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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

The employer sets the terms of the interview. If you don’t like them, don’t apply.

What you’re suggesting here isn’t any different than submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.

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> The employer sets the terms of the interview. If you don’t like them, don’t apply.

What you're missing here is that this is an individual's answer to a systemic problem. You don't apply when it's _one_ obnoxious employer.

When it's standard practice across the entire industry, we have a problem.

> submitting a fraudulent resume because you disagree with the required qualifications.

This is already worryingly common practice because employers lie about the required qualifications.

Honesty gets your resume shredded before a human even looked at it. And employers refusing to address that situation is just making everything worse and worse.

You make a valid point that while the rules of the game are known ahead of time, it’s strange that the entire industry is stuck in this local maximum of LeetCode interviews. Big companies are comfortable with the status quo, and small companies just don’t have the budget to experiment with anything else (maybe with some one-offs).

Sadly, it’s not just the interview loops—the way candidates are screened for roles also sucks.

I’ve seen startups trying to innovate in this space for many years now, and it’s surprising that absolutely nothing has changed.

>I’ve seen startups trying to innovate in this space for many years now, and it’s surprising that absolutely nothing has changed.

I don't want to be too crass, but I'm not surprised people who can startup a business are precisely the ones who hyper-fixate on efficiency when hiring and try to find the best coders. Instead of the best engineers. When you need to put your money where you mouth is, many will squirm back to "what works".

> Honesty gets your resume shredded before a human even looked at it

Does it? Mine is honest, fairly normal, and gets me through to interviews fine. What are common lies and why are they necessary?

Or he can simply choose to ignore the arbitrary and often pointless requirements, do the interview on his own terms, and still perform excellently. Many job requirements are nothing more than a pointless power trip from employers who think they have more leverage than they actually do.

I would like to be paid though. What do I care about the terms of the interview as long as they hire me?

What is being suggested here is not participating in the mind numbing process that is called ‘applying for a job’.

Wanting to be paid under false pretenses is the definition of fraud.

Being paid for even excellent performance is a fraud.

That doesn’t make any sense. The best engineers I know can’t pass these interviews because they started working long before they became standard.

That doesn’t matter. If the current qualification bar is “must do X” and you fake it, you’re committing fraud.

> Wanting to be paid under false pretenses is the definition of fraud.

What? No, it isn't.

Regardless, if the job requirements state "X years of XYZ experience" and you have to have >X years of experience, then using AI to look up how to do a leetcode problem for some algorithm you haven't used since your university days is absolutely not "false pretenses" nor fraud.

If the interview process says, “you must do X without using AI” and you use AI and hide it, you’re committing fraud.

Nope.

If you lie about your qualifications to a degree that can be considered fraud, employers can and will sue you for their money back and damages. Wait till you discover how mind-numbing the American legal system is!

I’m sorry is the job “professional Leetcoder”?

Nonsense. I don't endorse lying about qualifications, but employers don't sue over this. Employment law in most US states wouldn't even allow for that with regular W-2 employees.

You're absolutely right. Ditching the pointless corporate hoops, proving you can do the job, and getting paid like anyone else is what truly matters. Most hiring processes are just bureaucratic roadblocks that needlessly filter out great candidates. Unless you're working on something truly critical, there's no reason to play along with the nonsense.

> What do I care about the terms of the interview as long as they hire me?

well that's the neat part... they aren't going to. All this AI stuff just happened to coincide with a recession no one wants to admit, amplifying the issue.

So yea, even if I'm desperate I need to be mindful of my time. I can only do so many 4-5 stage interviews only to be ghosted, have the job close, or someone else who applied earlier get the position.

> What do I care about the terms of the interview as long as they hire me?

Because committing fraud to get hired is a pretty shitty way to live your life

Yea, exactly.

If a candidate were up front with me and asked if they could use AI, or said they learned an answer from AI and then wanted to discuss it with me, I'd be happy with that. But attempting to hide it and pretend they aren't using it when our interview rules specifically ask you not to do it is just being dishonest, which isn't a characteristic of someone I want to hire.

On principle, what you’re saying has merit. In practice, the market is currently rife with employers submitting job postings with inflated qualifications, for positions that may or may not exist. So there’s bad actors all around and it’s difficult to tell who actually is behaving with integrity.

> If you don’t like them, don’t apply.

Due to the prevalence of the practice this is tantamount to suggesting constructive unemployability.

People were up in arms about widespread doping during the Lance Armstrong era. But the only viable alternative to doping at the time was literally to not compete at all.

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