about the suit itself, I'd consider
| the dress code or culture of the company you're
| interviewing for.
|
| Turning up in formal business wear isn't going to be a
| positive social cue if everybody you interact with is
| dressed casually.
|
| The social cue you'd be giving off is that you stick out
| like a sore thumb and probably didn't do your research on
| the company before you showed up.
|
| Literally no different than turning up to Lloyd's of
| London in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I agree, but I suspect that you'd have much better luck
| if you wore something that was superficially similar to
| the kinds of things other people wore, but was much
| better fitted and higher quality. For instance, if you
| showed up in a nice pair of chinos and a tailored
| buttoned shirt (of appropriate formality), that might
| come across as being really put together rather than
| ignoring subtle social cues by dressing in something that
| stands out by not fitting in.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| The problem is that when someone who doesn't usually wear
| a suit puts it on just for one day, it's blatantly
| obvious he's uncomfortable.
| wavemode wrote:
| > in practice they tend to hire people who are like
| themselves.
|
| So then by your own admission, the best way to come
| dressed is the same way your interviewer tends to dress.
|
| Which is essentially what most people in this thread are
| arguing for - dress to match the company's culture.
| thruway516 wrote:
| I don't know where you live but for most tech jobs here
| even outside of sv its almost as bad as putting your
| photo on a resume. Even for very senior non-technical
| roles you're better off showing up in slacks and a blazer
| than the whole enchilada
| dagw wrote:
| _First impressions do count but I think the above poster
| has a point, a suit can actually harm your chances in an
| environment where no one wears suits._
|
| There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in
| wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun
| intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel
| uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you
| walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good,
| and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard
| time seeing how it will count against you.
| throwanem wrote:
| Intimidating a potential hiring manager right up front
| isn't usually a great play.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| With reference to the GP about awkward people, if an
| adult hiring manager is intimidated by an professional
| applicant wearing a suit to an interview in good faith
| (after all, it's widely seen as mark of taking the
| interview seriously), I think it is perhaps not the
| applicant who need to learn the social skills.
|
| If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a
| flex and show of good intent, they probably should go
| back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of
| character.
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, I agree unreservedly. But if I still need to decide
| how to dress for the interview...
| WJW wrote:
| If there is a de facto dress code and you knowingly go
| against it, even if you look good in whatever you do
| wear, it makes you look like you don't understand the
| prevailing norms. This could lead to worries you might
| not align with other team norms either.
| lores wrote:
| If it's so important, the interview invite should mention
| that casual wear is expected. Like it or not, most people
| take interviews seriously, and have been taught that you
| show you take the interview seriously by wearing a suit.
| borroka wrote:
| Which is funny, because weren't we in tech the people who
| aspired to "think different"? But then it didn't become
| think-different for the individual but for the tech in-
| group against the "square", boring, formality-driven out-
| group. And since the world is becoming increasingly
| informal and any group worth its salt needs to
| differentiate itself, tech people might be the first to
| return to wearing suits and ties (or dresses) to work.
| I'd love that.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Wearing a suit to a technical interview is an immediate
| red flag. Everybody knows you don't wear suits in this
| industry, so what's your motive? Your ability to wear a
| suit is irrelevant for the job, so what weaknesses that
| _are_ relevant are you rather clumsily trying to hide?
| malfist wrote:
| It's a red flag? Come on, if I wear a suit it's because I
| want too and has no impact on my skills as a software
| engineer.
|
| Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear
| isn't productive
| el_memorioso wrote:
| I would go as far as to say being this hyper-focused on
| clothes rather than if the person is sociable and
| competent is a red flag itself. It is rather superficial.
| Vague platitudes about "culture" might get thrown out,
| but are we engineering and building things or are we
| putting on a fashion show?
| atq2119 wrote:
| Calling it a red flag may have been too harsh. It's
| certainly not an immediate no.
|
| However, like it or not, it _is_ a signal because it
| means you deviate significantly from the mode of the
| distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests
| that if anything, all else equal that signal is a
| negative one.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| I've gotten a job offer from every technical interview I
| ever took in a suit, so it Worked For Me. And none of the
| jobs that I took I ever wore a suit to again (except for
| conferences or trade shows, and occasionally when I was
| going out after work to somewhere posh, which did provoke
| fun "Omg are you interviewing" questions!) Which I
| actually have found a bit of a shame because I do quite
| like a chance to wear a suit, though I'm also grateful
| not to have to iron infinite shirts.
|
| Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where
| people are wound this tightly about it!
| lores wrote:
| An interview is not a regular work day. If only things
| relevant to the job were required in an interview, no one
| would be talking about whiteboard exercises.
| exe34 wrote:
| can you just ask them before the interview? "is it okay
| to wear a suit, or do you guys have a stick up your..."?
|
| I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about,
| and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go
| into the office, so I really don't care about the suit
| either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you
| don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess
| if the job isn't about mindreading.
| graemep wrote:
| It has spread to other industries and circumstances other
| than suits.
