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Comment by jhawk28 | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed a number of people for a few positions and I never told them that I detected them using ChatGPT. We structured our interviews in 2 parts. The first one was finding a bug. First clue if they were using AI was that they would solve it instantly. Second part was to write something related to our work that had definitive start/end. If they were using AI, they often were able to get something out, but they had no foundation to reason about it and modify it. They would quickly become lost. We always said that they could use whatever "helps" as long as they showed what they were doing on screen. For some reason, only one person openly showed that they were using AI, but that was only because they couldn't figure out how to turn it off in the UI. We didn't disqualify anyone for using AI, we disqualified them because of their dishonesty. If you can't trust someone in an interview, how can you trust them in a remote environment?

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This sounds like the "coding for engineers" course I was a TA of. Everybody copied everybodies code and depending on their effort they either modified the variable names, flow or nothing (including the original authors name).

Long story short: asking them to make small changes and then tell us what would happen was a shurefire way to detect the true cheaters and not the lazy people.

I also fondly remember triggering float errors in loops so you'd get an extra cycle due to it ending in .999etc instead of 0.

I did a live coding interview a while back where I was sharing my screen. I just pointed out that I'd been testing Copilot and offered to disable it in my IDE. The engineer just waved it off and said I should keep it on. Trying to hide it didn't even cross my mind - either they want to see how I work in a realistic environment with available tooling or they want to see what I can do in a "blind" setup. The company's approach here is actually a potentially good piece of information for the candidate's evaluation of the company as well. Either way, doesn't seem like something worth hiding.

> Trying to hide it didn't even cross my mind - either they want to see how I work in a realistic environment with available tooling or they want to see what I can do in a "blind" setup.

Honestly, the realistic style of work that's close to how one would actually approach problems in their day to day is pretty much ideal. In my case that would be using a nice IDE, some AI as a glorified autocomplete, IntelliSense and all that as well, in addition to Googling stuff along the way, if needed.

That should be enough to let them know both how I think, as well as show how I can solve problems and reason about those solutions. Heck, maybe even give me a simple task to build a CRUD and then talk about the choices I've made, if they're serious about hiring me and want to actually see what's inside of my brain.

But of course, in many places can't have that happen - they want to put the candidates in a situation where they just have a barebones text editor and expect them to produce good results. Blergh.

I had an interview recently where the interviewer asked me, and I quote, "Please solve this using whatever language/editor/tools you're comfortable with and what you'd use in your day-to-day work"

So I pull out trusty old Ruby + RubyMine, and the question (I don't remember what it was specifically, but it was some sort of array manipulation type of thing) was trivially solvable with some Ruby STD lib method. Apparently he wasn't satisfied with the answer despite his prior instructions, and me not knowing what the actual method code is was reason enough to disqualify me from the job, which I found baffling.

I got into a bit of a heated discussion that, if I were solving a problem at work, there's a 99% chance I'd just reach for this method that Ruby itself comes with, because why the fuck would I try be a smartass and reinvent stuff here? And if for whatever insane reason I did indeed need a bespoke solution, I'd just poke around the source code and extrapolate from there, which he still didn't consider a good answer.

These interviewers drive me insane sometimes...

I've had this happen to me in an interview before, from the other side.

I laughed that I had given them such an easy problem for their chosen language, then said "ok, pretend you went back in time and you're the person writing that function for the std lib" and so they did.

It probably wasn't as optimized as the actual stdlib function but it was good enough for the interview.

I gotta say if someone got heated with me about that request I'd end the interview early and not give them the job too.

The point isn't just providing a solution it's demonstrating that you can work through a simple problem. If you get heated about that during an interview then I don't get any info about your ability to work through problems, and I do get the impression that you're short tempered when asked to do things you don't care about.

Not OP but I dont think they got heated because they were asked to reason/invent stdlib function, it seems they got heated because they got disqualified for using stdlib function without knowing the exact algo the function uses beforehand.

Like dating, rarely do people want what they say they want. Not because they’re lying to you either, but because they’re lying to themselves.

Back before COVID, we were performing in-person interviews, and one of the steps was a debugging problem. We always told people in advance that they can either bring their own laptop configured the way they like (we gave details about languages/libraries required), or they can use one we provide.

I was surprised to see how many people would prefer our laptop during interview instead of having their own favorite environment.

I would be interested why that is, have you asked?

I would 100% pick the company laptop. I don't like installing random crap on my own machines, which there'd be no non-awkward way to avoid otherwise.

I just did an interview where the collaborative coding session had an ai assistant in it, just a wrapper around chatgpt

that was interesting, upvoting that employer for honesty and pragmatism

>We didn't disqualify anyone for using AI, we disqualified them because of their dishonesty. If you can't trust someone in an interview, how can you trust them in a remote environment?

Radical honesty has been a core cultural component to many a strong team, I'm glad to see somebody else mention this. There seems to be something unique about the relationship between codering and the concepts of transparency, honesty, and truth more broadly.

Or maybe that's just a consequence of version control :)

It’s a fundamental part of (reliable) engineering. Many a person has died historically when in ‘harder’ engineering someone was hiding things, and someone being able to acknowledge their lack of knowledge is key to not getting into that state - or being able to progress/grow at all, IMO.

Chernobyl being one prominent example.

At least in a field like engineering where actual successful results/working output matters, anyway.

There are other fields where the same dynamics are not in play.

One cannot solve (or even avoid) a problem that one refuses to acknowledge exists, after all.

I don't think radical honesty would ever work in a workplace. A very high level, yes, but not radical as it's usually meant.

The relationship of capitalism to truth is very significant as well, or maybe 'value generation' would be a better term to use here than capitalism.

Or as I usually phrase it, 'money is allergic to lies'.

Say you have an organization that is producing a product/service that provides genuine value for its users, and have a team of talented, hardworking people. Any factors related to the operations of said organization, obscuring those factors from the value producers can only lead to less effective operation overall, as the producers have less/lower quality/false information to work with.

"I don't feel like this is workplace appropriate" does not violate the 'radical honesty' principle.

At least internally, anyway. If your objective is to make as much money as possible, you probably don't want marketing to be radically honest LOL

>There seems to be something unique about the relationship between codering and the concepts of transparency, honesty, and truth more broadly.

And what is worse than lies, is self delusion, even if honest. To nit pick on radical honesty, my observation is that most people won't tolerate it, plain honesty appears to be the sweet stop inmost cases.

Yes basically when interviewing you should be looking for warning signs. CV is as it is, you can't cover any bigger one extensively in that short time, so you poke randomly and go deep.

There is no bigger warning sign than outright lying. A normal mature person would ask just before if AI is allowed.

Oh the horror of people finding bugs instantly. You surely don't want them around in your company.

> We didn't disqualify anyone for using AI, we disqualified them because of their dishonesty.

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