It's a tool, and if they can master it to make it useful, then credit to them.
Alas, ChatGPT seems to be a jack of all trades, but master of none, which is gonna make it hard to pass my interviews which test very specific technical skills.
Tool usage is what separates us from animals and is generally ok where tools are available/expected, but in this case I think you misunderstand which tool we're talking about. The tool involved isn't actually chatGPT, it's more like strategic deception. Consider the structurally similar remark "as a voter, if a candidate can use lies to represent themselves as better than other candidates, I'm not gonna mark them down for use of dishonesty".
The rest of this comment is not directed at you personally at all, but the number of folks in this thread who are extremely eager to make various excuses for dishonesty surprised me. The best one is "if dishonesty works, blame the interviewer". I get the superficial justification here like "should have asked better questions", but OTOH we all want fairly short interview processes, no homework, job-related questions without weird data-structures and algorithms pop-quizes, etc, so what's with the double standards? Hiring/firing is expensive, time-consuming, and tedious, and interviewing is also tedious. No one likes picking up the slack for fake coworkers. No one likes being lied to.
Not me. I see it all the time, online and offline. I suspect they think it confers status on themselves, but what actually happens is honest people wind up shunning them.
If someone aces the interview using an LLM and then does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? The work is getting done, so what's the problem?
Compare a shitty worker to a deceptive one using an LLM. They both passed the interview and in both cases the work isn't being done. How are those two cases different?
I'm doubting this quite a bit. If it's so easy to ace an interview, why are there so many bad ones?
>Anyone can ace and interview and then slack off once they have to job.
In that a person can pass an interview, get hired, and then not do the job. An interview will never tell you if you will get poor job performance with 100% accuracy.
Interviews aren't perfect, but they can still be good filters.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I find it very hard to believe that anyone thinks the "good work" part here is actually a practical possibility today. Boilerplate generation is fine and certainly possible, and I'm not saying the future won't bring more possibilities. But realistically anyone that is leaning on an LLM more than a little bit for real work today is probably going to commit garbage code that someone else has to find and fix. It's good enough to look like legitimate effort/solutions at first glance, but in the best case it has the effect of tying up actual good faith effort in long code reviews, and turns previously productive and creative individual contributors into full-time teachers or proof-readers. Worst case it slips by and crashes production, or the "peers" of juniors-in-disguise get disgusted with all the hand-holding and just let them break stuff. Or the real contributors quit, and now you have more interviews where you're hoping to not let more fakers slide by.
It's not hard to understand that this is all basically just lies (misrepresented expertise) followed by theft. Theft of both time & cash from coworkers and employers.
It's also theft of confidence and goodwill that affects everyone. If we double the number of engineers because expectations of engineer quality is getting pushed way down, the LLM-fakers won't get to keep enjoying the same salary they scammed their way into for very long. And if they actually learn to code better, their improved skills will be drowned out by other fakers! If we as an industry don't want homework, 15 interviews per job, strong insistence on FOSS portfolio, lowered wages, and lowered quality of life at work.. low-effort DDoS both in interviews or in code-reviews should concern everyone.
You found a person (+ tool combo) that can do the job. If that person (+ tool combo) then proceeds to do the job adequately, is there a problem?
If you present a scenario in which a person passes the interview and then doesn't do the job, the you are answering a question I didn't ask.
To you scenario I would respond: the interview wasn't good enough to do its job, the whole point of the interview process is to find people (+ tool combos, if you allow) that can do the job.
>what's the problem?
Using a LLM is akin to copy/pasting code from random places. Sure, copy/paste can be done productively, except ChatGPT output comes completely untested and unseen by intelligent eyes. There are also unsolved copyright infringement issues via training data, and a question as to whether the generated code is even copyrightable as it is the output of a machine.
Find someone with a great resume and horrible interview skills. Chances are they have been working for years and are entering the job market for the first time. You are one of the firsts in their interview process. Grab them right away because once they start getting slightly good in the interview process someone will snap them up and realize they got a 10x (whatever it means to that company).
You'll never find that 10x if you are looking at interview performance unless you can compete on price and reputation.
Interview skill is not some monotonically increasing quantity. It very much depends on how the question hits you and what kind of a day you've had. Also, it somewhat depends on the interviewers' subjective interpretation of what you do. If you're more clever than them, your answer may go over their head and be considered wrong. They might also ask a faulty question and insist it is correct.
I'm not great at interviews myself. My resume is decent, but the big jobs usually boil down to some bs interviews that seem unnecessarily difficult to pass. I don't practice much for them, because I feel like it mostly depends on whether I've answered a similar question before and how I feel that day. I also often get a good start and just run out of time. I've found that sometimes interviews are super hard when the interviewers have written you off, as in you presented poorly in an earlier session and they are done with you. Also, when there is zero intention of hiring you generally, like someone else already got the job in their minds.
It does not. Please ask any LLM for examples of animals that use tools. (My examples: chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, otters...)
