Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI | Hacker News Reader

Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

kapwing.com

415 pointsjustswim708 comments

I keep coming back to this phrase used in this post: "it was scary".

Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.

The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.

- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.

- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

> Companies just need to fork the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.

IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.

I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that.

They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.

One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.

You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

> firing should not come as a surprise.

The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.

> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

In the real world, they don't.

There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt

Layoffs are generally random firing. Especially when we talk about % points.

What's your point? The thread is about how other people being fired is stressful.

You might be surprised how many totally oblivious and un-self-aware people there are out there.

Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?

If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?

People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw.

The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.

It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.

There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.

Interesting.

What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)

Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?

I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time". The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move onto somewhere less cut-throat.

Yikes!

That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.

Cortisol has never improved a line of code.

Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.

Maybe? But the idea of being on probation for a few months is basically how employment works in most countries of the world.

So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.

This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.

Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.

If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.

If I'm not that interested in a company, I won't waste my time to contact them (or pay attention to their efforts to contact me). Having interest in them does not imply that I have an interest in travel, however. If I had an interest in travel, I'd have become an airline pilot or something like that instead.

But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.

It’s fine to have quirks. And yes that is largely a quirk. And it’s fine for others to decide that’s it’s more trouble than they want to deal with. I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.

> It’s fine to have quirks.

Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make.

> I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.

Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.

What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is not the barrier it was five years ago.

Location isn't. Verification that you aren't a North Korea agent or just plain fraud is.

Mostly the latter but still. What some people on this thread don’t get is that unless you’re a known industry luminary, companies are not going to accommodate odd preferences without a legit reason like a physical disability. The resume probably won’t even make it out of HR. One key is both the company and candidate making requirements like travel clear up front. Saves everyone a lot of time.

Yeah. I’m not interested in a company that values my time so little that they demand that from me.

You’re absolutely right this would filter out candidates like me.

> The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI

I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.

Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.

There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.

It definitely did change with AI. Imposters are becoming harder to detect, at a cost to the company.

With all the unemployed tech workers, would it just make sense to hire someone who knows their salt to do recruiting and interviews? Recruiters always seem to have a blast moving between random high-level companies and ghosting people over text, socials and the phone. If they lack both the social skills and the technical knowledge, I don't know what their value proposition is, but compared to chronic underemployment after actually learning Java, C, C++, they're clearly winning.

The problem is "knowing their salt to do recruiting" is very hard. In all places I've been, the kinds of interview we are talking about here (technical problems, etc...) are delegated to regular engineers. So those technical interviewers are likely great at reading and writing the code, but they many not be the best at spotting fake AI.

(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)

Interviewing has also become harder too. You try to search the net during the interview, because you forgot the name of a thing, and the interviewer will assume you are running with an AI chat, and are cheating the interview.

Looking things up on Google without being transparent to the interviewer was always cheating the interview.

Its not about transparency, it about what the interviewer assumes about you, first hand. Just like you assuming that whoever is looking up things must be doing it in secret, with the intention of cheating.

It depends - I'm conducting interviews now and I'm totally ok with people screen sharing and showing me their internet searches and AI prompts as part of the interview. Part of the skills I'm hiring for is "can you find the docs/information you need to solve this", so knowing how to use whatever tools you prefer in order to do that is important.

This is actually a great idea, thanks!

I suspect the people saying nothing's changed are not people who've been conducting interviews recently.

I haven't seen the use of AI in interviewing (non-tech) yet, but something has definitely changed: People are now applying in droves.

I have seen wild things in the last year.

People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions. People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that. People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.

I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.

I interviewed every single candidate for development positions in a 300-400 company for the last three years and I saw some incredibly crazy stuff.

- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.

- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.

- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.

- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.

Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.

> I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.

What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?

I would tell the interviewee that I want to continue the interview with the other person since their answers indicate they’d be a good fit for the position.

I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way, then ask HR to reject the candidate.

I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha

I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/

Years back, I had someone interviewing in person for a low-level, bit-twiddling, C++ role without knowing what hexadecimal is (no clue how they got that far; the external recruiter was given "feedback"). Pretty much lied about everything, tried to bullshit his way through questions. I have no idea how they thought they'd manage the job.

Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.

>There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent

How is it not logically consistent?

>How is it not logically consistent?

i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think its fair game to use their words to lie.

screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be used to lie.

most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI, just certain uses of it.

Using AI to review and improve your CV would make sense, just as you can ask a person for help and review.

But not using it for creating lies and pretending you're skilled in areas where you're not.