|
| I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most
| things other than formal occasions like wedding, funerals,
| or formal dinners.
| schnable wrote:
| Yep. The great thing about the expectation of suit is
| always knowing what to wear.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most
| things_
|
| Can't go wrong with "smart casual"
|
| // not sure that helps :)
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| "Be yourself"? What does that mean?
|
| What if wearing a suit is "being myself"? You'll be
| penalized in tech for that.
|
| Not everyone views the wearing of suits as some kind of
| punishment.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Seeing someone wearing a suit for a dev interview would
| make me think one of the following:
|
| (1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in
| a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.
|
| (2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your
| skills?
|
| (3) They take looks way more serious than they should,
| maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.
|
| (4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software"
| developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my
| team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not
| get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical
| reasoning.
|
| That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the
| person, but they would be initially sorted into the
| category of managerial or close to management, rather than
| close to the other engineers, which is not a positive
| signal to send.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Sad because I /like/ wearing a suit, even to the grocery
| store. I know I must look weird, but I feel more
| comfortable with and confident in myself.
| lgas wrote:
| You probably wear suits that fit and the confidence
| probably shows through. Not to stereotype, but I suspect
| a large number of developers have one or two suits they
| wear for job interviews, weddings and funerals, and they
| bought them long enough ago that they are too loose or
| too snug by now, and consequently feel uncomfortable when
| wearing them. At least this used to be me.
| amrocha wrote:
| This feels like such a narrow view of the world. Not
| necessarily discriminatory, but on the path to get there.
|
| So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel
| about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to
| be confident in an interview.
|
| And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed
| beard would you think "he probably spends too much time
| on his beard, he must be a bad programmer"? I bet you
| don't.
|
| I'm not trying to criticize you too much, but this just
| feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for.
| You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This
| way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile
| to women and minorities.
|
| Our industry in north america is known for lots its
| egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel
| about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to
| be confident in an interview.
|
| Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel
| confident that says something about them. It may just be
| a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills,
| but it often is not. There's no reason you need to wear a
| suit to feel confident.
|
| > You get judged on your merits, not on anything else.
| This way of thinking is how you create an environment
| hostile to women and minorities.
|
| How often does tech discriminate for "culture fit"
| reasons? Someone's personality fit is often a huge point
| of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone's
| personality and choices.
|
| I'm not advocating for it being an absolute state, but
| you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact
| that dressing up far more than is needed implies you
| don't culturally understand. It's as simple as that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| So tech got rid of the suits, but kept the desire to judge
| people at interviews based on their clothes?
|
| Great. Fantastic job everyone /S
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember reading, when IBM turned "business casual,"
| that everyone adopted the same outfit: Khaki slacks, and
| blue polo shirts.
| hylaride wrote:
| As a 25 year hoodie-wearing tech person, I'd pick suits
| over Khakis and polo shirts any day.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a
| high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of
| intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity.
|
| At least requiring a suit requires something
| aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity.
| Reverse snobbery demands you dress _worse_ and beneath
| it.
| yks wrote:
| Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is
| "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a
| t-shirt/jeans combo.
| borroka wrote:
| In human dynamics, very little is based on "first
| principles". Some words are considered vulgar and others
| are not. Why? Aren't they just a sequence of letters?
| They certainly are, but those sequences have been
| assigned a meaning that does not derive from any "first
| principle".
|
| In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100
| years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men.
| Then expectations changed and now some, many even,
| consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as
| a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your
| lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that
| you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be
| perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically
| pleasing.
| yks wrote:
| I absolutely agree, humans are creatures of context,
| that's why GPs opinion that not wearing a suit is a
| "perverse mirror image" and "mediocrity" is out of touch.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100
| years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men._
|
| Traditionally, it was a suit _and hat_. Going suit alone
| was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now
| consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.
|
| _> Maybe in a few years, you 'll go and talk to your
| lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine,
| you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing._
|
| It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a
| t-shirt like a dignified man.
| rafterydj wrote:
| Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of
| clothes that are designed to look good on a male
| silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is
| aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the
| entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of
| wider society surrounding tech.
|
| Most people off the street would agree that a suit is
| more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a
| suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and
| intention about the way that you look that simply wearing
| a t shirt with jeans does not.
|
| To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt /
| jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an
| industry got away with it at first, because techies were
| not interfacing with clients directly or simply because
| they're working class.
|
| You can argue about the elitism and class differences
| surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think
| it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't
| aesthetically better just because of the media image for
| hacker types.
| yks wrote:
| Most of the popular outfits are "designed to look good"
| to a high degree, and then humans are quite bad at
| fitting the garments on average. Poorly fit suits that
| don't look good on a male silhouette are absolutely a
| thing, and I'd posit that an unkempt male wearing a
| poorly fitting cheap suit looks "lower status" than a fit
| and well groomed male wearing a stylish t-shirt/jeans
| combo.
|
| So all we have is the tradition that "high status males"
| in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public,
| which is true and valid, but it does not translate into
| the inherent superiority of this garment.
| filoleg wrote:
| 100% agreed. I've seen way more than enough people in
| poorly-fitting expensive suits to last me a lifetime, and
| it is just painful to watch.
|
| The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily
| tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn't the case
| with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor
| those, i guess, but that's very uncommon.
|
| For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding
| ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your
| shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a
| non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that's their
| main downside.
|
| Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any
| time. Beyond that, it is situational.
