Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsintra2022 | Hacker News Reader

wsintra2022

Is it cheating if I can solve the problem using the tools of AI, or is it just solving the problem?

Interviews aren’t about solving problems. The interviewer isn’t interested in a problem’s solution, they’re interested in seeing how you get to the answer. They’re about trying to find out if you’ll be a good hire, which notably includes whether you’re willing and interested in spending effort learning. They already know how to use AI, they don’t need you for that. They want to know that you’ll contribute to the team. Wanting to use AI probably sends the wrong message, and is more likely to get you left out of the next round of interviews than it is to get you called back.

Imagine you need to hire some people, and think about what you’d want. That’ll answer your question. Do you want people who don’t know but think AI will solve the problems, or do you want people who are capable of thinking through it and coming up with new solutions, or of knowing when and why the AI answer won’t work?

> They’re about trying to find out if you’ll be a good hire, which notably includes whether you’re willing and interested in spending effort learning

I admire this worldview, and wish for it to be true, but I can't help but see it in conflict with much of what floats around these parts.

There's a recent thread on Aider where the authors' proudly proclaim that ~80% of code is written by Aider itself.

I've no idea what to make of the general state of the programming profession at all at the moment, but I can't help but feel learning various programming trivia has a lower return on investment than ever.

I get learning the business and domain and etc, but it seems like we're in a fast race to the bottom where the focus is on making programmers' skills as redundant as possible as soon as possible.

>I admire this worldview, and wish for it to be true, but I can't help but see it in conflict with much of what floats around these parts.

Honest interviewers may not realize how dishonest other interviewers became in such recent times (2-3 years ago). Interviewing today compared to COVID times is night and day. Let alone the 10's Gold Rush.

The respect is long gone.

> Interviews aren’t about solving problems.

Eh, I wish more people felt that way, I have failed so many interviews because I haven't solved the coding problem in time.

The feedback has always been something along the lines of "great at communicating your thoughts, discussing trade-offs, having a good back and forth" but "yeah, ultimately really wanted to see if you could pass all the unit tests."

Even in interview panels I've personally been a part of, one of the things we evaluate (heavily) is whether the candidate solved the problem.

Isnt one of the ways of solving the problem using all the tools at your disposal? If at the end of the day, isnt having working code the fundamental goal? I guess you could argue that the code needs to be efficient, stable, and secure. But if you could use "AI" to get part way there, then use smarts to finish it off. Isnt that reasonable? (Devils advocate) The other big question is the legality of using code from an AI in a final commercial product.

Yes that’s a fair question. Some companies do allow LLMs in interviews and on the job. But again the solution isn’t what the interviewer wants, so relying on an LLM gives them no signal about your intrinsic capabilities.

Keep in mind that the amount of time you spend in a real job solving clear and easy interview style problems that an LLM can answer is tiny to none. Jobs are most often about juggling priorities and working with other people and under changing conditions, stuff Claude and ChatGPT can’t really help you with. Your personality is way more important to your job success than your GPT skills, and that’s what interviewers want to see… your personality & behavior when you don’t know the right answer, not ChatGPT’s personality.

Yeah everyone says that they are interested in how you got there but this isn’t true in reality from my experience. Your bias inevitably judges them on the solution because you have many other candidates who got the correct solution.

You’re right, interviewers will still care about whether you come up with a solution, and they care about the quality of the solution. The part you might be missing is that what I said and what you said aren’t mutually exclusive; they are both true. Interviewers do have to compare you to other candidates, and they are looking for the candidates that stand out. They want more than a binary yes/no signal, if at all possible. What I was trying to say is that the interviewer doesn’t need the solution to the problem they ask you to solve, what they need is to see how well you can solve it. I hope that’s stating the obvious, but it’s worth really letting it sink in. It’s super common for early-career programmers to be afraid of interviews and complain about them. Things change once you start doing the interviewing and see how the process works.

If you've been given the problem of "without using AI, answer this question", and you use an AI, you haven't solved the problem.

The ultimate question that an interview is trying to answer is not "can this person solve this equation I gave them?", it's usually something along the lines of "does this person exhibit characteristics of a trustworthy and effective employee?". Using AI when you've been asked not to is an automatic failure of trust.

This isn't new or unique to AI, either. Before AI people would sometimes try to look up answers on Google. People will write research papers by looking up information on Wikipedia. And none of those things are wrong, as long as they're done honestly and up front.

If you are pretending to have knowledge and skills you don't have you are cheating. And if you have the required knowledge and skill AI is a hindrance, not a help. You can solve the problem easily without it. So "is using ai cheating"? IDK, but logically you wouldn't use AI unless you were cheating.

Knowledge and skill are two different things. Sometimes interviewers test that you know how to do something, when in practice it's irrelevant if you A) know how to retrieve that knowledge and B) know when to retrieve it.

There is foundational knowledge you must have memorized through a combination of education and experience to be a software developer. The standard must be higher than "can use google and cut and paste." The answer can't always be - "I don't need to be able to recall that on command, I can google/chatgpt that when I end up needing it." Would you go to a surgeon who says "I don't need to know exactly where the spleen is, I can simply google it during surgery."

For the goal of the interview - showing your knowledge and skills - you are failing miserably. People know what LLMs can do, the interview is about you.

I guess its more of a question if you can solve the problem without AI.

In most interview tasks you are not solving the task “with” ai.

Its AI who solves the task while you watch it do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com