Or would you say that if HR uses humans to screen CVs, you can cheat by using a friend's CV instead (using a human, like HR)

Because it's a nonsensical reduction and false equivalence.

It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.

That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.

>It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store.

That's a false equivalence on your part. Real equivalence would be to find out that the store decided to keep zero tills manned and forced you to do the work yourself and go the self checkout. You go do the self checkout and keep a few items extra as a form of payment for the work you did. This would be the real equivalence

My personal theory is less that it's reducing the guilt of lying if the machine fabricates it but rather more that the average person has historically been not so good at fabricating a fib (and they now have instant access to plausible-sounding lies)

I've conducted interviews where the candidate asked if he could use google to try to get an answer. I often say "sure". If a guy can read an explanation out of context, understand it in a way he can explain it using his own words, and reason about corner cases in a couple of minutes, he's hired. The same goes with AI; canned responses work when you ask canned questions, not so much on open-ended ones.

That's missing the point. The goal is to have a level playing field for the interview.

If your interview format allows people to use outside help but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness to ask. In most interview formats it would not be acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.

If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret for people to discover.

The questions dont require google; but what do you do when you don't know a specific thing? You search for it.

The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?

and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.

In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?

And people may lean on their networks more (though they already do).

I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.

If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)

Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.

> But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them

Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.

Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.

Seems pretty alien to my experience. A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway. I’ve certainly always interviewed in person and would probably turn down any company that didn’t offer as an option aside from COVID. But maybe there were a lot of companies that were willing to compromise on face to face so they could get any supposed talent to sign on the dotted line. Of course, they didn’t have much choice for a time even if they subsequently laid people off and/or largely froze hiring.

> A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway.

Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps. Otherwise no – senior talent time is way too valuable to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.

The interview is the time to discuss if there is any benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are past interview territory at that point.

They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview is deemed important.

I have had executives fly to meet me more often than the other way around.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.

You assume we aren't going to end up wearing them daily in order to get promotions. The same elitist power trip that drove RTO is also likely to produce the "dress like us & be rewarded" dynamics that push for conformity.

In more detail, in a glutted market with an unknown percentage of fakers, companies look for costly signals they can use to sort.

This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.

If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.

The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.

Man, as a 6'5" guy I wish getting a suit was that simple.

> It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.

This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor? Am I tailoring my own suit?

> The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews.

this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be right, but it's just sad.

personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look for suits like quants at an investment bank.

Which highest paying dev jobs do you have in mind?

Outside of fintech, none of the highest paid devs are in suits. Not sure if it is even still a thing in fintech actually.

I am FAANG/FAANG adjacent. People making 400-700k/yr. I only see suits at holiday parties.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No, business casual is just fine. Who wants to try to do a grueling technical interview in a suit? No thanks. I sweat enough as it is in interviews.

You are right about hiring not being that much different but your prognostications are way off IMO.

> - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.

Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.

> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.

My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.

Requiring people to be able to interact with other people is not "bigotry".

No, but ignoring their disabilities and saying to just learn to do better is not good enough. It is no different from telling a deaf person to learn to hear with their other sense, it doesn't make sense as their disability is what prevents it. People do need to be able to interact with other people, it just doesn't work like it does with non-neurodivergent people. It takes an effort on both sides. Quit putting it all on the person who cannot do what you want. That is the bigotry.

I'm deaf and rely on real-time captions for calls. In an in-person interview scenario, I'm at a huge disadvantage and not able to perform at my best. In a video call, I'm on equal ground.

It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."

Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a legitimate disability e.g. providing a deaf person the interview questions on paper or even having an ASL interpreter present.

In fact many mention it up front on the screening call before any questions are asked.

> Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a legitimate disability

so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?

That depends on several factors. You should read the official guidance.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reas...

> so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?

It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able to function well around other humans is a job requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why do you think behavioral questions are often asked during interviews?

For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of any accommodation provided.

Yeah but software / digital is a great equalizer, where all kinds of people can contribute even with disabilities or neurodivergence. The whataboutism doesn't really work.

Sure. But if you are unable to really explain yourself and your thought process in the hiring process, they might feel like you are unfit for the interview. they are way more likely to pick a guy who might be a little worse than you in coding but they actually liked him in the interview.

I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?

Yep, I'm in the exact same situation as you.

The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.

As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.

I’d love to read this collection of reviews!

I am pretty sure my current employer could make an exception if you can show proof of your condition (which would benefit you either way in Germany). But we also like to see collegues in person, as this is what the interaction for many positions might look like anyways.