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe explain aesthetics from first principles sounds like
| demanding the equation that proves Mona Lisa is a good
| painting.
|
| I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it's a fact that in
| the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more
| or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and
| more formal is widely considered to be more dignified
| than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren't
| aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class
| (socioeconomic status).
| causalmodels wrote:
| It's just a different set of in group // out group
| signals, not some sort of moral failing. You're well
| within your rights to not like the signals though.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| At least t-shirts and stripey socks are comfortable
| kklisura wrote:
| [in NYC accent] What, you think you're better than us
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| [in a Mid-Atlantic accent] No, I _know_ that I 'm better
| than you.
| anonym29 wrote:
| [chuckles in Texan]
| mathgeek wrote:
| Too real. I once got turned down by the Apple Store for a
| retail position because I wore a collared shirt to the
| interview (after being told in advance not to wear anything
| formal). Interviewer let me know I came off as too formally
| dressed to get their vibe. The discrimination/bias was
| real.
| noirbot wrote:
| I mean, if they said not to wear something formal, that
| doesn't really seem like bias as much as just not
| following instructions. If I showed up to an interview
| where they said to wear a suit and I was in jeans and a
| polo, I'd expect to get turned down too.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| A button up shirt isn't formal.
| noirbot wrote:
| I'd mostly agree, but with them specifically calling out
| "not anything formal" as part of the expectations for
| interview attire wouldn't be the time I'd want to be
| riding the line of "is this too close to formal". This
| isn't a job at a tailor or stylist. You're not being
| tested on your understanding of the roles of various
| garments in different levels of fashion over time.
|
| Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and
| knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery
| what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant
| by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of
| gotcha.
| mathgeek wrote:
| We might be getting a but pedantic about what "formal"
| meant at the time, but you would have had to be in that
| Apple culture circle to consider a button down formal.
| Seems normal today, but it was not back then in most
| parts of the world. Today I would agree that folks would
| already know the expectation.
| mathgeek wrote:
| A button up shirt without a jacket, at the time, was
| business casual at most. What they wanted was a t-shirt
| and jeans. Even Walmart, when I'd worked as a teen,
| expected a collar and appreciated a sports coat for
| interviewing. Different times for sure.
| noirbot wrote:
| Sure, but t-shirt and jeans is also what everyone working
| at an Apple Store wears. It'd be one thing if they didn't
| say what to wear - then I'd totally understand going a
| bit above, but if they specifically put in "not formal",
| then it seems reasonable to assume they mean "match the
| uniform generally".
| mathgeek wrote:
| They didn't say what to wear, they said a vague what not
| to wear. Almost all interviews at that point in time
| expected attire a step above your intended position. I
| personally think it was just a silly test of whether you
| already know what they expect. "You are a great hire but
| you dressed too nicely for the interview" is certainly a
| thing that I chuckle at.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I didn't wear a suit, but in 2012 I wore slacks, tucked in
| collared shirt, and a tie, and got the same response from
| Microsoft. It was for an internship which is hilarious.
|
| I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an
| Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring
| manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear
| that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain
| T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)
| crabbone wrote:
| 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.
| lores wrote:
| It's not unusual in Europe - but then Europeans tend to
| dress smarter than Americans in general too.
| barbs wrote:
| 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"!
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Very close story here as well. lol. "You can always
| underdress but never overdress!"
|
| Thanks mom!
| hnbad wrote:
| Take it to the limit and show up to an interview in full
| white tie attire.
| phaedryx wrote:
| 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_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| To be fair, "suit up" usually means to put on a uniform
| rather than to wear a suit. The phrase seems to have
| originated in sports. T-shirts and hoodies are the uniform
| of tech.
| schnable wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to the candidate to expect them
| to think that when a recruiter says "suit up" they mean
| in t-shirt and jeans or cutoffs.
| 9rx wrote:
| It is a common phrase that, as commonly used, has no
| connotations with the suit as a style of dress:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suit%20up
|
| But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where
| it only works where there already is a shared
| understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of
| the comments on HN are from actors having different
| understandings for technical jargon and talking past each
| other because they aren't even talking about the same
| thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.
| tartoran wrote:
| > - 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.
| baq wrote:
| 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think there's a tacit expectation to fit into a mold and
| that mold is heavily skewed towards extroverted
| neurotypical traits.
| baq wrote:
| Neurotypical means something, after all. Extroverted, I
| wouldn't say.
|
| Basic game theory, really. Business are not charities.
