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Comment by appleiigs | Hacker News Reader

You're not asking the correct questions as an interviewer. You should be asking specific questions about projects they've worked on, or about them personally to get to know them. ChatGPT should not be able to answer. Pretend you're Harrison Ford in Blade Runner.

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You ask many kind of questions.

A candidate can do very well on personal and web project experience questions, and suddenly blank when you ask them how an http request is structured. Or what's CORS.

Then you dig further and discover a lot more thing about them that wouldn't have surfaced otherwise because hou assumed they knew all of that.

My best advice would be to never skip "dumb" and easy technical questions. You can do it very quick, and warn ahead that it's dumb questions but you ask them to everyone.

I agree with the "drill down" technique. Example: How does a dynamic array class (Vector, List, etc.) work? The very best interview questions have "fractal complexity" that allow you to drill deep.

Knowing the structure of an http request and CORS is a check for a common technical vocabulary, but I would strike a blank when asked directly. It feels a bit a like, “I had to learn it” even though it’s just googleable labels for simple topics. I heard of interviewees being dropped for not knowing the difference between 402 and 401.

I think blanking is actually OK. From there you could probably explain what you know about it, how it was set in your project, or any peripheral story that comes to mind at that time.

I see it as a different angle to get more information.

You can't only ask those questions, because some people are extremely good at bullshitting.

I always start interviews by asking them to explain their own projects. However, sometimes I'll find someone who's great at explaining projects they supposedly worked on in great detail, but then when given a simple coding problem they can't even write a for loop in their own top language.

Chatgpt can easily be instructed to tell a tale about a project it has worked on. It will expand on fake details when pressed.

As an experiment I gave ChatGPT my resume and background information and then pretended to interview it, just to see how well it would be able to conduct a mock interview. It did exceptionally well.

I'm not sure what specific questions you have in mind, but ChatGPT is almost certainly trained on a vast array of resumes and a diverse range of profiles, possibly even all of LinkedIn itself as well as other job boards. There is little to no reason why it wouldn't be able to make up an entire persona who is capable of passing most job interviews.

One red flag for me is when the interviewee gives "cork" answers -- the metaphor is that of a cork bobbing in the water. If you ask superficial questions about work they've done, the answer it convincingly. But the further down you go into the details the more resistance you get and the cork keeps bobbing up to the surface level.

'intentionally superficial and vague'

You want me to explain my role in the tortise flipping app that had a dating feature for lesbians?

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