Demanding said proof is very illegal in multiple jurisdictions.

“Prove you’re deaf” would be a pretty rude thing to say, but you also don’t want to hire someone who’s lying about a disability. Presumably you’d do some kind of vetting before an in-person interview, and certainly before a hire.

Anyway in Germany I bet there’s a Taubenausweis (Gehöhrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of official status marker, and the employer would expect you to show it to HR.

Sorry for the snark, but yeah, I agree, human dignity and empathy have no place in the capitalist work place. You must prove you're disabled or else.

I've worked under communist regime. A real one, a few decades ago, and let me tell you, they also demanded proof of disability. Did you have different experience?

I wasn't trying to claim that only capitalists dehumanize people. But that's what we mostly see today because that's the majority of our society.

When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of organisation that treats employees as "resources" will work in a decent way.

What's wrong with asking people to prove they're disabled? There definitely exist people that lie about being disabled too. Many places have a persons with disability certificate given by the government, so "proving", just means entering the ID of that certificate in a form.

> What's wrong with asking people to prove they're disabled

It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually ends up having people trivialise the problem a person might suffer from.

As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a position behind "you need to be able to function in society" is an indecent request to people that have difficulties doing so.

And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.

I for one would like my manager and my employer to understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.

How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?

> As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations [...]

That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for accommodations.

> And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.

I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well. Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.

> How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?

Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often come with suggestions tailored to your specific disability.

> How do you propose I demonstrate...heart rate...bugs per feature...

Just a doctor's note/certificate actually.

> Fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy needed to get a government approved certificate is a chore

Well that is a separate problem. Yes, bureaucracy causes a lot of problems(even renewing your driver's license is a pain), but that doesn't mean the entire basis of needing to prove you are disabled should be thrown away. Everyone in their life faces shit bureaucracy, it's not news.

I'm not sure what kind of authority you have or in which jurisdiction you are to be able to say with such confidence that you need "just a doctor's note", but I was speaking from personal experience where a doctor's note was rejected as it wasn't specific enough to warrant an exception to the RTO mandate. And the doctor is not allowed to put the exact diagnosis in writing for the company. So currently it's a stale mate while everyone is trying to find an acceptable formula for what said doctor's note should say to satisfy the (in)human resources drones and their capitalist overlords.

In the US, the ADA allows employers to request proof of disability.

I had an interview cut short early once because the interviewer said “I have to make sure we’re allowed to hire you.”

This was in Germany.

Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.

> Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.

Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.

So fly them to multiple destinations? I was hired 1 year ago and interviewed with ~14 people all living in different locations. That could be paired down, but it won't ever reach the single destination that the OP is referring to.

Yes but it only one face to face meeting is needed in the process to see if someone is using AI to answer interview. The 13 other interviews can then be online.

this is a great suggestion actually!

Nobody is seriously suggesting you perform every interview step in person. The suggestion is to consider doing the last interview in person. It could even be with one other person.

You can always rent a conference room for an hour or so somewhere in between.

> Classic bigotry.

Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.

Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.

> If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.

This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?

> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate.

Then what is leet code about?

> This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?

That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company and project has its own requirements.

This does not reject the value of soft skills and being able to interact with other people.

You can also frame this from another perspective. How far should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber have the right to advance in hiring processes just because others found him unpleasant to work with?

Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional.

> Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional.

You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.

Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.

Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior people to perform “work samples” under pressure, they just talk to them and dig into past work.

All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.

Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.

I’ve always wondered: is there a LeetCode equivalent for doctors? When a hospital interviews a surgeon, do they roll out a cadaver and ask them to remove the gall bladder in 15 minutes while the interviewer scrutinizes how they hold the scalpel?

It’s because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked credentialism, is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the “every hacker for themselves” world of modern tech.

> is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the “every hacker for themselves”.

Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?

> Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?

Why should it? What problems would they solve? Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?

Well, it'd be nice if they reintroduced proper training of new tech workers, rather than outsourcing it to universities ("not supposed to be trade schools") or relying on internships/co-ops which these days are often nearly as competitive to be hired for as actual jobs. Formalized apprenticeships could help with that, as well as impart a proper culture of craftsmanship.

And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?

> Why should it? What problems would they solve?

We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.

> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?

I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.

> It’s because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked credentialism,(...)

The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.

In the US, candidates to become physicians go through a 5-7 year residency which has low pay, dangerously long hours, and has a supervisor watching over them who can flunk them for failing to meet their standards. That's _after_ a normal bachelors degree and then medical school. Does that sound like something anyone would like to go through to become a software developer just to avoid technical interviews?