| Hiring a neurodiverse person is riskier than a
| neurotypical one.
| godsinhisheaven wrote:
| Neurodivergent people have always had to learn social skills,
| plenty of people come off as weird/insane/awkward over zoom
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| Hm, it turns out suggesting that someone buy a suit for a job
| they need is a litmus test.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Cyphase wrote:
| > People have been lying about their experience for literally
| centuries.
|
| Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-
| nasir.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
| LandR wrote:
| Man, how annoyed do you have to be with someone to carve your
| complaint into stone!
| defrost wrote:
| Pressing an edged tip into damp clay to write a complaint
| or ledger is almost as fast as quill and ink writing, the
| clay takes longer to dry solid than ink though.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| 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.
| baq wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| wrote something similar a while back:
| https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/ai-is-the-reason-intervi...
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| aforwardslash wrote:
| 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.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> a string of meh employers_
|
| What's a meh employer?
| dagw wrote:
| A lot of people look down on companies that solve 'boring'
| problems with 'boring' technologies. I guess it's an open
| question if having been writing in-house CRUD apps using a
| 10 year old tech stack for several years is a proxy for
| lack of competence.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I've seen a "senior" developer who didn't recognize what
| VSCode was. Like, not that they hadn't heard of the
| specific program--they didn't recognize the _sort_ of
| program it was.
|
| Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this
| was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in
| strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming
| environments their entire career. This was accompanied by
| exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of
| other stuff that you'd expect.
|
| The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to
| let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a
| good business case for it, for fear of having a resume
| that eventually starts to look like it could belong to
| that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of
| the whole resume driven development phenomenon.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| A company pretending to be some fancy place that everyone
| wants to work that just isn't that great. The whole A's
| hire A's and B's hire C's but are pretending to be A's kind
| of thing. Let's just say that not every company is like
| Google in the early days (free 3 star restaurant food,
| clean t-shirts, slides in the office, and all the rest).
| Even Google is not like that anymore.
|
| There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't
| realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out
| but scaring the best ones away because they approach them
| wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering
| job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you
| make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you
| get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The
| assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their
| knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely
| misguided in many cases.
|
| Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find
| good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down
| to the company not being that great and candidates flocking
| to more interesting opportunities.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| 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.
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| >And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
|
| Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa
| dan_quixote wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > - 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| foobahify wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| mystraline wrote:
| > 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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?
| roguecoder wrote:
| Leaving short-duration jobs off is common practice. The
| only way it might be "lying" is if you happened to, I
| dunno, have joined SVB just in time to commit a bunch of
| fraud, and then hoped no one googles your name. And even
| then, if it was three weeks, when your conviction comes up
| in the google search no one is going to think you lied
| leaving it off.
|
| Similarly, it is typical that people will have a polite
| fiction for "why did you leave your last role?" that hints
| in the direction of the real reason without saying anything
| the company wouldn't want to be said publicly. That
| question is a test of your discretion as much as it is
| making sure the same reason doesn't apply to the new
| company.
|
| However, saying you have a degree you don't, worked on a
| project you didn't, implemented something you didn't, led a
| project you only participated in, or used a technology you
| didn't: those are lies. Even if you get away with it, you
| are setting yourself up for a role you are unqualified to
| have. If you get caught, you will be correctly fired.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| mystraline wrote:
| > Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people
| can sue you.
|
| That is also fungible as well. Some lies just aren't
| catchable, like experience with skills that you teach
| yourself quickly, or go through a quick online course. Not
| saying _I_ should, but "fake it till ya make it" is a
| definite thing.
|
| > If you don't have references who can speak to the work
| you did, I also won't be hiring you.
|
| There's also a reason I'm leaving the role, and usually you
| don't want people near your position to know youre looking.
|
| And also, demanding references is the old AI slop - you're
| only going to give glowing references. Nobody gives bad
| references. And the worst case is you have a friend answer,
| or you buy one of those reference services (yes, theres a
| service for that).
|
| > know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that
| place, but lying will not help.
|
| I think you're missing the point of the type of 'lying' I
| was referring to. Workday uses an absolute terrible AI,
| that uses keyword search. With my resume, the human
| readable text is accurate and me, but to this ai-slop
| scanning woukd scan 1pt listicle of every keyword.
|
| Its not lying, but it is. Play stupid AI bullshit games,
| get gamified AI slop solutions. And I hate it. But even
| having a discussion with someone would be a start.
| anon_e-moose wrote:
| That's all fun and games until a single company puts the
| top 3 or 5 candidates pitted against each other to see who
| waits the longest without a rejection and takes the lowest
| offer...
|
| I heard this from friends, and despite being very
| comfortable where I am, I started interviewing cynically
| with no intention to take any job. I can confirm this is
| very much true and widespread. Hiring is at its worst ever.
|
| Whenever supply and demand gets fixed, we'll see these
| behaviors go away.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not at its worst ever. But many tech folks are
| coming off a period when they could waltz off one job
| into another in a week. That is not the norm for
| professional jobs. After dot-bomb the norm was lots of
| people left the industry forever and would you like does
| with that was not uncommon for many.
| veunes wrote:
| Completely agree with the distinction you're making:
| framing is fine, fabrication is a deal-breaker. It's
| frustrating how often people conflate "putting your best
| foot forward" with just making stuff up, especially when
| they underestimate how easily it can fall apart during
| reference checks or follow-ups.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people
| can sue you.
|
| That's why we had our guys down in marketing come up with a
| new term for it. Focus groups, legal review, the works! Now
| we call it "puffery".
