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Comment by thesaintlives | Hacker News Reader

So cheat to get a job then get fired when they see you are useless? Genius..

I’d say chances of getting busted are high as well. The invisibility of the window to common interview software won’t do anything mask candidates’ own suspicious behaviour.

I was doing a 45 minute screener interview with a guy the other day who I could see kept glancing over at another window or screen as he was typing in code. Every couple of characters or so he was pausing looking over, then he’d type a handful more characters, then pause and glance again. He was typing incredibly slowly as well, like a character or two per second, even when he was typing. It was honestly a bit of a weird experience to watch unfolding. His solutions were spot on though.

I didn’t make an issue of it, partly because I already had other concerns as well. I can’t think of a situation where there’s anything to gain by getting into an argument with a candidate: I simply didn’t invite him to the next interview stage.

Gong back about 20 years we had to introduce a "pre-screening" interview for infosec roles because of the calbire of candidates we were getting through.

They'd made it through the HR "sift" by having the right words on their CVs but we found that a huge majority of these candidates didn't know even entry-level basics.

There was initially a "quick fire" round where we did some real basic definitions - Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, risk, etc, etc.

Even back then candidates would hit us with the:

"Hmm, great question"

/tap tap tap tap

[Wikipedia definition of confidentiality]

RAID 45 strikes again

> /tap tap tap tap

Another fine reason no one should be using mechanical keyboards :-D

That is completely ridiculous because the candidate could be looking at a relevant documentation page, which is fair game. Next time, try a voice interview.

Given how poor and assumptive your logical reasoning is, the candidate is lucky for not working with you.

If it's so poor, it should be pretty easy to explain why.

Yes, but it should not be necessary to explain why. Just because a candidate is looking somewhere is very weak data to suggest that the candidate is cheating. I shouldn't have to say that the candidate could be looking at necessary documentation, or even at his own resume, or at the job description.

People rarely get fired solely due to technical incompetence, in my experience.

Technical competence happens to be much easier to test for than most of the other factors, and it can compensate to some degree for e.g. bad interpersonal skills. This is indeed part of why tech is such an autism-friendly field. But I've only seen a few people get let go for being great team players, excellent requirements analysts, etc., but just totally unable to code - for better or worse.

(More common is they get shifted to a role which better aligns with their "true" skillset. Why didn't they get this role in the first place? Again: Hard to test for.)

I do agree, however from my experience some folk smart enough to build this kind of system will struggle in an interview situation. Maybe rather than outright cheating, this could be more of a leg-up for those who find interviews difficult. Still wouldn't use it myself.

Since interview process is also flawed in many ways luck based, if you cheat and moderately capable, you can totally stay there and even go up in ranks.

It's starting to feel more like "cheat the job interview because the cat-and-mouse game has pushed everything to the point where you can't legitimately get an offer for a job you're actually fully qualified for anymore"

That's not quite where things are now, but the initial phases are beginning to show.

Perception on the degree of severity seems to depend largely upon the size and structure of your social networks. In the post-GPT4 tech economy, your work friends are also the only worthwhile recruiters.

There's a positive association between 1337code interview hurdles and lack of management competence.

Someone without the confidence to hire someone without going through a bunch of hoops to justify themselves is even less likely to admit humility and say they were wrong. Which makes places that employ these interview techniques terribly passive aggressive places to be.

The recruitment process is broken.

Obligatory "I don't agree with this and think it seems like a pretty depressing way to live", but:

A colleague yesterday was telling me about how much he and all his friends lied to get their jobs, and he suggested I do the same, because if I don't, I'm competing against people who do, and said that's unfair (for me).

It wasn't even an office job, but I've seen the same thing there too. (Also at university...)

I'm not under pressure so it's easy to say this, but I'd rather not get a job than lie during interview.

I encourage anyone to stand their ground on this. Competing with liars is an enormous soft-skill challenge. But it doesn’t exercise critical thinking. Structuring a personal plan that builds those soft skills is really annoying. Especially if you just want to solve complex problems all day.

That said,

- the interviewer likely embellished or lied to get his job. Be careful.

- a lot of this thread is about avoiding a bad hire. In engineering, someone technical who can detect deception is too valuable to put in the interviewer role. Send them to conferences to “poach”.

Just like the soft skills of competing with liars, you can also improve detecting deception.

In engineering, someone technical who can detect deception is too valuable to put in the interviewer role. Send them to conferences to “poach”.

Those are wildly different skill sets and/or personality traits.

In tech? Unless you really are useless you'll be more likely to coast.

Technical interviews are useless and its normal that their victims fight back

I heavily disagree with this. Technical interviews are great if done correctly.

Or do you think that technical interviews hold such trait that is always present, that you can label all of them useless?

I think they’re useless unless they touch some part of the domain you’re howling to work in.

Why do they need to touch the domain? The point of generic interviews is to find smart people who can learn any domain.

I’m using the term domain very broadly here, I apologise.

What I mean is, if the job your applying for is mostly about working with implementing 3rd party APIs IMO it makes sense that your tech test represents that to some degree.

Can you understand basic documentation.

Can you use data structures.

Can you write tests and understand what actually needs to be tested.

Can you handle exceptions.

Do you try and get the entire resource?

Believe it or not I’ve joined a team in the past who owned a service where no one knew what pagination was.

Bonus points if you demonstrate that you understand what a transaction is.

And I forgot to add, can you design a sensible database schema.

Can a candidate talk about those simple concepts?

Now, would I be able to do a tech test based around domains in machine learning? I would have to do a lot of research first!

I think a better option is to have a system in place where companies hire them for a month or so then after that period you choose whoever made a better impact. And before you say it will be costly, most companies can afford it, especially if it will lead to a better outcome. That way they get tested on the actual systems and not just some useless questions from the internet.

As someone with a job I'm not giving up my job security to take a job that might go away after 1 month. Doesn't matter how much more it pays - I need income every month to pay rent!

That’s a fair point, maybe the proposed system can be adjusted for a 2hours a day then. The point is to test that person on the systems rather than just QA style.

Sure, that's costly for employers, but it's also costly for the candidates.

If you're planning to have N candidates do this when you only have 1 position, you're disrupting the others' lifes so much. It's like one of those chef competition shows. You better pay these people at least 6 months salary to show up for this.

Plus, do you really have the supervisory system in place to have N new hires and evaluate their impact after 1 month. Do you have the work for them to do? Or are they all going to independently work on the same project?

I ask a useless question in interviews, but asking every candidate the same question lets me calibrate the candidates as well as improve how I present the question so we can get to the problem solving and programming skills I want to see. Some questions are worse than others, and I hope mine is less worse; I've had several people tell me they enjoyed working on my question, although I also had a candidate refuse to work on it and ask for another question (which I didn't have, and I was the last interview of the day, so I returned the balance of his time and walked him out)

"Victims"

This just makes it much worse for the industry that is already weeding out frauds or those that claim / lie about their achievements without backing them up when asked very technical tests.

I would say the online technical interview solutions like leetcode, hackerrank, etc are losing their worth given they can be easily cheated but you are just cheating yourself in the on-site interview.

If you don't like technical interviews then what the industry needs is proper and formal certification process akin to the medical, legal, and engineering fields. In the absence of some outside resource to validate that a person has the basic fundamental skills, then you have to ask questions to determine if the applicant knows any of those skills.

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