It’s not just medicine. No other job does solve this question on a whiteboard style interviews for anyone other than new grads.

The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.

Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.

Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.

I remember reading an article linked here (which I can't find anymore) about a lawyer who converted to software engineering. He was contrasting tech interviews, with 3, 4, 6 rounds* and live coding and high-pressure testing with the exactly one deep chat for a lawyer about to handle multi-hundred-million dollars lawsuits. Insanity.

* special demerits to Canonical

> Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this.

No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.

Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.

Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?

You’re comment was talking about performing under pressure and failing to perform with people watching them.

In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.

If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.

No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.

> If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.

I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.

And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.

You’re not understanding the point.

1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.

2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.

I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”

If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.

>expected to showcase your skills

Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.

> If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that.

EVERY job in EVERY industry???

Well apparently the penguins have to pay tariffs. Do you know what industry they are in and how they do interviews?

> Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.

I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.

I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.

> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure?

Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.

Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/

I asked you, specifically. I'll bite anyways, but I'll expect an actual answer from you.

> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure

No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.

It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.

> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.

> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth?

All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.

> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.

Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?

> Then what is leet code about?

At FAANG and friends? Discouraging job hopping to slow wage growth.

Elsewhere? "FAANG does it and they're rich, so if we want to become rich we should also do it".

> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.

> Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.

Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.

Apply that same logic to someone with one of those conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.

> Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.

A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an hour is not a good employee where that is required. What makes the last one special compared to others? They can be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session musician/mover, I just don't see controversy

A physically impaired person can be a good yoga instructor: they'll suggest alternatives, different/better cues, or provide more accessible classes such as yin or seated yoga.

Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't mean they were before, and an instructor won't necessarily move through the poses with the class since they can have 2-3 classes per day.

If you don't like yoga instructor just replace it with crossfit trainer or olympic athlete or tree surgeon or personal bodyguard

Edit: replaced "triggered" with "don't like"

Because an autistic person can be an amazing programmer? As could a blind person, a deaf person, etc...

Simple accommodations can be made if needed and then there's no need to exclude people on old-fashioned prejudice.

Where did I mention being an amazing programmer? If that's the requirement then why not. The comment was replying specifically about environment where you gotta sit through hour long meetings and that is what I wrote about

maybe there is a company where being an amazing programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries the project and interacts nicely with customers when needed. The last one was probably the most valuable

> Where did I mention being an amazing programmer?

I mean... that's what the title and context of the discussion thread is all about?

If you are an amazing programmer but can't function in the 1 hour sitdown meeting which is part of your job activities then you are de facto worse candidate than the next amazing programmer who can, that's just how it is.

I'm curious about this. When I've hired, I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them.

People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.

I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.

I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.

I like this idea of making the soft skills explicit. Both to the interviewers and the candidate (i.e. in the job posting itself). This would save everyone involved a lot of time, too!

As somebody with autism, one thing I'd say from my experience (I don't know how many people will agree) is that interviewing has felt like a much more severe stress test of my soft skills than anything I've had to do while actually being employed. While employed, the vast majority of my social interactions are oriented around some technical task that I need to work on with other people, and conveying information effectively so as to bring about the completion of this task. This is precisely the kind of social interaction that I feel most competent in--I feel like I'm pretty good at it, actually! What I struggle with are social interactions that are more open-ended, that are more about emotional connections and getting people to like you, and I feel like interviewing is an interaction of the latter type.

In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode. LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business requirements are both "coding" but they're quite different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the former is probably good evidence they can do the latter, but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter without being able to do the former. So it is, in my view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on the job.

> I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them.

Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.

Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.

> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.

I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.

The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.

It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.

there is a world of difference between interacting with three people you don't know for an hour for the explicit purpose of stress testing your experience and knowledge and interacting with three people that you talk to every day talking about a project that is well familiar to you.

There is a big difference between being in a conference room for an interview where you are judged, and on a regular work day. There is for me, and I'm old and have done dozens and dozens of interviews, largely successfully. Don't summarily judge people, especially if they're not neurotypical, as often happens in software.

> Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore

While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.

> Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.

I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.

You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.

If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.

This is not bigotry, is it?

> they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with. This is not bigotry, is it?

If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.

Adding to your point. Why arent we saying that the "noraml" people are the ones bad at interacting with neurodivergents. Their supposed social skills are so limited that they can only work with people who act and behave like them.