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >I couldn't just make up new questions for every candidate.
|
| Ask each candidate the same questions?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was not clear from your original comment. I read it as
| the company gave them the questions to presumably think
| about/prep.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I had the same impression. It sounded like he was given
| the questions for preparation as part of the company's
| process, and then OP deliberately tricked him by asking
| him one that wasn't on the official list.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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.
| veunes wrote:
| Yeah, this is the gray area we're all bumping into now
| tryauuum wrote:
| 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
| lysecret wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| 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.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| Yes, but we had that problem before when somebody would
| farm out coding assignments to a friend. I couldn't say yet
| how it's impacted the coding assignment's effectiveness as
| a filter yet. We still do get crap code just sometimes it's
| obviously AI generated.
| umbra07 wrote:
| 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....
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| 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.
| intalentive wrote:
| You could also sort by SAT / ACT score. It will yield roughly
| the same results as your IQ test.
| Foofoobar12345 wrote:
| We don't operate in the US. Our applicants can't present any
| standardized test scores
| boscillator wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >something like a mental ability test
|
| General-purpose "mental ability tests" are typically illegal
| for hiring in the US.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| dpkirchner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| roguecoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Why do you assume the 8 years of experience were real?
| ofrzeta wrote:
| 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."
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Why is it ironic? Usage of AI doesn't mean you can just lie or
| not know what you are doing.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| disambiguation wrote:
| 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.
| dakiol wrote:
| Please, no. I don't want to travel hundred of kilometres each
| time I want to apply for a job.
| disambiguation wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Just do onsite interviews if you are that concerned.
| atoav wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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.
| gregncheese wrote:
| 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.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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?
| dakiol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dakiol wrote:
| 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.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| What's the better way to do pagination?
| duggan wrote:
| Not necessarily "better" but cursor-based pagination, for
| example, has a different set of trade-offs. It can be
| more performant, but tends to be trickier to implement.
|
| This article looks like a decent overview:
| https://medium.com/better-programming/understanding-the-
| offs...
| tmstieff wrote:
| The easiest alternative is using a where clause and
| filtering by an ID range. Eg: "WHERE id between 1000 and
| 1200". But this introduces a ton of limitations with how
| you can sort and filter, so the general advice of not
| using LIMIT and OFFSET has a ton of caveats.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| You don't use OFFSET because the btree index just sorts
| the rows from smallest to largest. It can quickly get the
| first 30 rows, but it can't quickly figure out where the
| 30th or the nth row is. When pagination is crawled it
| will crawl the whole table, so it's important that the
| worst case performs well.
|
| The fix to this is to paginate by saying "give me 30 rows
| after X" where X is an unique indexed value, e.g. the
| primary key of the row. The RDBMS can quickly find X and
| 30 rows after X in the sorted index.
|
| This makes it hard to implement a "previous page" button
| but nowadays everything is a feed with just a "show more"
| button so it doesn't matter much.
| theamk wrote:
| The pagination was chosen because it was prominently
| featured in the candidate's resume, and was something that
| interviewer was familiar with - it's not about "cool
| experience", but rather conversation starter.
|
| When performing interview, asking about things mentioned on
| the resume is a pretty good conversation starter. No one
| wants random trivia, resume entries, especially from the
| most recent jobs, are absolutely fair game. And if they
| turn out too simple, we can always dig further based later.
| never_inline wrote:
| The message is: good lie is not too far from truth.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| veunes wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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"?
| msravi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| msravi wrote:
| 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...
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Well I guess if the candidate would be a little be stronger
| and actually trying to reason with the LLM about the
| decision it suggested, he would be better prepared and
| maybe got away with his claims.
|
| Or as current best chess player Magnus Carlson said, "if I
| would cheat, you would never know". Meaning very strong
| candidates will get away with flexing the truth with AI.
| But this means maybe, you shouldn't look for a perfect fit.
| Or check his merit by spending time and money to get in
| touch with his old companies.
| msravi wrote:
| Yeah.. but if he didn't actually work exactly on it, but
| took the effort to learn from coworkers (or LLMs or
| google or wherever) and is able to answer my questions on
| what he did, and more importantly on why he decided to do
| something a certain way and not some other way, then
| he/she must have spent considerable amount of time
| actually learning about it and figuring things out. So
| I'd still hire him/her. The trouble is most people who
| embellish are either not competent to go deep enough to
| learn, or think that they can get away with some
| superficial knowledge of it.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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_inline wrote:
| 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!