I think that makes you an incompetent interviewer, unless your questions are too hard for ChatGPT. In any case, solving the question without ChatGPT is more impressive than using it. Just like most other tools, like search engines or IDEs.
Even if you don't mind that situation, shouldn't you get buddy's contact information and offer him the job?
A better analogy is an interview where you can use a calculator (and not be detected). If the interviewer were only to ask you simple arithmetic questions with numeric answers then sure you'd seem to do well. So interviewers adjust to not doing that.
I mean, why not? Me and my buddy are a team, hire us both or none of us. Split the salary if you must.
Yeah, hiring someone to code a website isn't the same as maintaining a nuclear plant, but it's the same concept of someone that knows their craft vs. someone that needs to rely on tools. There's a major difference in my mind.
to your point though, a person needs both. all of one and none of the other is useless. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing to play around disabling safety systems so you don't get Chernobyl, but for the everyday crud website you can just hire the coding monkey at a reduced cost.
Similar it is unreasonable and bordering on negligence to assume a person has the skill set unique to your situation.
I can see how an applicant who cheats interview with chatbot would later not bother to internalize operation instructions for the job.
My experience with Chat GPT ranges from “it’s really good for rapidly getting a bearing with a certain topic” to “it’s a woeful substitute for independently developing a nuanced understanding of a given topic.” It tends to do an OK with programming and a very poor job with critical theory.
Normally people who get bad results from it would also get similar results if they asked a domain expert. Similarly different knowledge domains use a different corpus of text for their core axioms/premises, so if you don't know the domain area or those keywords your not going to be able to prime the model to get anything meaningful from it.
Exactly. It “only” shows you can & willing to at least understand the requirements, internalize them well enough, and comply with them. It shows your capability of understanding & working together with other humans.
Which is key.
In my impression, almost always the knowledge you receive at the uni is not really pertinent to any actual job, and anyone can have PhD level understanding of a subject without having finished high school.
It is the capability of understanding and working in a system that matters.
Similarly with a chatbot. Using it to game interviews in ways described does not mean candidate is stupid, or something like that. It is, though, a negative signal of one’s willingness and intrinsic motivation to do things like internalizing job responsibilities & procedures, or just simply behave in good faith.
Mental capacity to do mundane things is often important when it comes to, say, maintaining a nuclear reactor.
> just a tool
> it’s really good for rapidly getting a bearing with a certain topic
Perhaps. Personally I prefer using Google, so that I at least know who wrote what and why rather than completely outsourcing this to an anonymous team of data engineers at ClosedAI or whatnot, but if it is efficient to get some knowledge then why not?
It’s using it to blatantly cheat and do the key part for you where it becomes questionable.
Consider e.g. being a pilot, or a surgeon - two other occupations known for their extensive use of operational procedures today. People in those jobs are not being hired for their ability to stick to a checklist, but rather for their ability to understand reasons behind it, and function without it. I.e. the procedures are an important operational aid, not the driver.
Contrast with stereotypical bureaucrats who only follow procedures and get confused if asked something not covered by them.
Now, IMHO, the problem here is that, if you're hiring someone who relies on an LLM to function, you're effectively employing that LLM, with its limitations and patterns of behavior. As an employer, you're entitled to at least being made aware of that, as it's you who bears responsibility and liability for fuckups of your hires.
It's like in college when you're allowed to take textbooks to an exam. You can bet the professor spent more time crafting questions that you can't answer blindly.
That being said, I think both types of questions have their place in an interview process. You can start with the no searching allowed questions in the beginning to assess real basic knowledge and, once you determine the candidate has some knowledge, you start probing more to see if they can connect the dots, maybe it's architecture decisions and their consequences, maybe it's an unexpected requirement and how they would react, etc.
At my company we tell people that they should feel free to google or consult references at practical coding challenges.
> It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way.
I don’t really want to test knowledge but skill. Can you do the thing? At work you will have access to these references so why not during the interview?
Now that doesn’t mean that we are not taking note when you go searching and what you go searching for.
If you told us that you spent the last 8 years of your life working with python and you totally blank on the syntax of how to write a class that is suspicious. If you don’t remember the argument order of some obscure method? Who cares. If you worked in so many languages that you don’t remember if the Lock class in this particular one is reentrant or not and have to look it up? You might even get “bonus points” for saying something like that because it demonstrates a broad interest and attention to detail. (Assuming that using a Lock is reasonable in the situation and so on of course :))
I do want to understand their knowledge. I'll preface questions with the disclaimer that I am not looking for the book definition of a concept, but to understand if the candidate understands the topic and to what depth. I'll often tell them that if they dont know, just say so. I'll start with a simple question and keep digging deeper until either they bottom out or I do.
What happened to all those folks? They retired, and turned into Boomers who are now unable to function in society at a basic level and do things like online banking or operate a smartphone.
You're on your own matey.
But hey, you'll have Google.