That’s an uncharitable interpretation. But if that is what it ends up meaning then i do agree, that’s bigotry.

A more charitable interpretation might mean “the candidate is able to clearly explain (through some medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and why they picked that solution. They were also able to correctly answer follow up questions”. If _that_ is what is meant, then that’s not bigotry IMO.

I wouldn't say uncharitable, just that the best-intentioned version is pretty naïve, especially in the current political climate where every effort to bring that kind of inclusivity and open-mindedness to the table is being actively regressed.

For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.

> If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.

It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.

That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills. Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers filter them out. Problem averted.

If you have a really desirable job I wouldn't think twice about a few hours long drive/flight but eventually creativity wins the game for the hiring side. E.g. No offices, no problem: Either you recruit where you already have people or find trustees. I'd be happy to hold remote interview assist in the Colorado Springs (pot. Denver) area in my small 3ppl office if anyone from a remote-only corp doesn't have anyone on-site and wants to give it a shot...

> Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.

Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.

You're merely reinforcing their point. Its so out of fashion it would be considered a bold or even edgy choice just as dressing casually once would.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)

Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.

The general rule seems to be if you’re not customer-facing, then no suit is needed. Just wear clean, neat clothes and that’s usually enough. If a suit or uniform is needed, that would be noted up front.

The general rule is to dress one step up from those in the role. Everyone in hoodie and shorts? Wear pants. Everyone in collared polos? Go business casual with maybe a blazer. Showing up a level lower makes you look unprepared. Showing up some levels higher, like in a suit to a hoodie shop, shows lack of research and reading a room.

In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot impression wise.

That's the point. One of my first interviews in tech was with a CEO who dressed with an Iron Maiden t-shirt. That settled to me the question about whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office! :)

whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office

'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.

Tech uniforms: instead of spending $2500 on four Brooks Brothers suits (seasonal sales), spend $2500 on fancy Nordic hiking clothes that you'll mostly wear sitting at a desk, as if an Arctic expedition might suddenly break out at the office and you'll need to at least have your base and mid layers ready.

Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.

Erm... no?

The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)

Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.

Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will raise more questions about your sanity than score any points on preparedness.

What is wrong with the advice? You are saying nobody was wearing a suit. I said dress a step up (for the interview). Sr. Management in graphic tees? Wear a polo shirt. Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee. And if the CEO wears a tee-shirt and all the rest are in some other category of dress, base your interview attire based on everyone else.

Mmm... because I'd prefer the approach of Donald Knuth: wear dashiki to special events (like interviews)? I don't mean I endorse West-African style literally. Just either wear something that says something about you, if you are into that, or be neutral and approachable. No need to plus one anyone.

> Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee.

I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the front. The very definition of smart casual.

I hired a guy who did that :) If you're on, hi Minh :wave:

A few months ago, the 60-year-old CEO of the previous company I worked for, employing 100,000 people, showed up at our satellite office with other senior executives and EVPs for an official visit.

He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.

In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.

> the GP Morgan head of futures department... I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank

In case you mean JP Morgan, here's the CEO, Jamie Dimon, on cover of annual shareholder letter, back in ... 2015:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimons-style-telling-jp...

is it bad form to just like, ask your HR screener what the general dress code/vibe is like?

These days, the screener is often external to the company and has never visited the office.

I wouldn't take that advice seriously. Suit in tech would be awkward (even for most mgmt roles). Tech pioneered the concept that you don't need a suit to get the pay of a suit. You can be yourself.

As I learned, you can also be yourself, never wear a suit on the job and still wear one for the interview. First impressions count. Once people know I can wear a suit they just don't seem to mind me in shorts anymore.. So I might have a social skill after all :D

First impressions do count but I think the above poster has a point, a suit can actually harm your chances in an environment where no one wears suits.

I'd want to see some actual hard evidence before I believed that. The usual way social cues work is they are devastatingly effective even if people claim they are not. Much like how most interviewers are honestly convinced that their approach is unbiased but in practice they tend to hire people who are like themselves.

My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-skill roles but I'd assume still present.

Wearing a suit to a tech interview in silicon valley would without a doubt send the signal that either (a) they have absolutely no clue about SV work culture, or (b) they’re a “look at me” guy who dresses odd on purpose

If they're young it can also be because that's what they've been told to do, if they're from a different culture (even an American one) it may be shockingly weird not to wear a suit to an interview, and there are even people who wear suits all the time because a well-made suit is very comfortable, with no more showing off involved than dressing up any other way. An interview is not a regular work day, best not to summarily judge people like that.