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| > what is one to do
|
| Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| What if there are no open positions on my experience and
| I have to pivot to another completely different tech
| stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should
| I be unemployed?
|
| We're still taking about SW engineering here, not
| medicine or rocket science.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> What if there are no open positions on my experience
| and I have to pivot to another completely different tech
| stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should
| I be unemployed?_
|
| If you studied and worked with the tech in your free
| time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is
| the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to
| perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be
| unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery
| goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I
| train.
|
| _> We 're still taking about SW engineering here, not
| medicine or rocket science._
|
| SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine
| and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people.
| Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job
| from someone who put in the work to actually be
| qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving
| them.
|
| So the real answer to your question depends on how much
| you value other people and your principles, compared to
| valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't
| want to wrestle with that, just add some personal
| projects to your personal studying.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> If you studied and worked with the tech in your free
| time, you can say so, and show your work. _
|
| Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about
| what you do in your free time as counting as professional
| experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or
| stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white
| lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter
| and get to a technical person who will judge your
| knowledge less superficially.
|
| _> What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not
| qualified?_
|
| Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a
| different tech stack is not the same as switching to
| doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad
| faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position
| of privilege who never had to endure poverty and
| unemployment.
|
| So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part.
| As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can
| in the interview and both parties are happy and getting
| their expected value out of it, who cares what experience
| in your resume was a lie and what not?
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching
| to brain surgery._
|
| SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine
| and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people.
| Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job
| from someone who put in the work to actually be
| qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving
| them.
|
| _> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared
| about what you do in your free time as counting as
| professional experience, they only do keyword matching
| with "year of on the job experience"._
|
| I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on
| the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the
| technical person can judge your knowledge less
| superficially. It worked for me!
|
| _> So white lies are the only way._
|
| It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people
| by telling it.
|
| _> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of
| empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege_
|
| This is actually an offensive thing for you to say,
| because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and
| lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on
| substance over name-calling.
|
| _> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and
| unemployment..._
|
| I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty
| and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified
| applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just
| towards yourself.
|
| We are all people, you are not more important than them,
| and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it
| is for them.
|
| _> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what
| you said you can in the interview..._
|
| We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their
| abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver
| what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
| gyesxnuibh wrote:
| Not all jobs are created equal. I know the quality
| control for software written for Web is very very
| different than the software written for cloud.
|
| You're arguing that the standards for medical device
| firmware should be the same for Pinterest which is
| honestly just a waste of and effort.
|
| I can see both sides of this specific discussion but
| treating SW engineering generally as rocket science is
| lying to yourself ;)
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I consider unjustly harming others to be bad, whether
| you're exploding a rocket or not. That's why I added this
| part:
|
| _> Beyond that, you 'd be harming others by taking the
| job from someone who put in the work to actually be
| qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving
| them._
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| You're not harming anyone with grooming and pump up your
| resume to give yourself the best possible chance. Jobs
| aren't assigned and reserved to people from birth based
| on fate in order to be something you can steal from them
| with this. You don't deserve a job just because, you have
| to compete and interview for it like everyone else, and
| if you can get it and do the job, then good for you.
|
| If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself
| at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the
| job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job
| then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get
| better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging
| top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility
| to adapt to the variable interview process and prove
| yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way
| you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge,
| cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to
| play their best hand all the time and honesty is not
| always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.
|
| Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for
| themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're
| not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of
| some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as " _I
| deserve "_, there's only _" I competed, and I won/lost"_.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > critical component of both medicine and rocket science
|
| Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write
| software for rockets or medical devices after applying
| for a generic web development job?
|
| > from someone who put in the work to actually be
| qualified
|
| That's all very nice. Unless you end up being that
| someone yourself.
|
| > and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
|
| That's highly debatable. It's possible a lot of them did
| the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of
| exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it
| really "deception"?
|
| Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying
| is not even remotely a binary thing.
| tyzoid wrote:
| > who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and
| what not
|
| Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false
| representations for personal gain (employment, in this
| case) is one of the classic examples.
|
| It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if
| you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty.
| If I were to discover that someone joined my team under
| false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith
| in their credibility going forward.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-
| manual... :
|
| > The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18
| U.S.C. SS 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term,
| which includes false representations, dishonesty and
| deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311
| (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Not the case in my jurisdiction, exaggerating in your
| resume is not illegal. And I really don't care, call it
| whatever you want if that makes you feel better.
| Companies are dishonest all the time to their customers
| and to their workers and especially to their candidates.
| Been screwed 3 times by dishonest employers, I'm only
| reciprocating their attitude.
|
| I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the
| same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for
| you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it
| rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the
| top. Companies aren't religious holier than though,
| they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's
| the case, I can play the same game.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Outright lies? Perhaps but even then it's not clear if it
| meets the legal definition in all cases.
|
| Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not
| telling the full story with all the details? Well that's
| entirely subjective.
|
| > under false pretenses
|
| Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional
| experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he
| didn't explicitly declare that during the interview
| without being bc prompted?
|
| Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but
| it's non-"professional" experience since he learnt it pn
| his own and again.. didn't disclose that during the
| interview?
|
| Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and
| you somehow find out he wasn't 100% honest about some
| finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers
| that stuff anyway?) you'd still feel the same way?
| rafaelmn wrote:
| What do you think happens when you lie through the
| interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were
| hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired
| after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks
| income after getting lucky and scamming someone through
| an interview ?
| skydhash wrote:
| And there's the reputation loss if someone decided to do
| due diligence.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss
| and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone
| is incompetent.
|
| Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are
| also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and
| recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and
| transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and
| play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up
| missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply
| because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you
| lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of
| experience.
| before_the_law wrote:
| > What then? Should I be unemployed?
|
| Clearly philosophically I would love a world where
| everyone was taken care of, but this is a job _market_.
| All that money devs were getting this last decade has the
| dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist
| industry. Competition is getting much more heated and,
| having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not
| everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to
| be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser
| paying but at least hiring careers back in the early
| 2000s.
|
| I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during
| this decade long boom period have never really
| experienced competition. In the last few years companies
| were often adding positions faster then they could fill
| them. If you passed the test, you got the job.
|
| When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved
| first building a pool of applicants, which could easily
| take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't
| happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to
| interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt
| where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did
| your best, all it took was one other candidate that was
| better or even simply got a long better with the team to
| mean you didn't get the job.
|
| You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it
| was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Clearly philosophically I would love a world where
| everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. _
|
| In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs
| market? Or about the broken hiring process?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > What if there are no open positions on my experience
| and I have to pivot to another completely different tech
| stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?
|
| I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving
| mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview
| prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| But you still had to get an interview first, which is
| often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky
| to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till
| you get an interview?
|
| The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer,
| but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack
| that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't
| learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with
| discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a
| checkbox list, and so I have to work around the
| employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.
| gosub100 wrote:
| There are many recruiters out there that will flat out
| reject someone if they aren't a perfect match for every
| single skill listed. I don't have a problem with lying to
| get past that gauntlet.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because
| someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them,
| you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all,
| it's the same game.
|
| That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay
| with harming others to personally get ahead. A few
| thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from
| _" fark you, I got mine"_.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > it's not surprising that humans are still okay with
| harming others to personally get ahead.
|
| Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary
| and offering nothing of value other than screening some
| calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and
| robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I'm sorry you feel hurt or harmed by someone. I've felt
| that, too, and it really sucks. It's not a good feeling.
|
| I avoid recruiters unless they can serve me well, too
| (increased salary, signing bonus, etc), instead
| preferring to applying directly to individual companies
| whose mission is interesting and whose culture matches
| mine.
|
| That said, I don't think hurt is a valid justification
| for hurting someone else, like the innocent parties I
| mentioned (potential future coworkers, other job
| applicants). That perpetuates a chain of hurt. Break the
| chain.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Employers pay big fees to recruiters who deliver
| qualified candidates.
|
| Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen match customers
| with providers. For that, they get paid.
|
| They are not "harming" either, as the relationship and
| deals made are voluntary.
| gosub100 wrote:
| They don't need a percentage of my salary. Why don't they
| work hourly like I do? I don't work for a percentage of
| the company's revenue
| wqaatwt wrote:
| And what happens when another candidate has the same
| skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well
| maybe they don't.. but of if they manage to take your
| interview spot it hardly matters.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| And what happens when another candidate has the same
| skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well
| maybe they don't.. but if they manage to take your
| interview spot it hardly matters.
| never_inline wrote:
| AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound
| authentic.
| abirch wrote:
| AI is the GOAT of Buzzword generation or should I/Gemini
| say
|
| "Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate
| game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword
| generation."
| zellyn wrote:
| It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. "Oh
| shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-
| reading, and forgot to review the output carefully.
| Sorry!"
| collingreen wrote:
| Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Recruiters have gone beyond keyword matching, they're now
| using AI to judge the resume.
|
| > Hiring is broken
|
| How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?
| sidrag22 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to
| bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative
| ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.
| devmor wrote:
| How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs
| trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect
| answers about 50% of the time?
|
| Is it _actually_ more useful than Googling, or is it just
| so convenient that you let it convince you that it was
| useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so
| useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is
| still better?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > if you want to prepare for a C dev interview
|
| Spend an hour reading a book about C?
|
| I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG
| company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks
| studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for
| time spent you'll ever get.
|
| He did, and got a $300,000 offer.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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_jeeves2 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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]
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even
| an experienced person) whose resume says experience in
| ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed
| in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system
| that does the screening.
| miki123211 wrote:
| The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one
| not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice
| is between lying and being on even footing with everybody
| else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair
| disadvantage for it.
|
| If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants
| get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more
| socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to
| lie... and so the feedback loop goes.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is
| only necessary to pass the "filter" and that it has limited
| impact on the candidate's ability to perform the actual
| work its not necessarily that straightforward.
| _bin_ wrote:
| 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.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Do OCR systems still detect invisible words? I would have
| thought by now they'd use pixel based image recognition.
| filoeleven wrote:
| I doubt they're using OCR. More likely they're using one
| of the many text extractors available for PDFs.
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-
| extract-t...
| hoerzu wrote:
| I think nowadays they directly use screen share and image
| recognition like https://interview.sh for example
| hansvm wrote:
| Interesting, that still works? I first heard about that a
| decade ago.
| sarlalian wrote:
| You can occasionally prompt the AI resume review systems
| using the white text as well.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > would flag you internally
|
| And how would they figure that out if you lie by
| exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright
| making up entirely false stuff?
| before_the_law wrote:
| > 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| ender341341 wrote:
| Many interview coding questions are purposefully worded
| weird with the intent of seeing if you ask clarifying
| questions.
| exabrial wrote:
| >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.
| crabbone wrote:
| > 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?
| lysecret wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| Moral of the story? Don't tell em you used AI to prepare or they
| will write a whole article about you
| a_t48 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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.
| cloverich wrote:
| Agree becoming good at your job is number one, but
| interviewing is an independent skill worth developing. The
| places I've worked that required interview prep in one form
| or another, were all around better and all around had
| higher quality employees. That's not an absolute rule
| (nothing is) of course. But prepping for interviews gives
| you more "yes" opportunities to evaluate companies, and
| once you get competing offers you see something you
| normally don't. You can get paid substantially more for the
| same job, without ever negotiating. Merely having other
| opportunities, your prospective employers will magically
| offer you more money, a bigger signing bonus, more stock,
| for the same exact job, and you don't even have to ask for
| it. You merely tell them all what they are all offering.
| But of course the real value is being comfortable and
| confident enough to _take_ multiple interviews, and ask
| hard questions, and using that to find better companies.
|
| (This of course works for all kinds of things, not just
| interviewing: Quotes for house work, car purchase / sell
| offers, etc. Simply get more than one, and poof you get
| better deals).
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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.
| hliyan wrote:
| 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.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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?
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Okay, you don't like leetcode, that's fine. It doesn't mean
| you shouldn't prepare for an interview. In fact I'd say
| preparing for an interview might include researching their
| interview process and avoiding them if they use leetcode
| type questions which you don't like. It might also include
| learning about their tech stack, brushing up on relevant
| past experience, or learning a bit about the industry they
| operate in (for example).
| ar_lan wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have
| written."
|
| I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on my
| personal github page and even thought it's listed on my
| resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at it. This
| includes contributions to a widely used OSS project.
|
| YMMV, but all the high paying jobs I've received were due
| to knowing the tech stack they used and being able to walk
| through the projects that I've done in detail.
|
| Admittedly, the last time I changed jobs was 2024, so
| things might be different now.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Exactly, the most I've gotten from my personal projects
| has been a "oh cool".
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on
| my personal github page and even thought it's listed on
| my resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at i
|
| If it helps, I do! When someone has this available on
| their resume, I will look around. It allows me to ask
| better questions, for starts.
|
| Unfortunately, what I have found, is for every one person
| who has a legitimate track record of contributions and/or
| working/worked on projects beyond the basics, there are
| 100 people who simply do a bunch of cookie cutter
| projects to make their Github look good, but everything
| is shallow.
|
| Ironically, those with the cookie cutter projects set
| themselves up to get weeded out easily, as there is a
| clear pattern of 'learning to pass the test' rather than
| learning to _learn_
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| no interviewer has ever looked at it
|
| How do you know this? Did you challenge every interviewer
| to tell you whether they'd looked at any of the code on
| your personal github page?
|
| If I review code on someone's github page, that doesn't
| mean I'll proactively ask them about it in an interview.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Very easy but time-consuming
| aforwardslash wrote:
| 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".
| polishdude20 wrote:
| > 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| OK, so ask them for something they've written in the past 2
| years.
| intalentive wrote:
| Consistent use of indefinite "they" is jarring and unnatural.
| It's one person, so use he/his or she/her.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Meanwhile, the company is free to lie to you nonstop about your
| prospects and then just randomly fire you one day.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've got no sympathy for the person doing the interviewing
| here. They advertise a "L3" software job for $150k a year and
| wanting someone with internship experience. Doesn't even make
| sense. Then they interview someone with a sh!t resume written
| in semi-broken english and act surprised that they are fake. I
| guarantee if I had applied I would not have even been
| considered due to 15 years of experience and that seems to put
| me in the "too expensive" category even though I live in a
| rural town and my monthly expenses are under $2k (with a family
| of 5 even).
|
| I hope this guy's startup fails. That is what you get.
| speckx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's called vibe interviewing.
| mk89 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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
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