> If they're young.... if they're from a different culture...

These are just instances of my point (a): not having a clue about SV work culture.

> there are even people who wear suits all the time

Not in silicon valley tech. I mean, sure, maybe there's one guy and the number is not zero.

My point is that even knowing the work culture of SV does not mean that people necessarily believe it applies to interviews too, or that a suit will be a negative point, rather than good or neutral. There is a strong culture of looking smart at interviews that overrides knowledge of day-to-day attire. If you really care about people being in casual clothes, mention it in the invite, rather than looking down on them for doing what has been ingrained to be appropriate.

Rather than thinking about the suit itself, I’d consider the dress code or culture of the company you’re interviewing for.

Turning up in formal business wear isn’t going to be a positive social cue if everybody you interact with is dressed casually.

The social cue you’d be giving off is that you stick out like a sore thumb and probably didn’t do your research on the company before you showed up.

Literally no different than turning up to Lloyd’s of London in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.

I agree, but I suspect that you’d have much better luck if you wore something that was superficially similar to the kinds of things other people wore, but was much better fitted and higher quality. For instance, if you showed up in a nice pair of chinos and a tailored buttoned shirt (of appropriate formality), that might come across as being really put together rather than ignoring subtle social cues by dressing in something that stands out by not fitting in.

The problem is that when someone who doesn't usually wear a suit puts it on just for one day, it's blatantly obvious he's uncomfortable.

> in practice they tend to hire people who are like themselves.

So then by your own admission, the best way to come dressed is the same way your interviewer tends to dress.

Which is essentially what most people in this thread are arguing for - dress to match the company's culture.

I don't know where you live but for most tech jobs here even outside of sv its almost as bad as putting your photo on a resume. Even for very senior non-technical roles you're better off showing up in slacks and a blazer than the whole enchilada

First impressions do count but I think the above poster has a point, a suit can actually harm your chances in an environment where no one wears suits.

There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good, and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard time seeing how it will count against you.

Intimidating a potential hiring manager right up front isn't usually a great play.

With reference to the GP about awkward people, if an adult hiring manager is intimidated by an professional applicant wearing a suit to an interview in good faith (after all, it's widely seen as mark of taking the interview seriously), I think it is perhaps not the applicant who need to learn the social skills.

If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.

Oh, I agree unreservedly. But if I still need to decide how to dress for the interview...

If there is a de facto dress code and you knowingly go against it, even if you look good in whatever you do wear, it makes you look like you don't understand the prevailing norms. This could lead to worries you might not align with other team norms either.

If it's so important, the interview invite should mention that casual wear is expected. Like it or not, most people take interviews seriously, and have been taught that you show you take the interview seriously by wearing a suit.

Tbh, people who blindly accept what they've been taught without considering the situation at hand don't make good engineers anyway (software or otherwise). It's not like programmers not wearing suits is some well-kept secret only accessible to the inner circle. Quite the opposite I'd say.

It's well known that programmers don't wear suits in the office in the SV. It's less obvious they shouldn't wear one in the interview either, because that's not a regular work day. It's not obvious at all to someone from a formal-dress culture like France (Italy? India?). Google's own AI recommends erring on the side of caution and wearing a suit for an SV interview. Yes, people should look up the specific company they're interviewing for... if it even comes to their mind, it's that obvious interviews require suits in some cultures.

If you forgive me the analogy, and assuming you're American, would you think of checking the etiquette of entering into a shop? In the US, the concept itself is weird, you go in, buy stuff, and leave. In France, you must greet the shopkeeper right as you go in through the door. In Hungary, you must wish the shopkeeper a good day in reply to their greeting. It's simple... if you know it's even a thing you should check.

Which is funny, because weren't we in tech the people who aspired to “think different”? But then it didn't become think-different for the individual but for the tech in-group against the "square", boring, formality-driven out-group. And since the world is becoming increasingly informal and any group worth its salt needs to differentiate itself, tech people might be the first to return to wearing suits and ties (or dresses) to work. I'd love that.

"Think different" was a marketing slogan used for Apple products from 1997 to 2002, back when Apple was aimed chiefly at video editing professionals. It was never aimed at techies.

As long as suits and ties remain the uniform of politicians and managers, I don't think techies will ever willingly adopt it for themselves as well.

Wearing a suit to a technical interview is an immediate red flag. Everybody knows you don't wear suits in this industry, so what's your motive? Your ability to wear a suit is irrelevant for the job, so what weaknesses that are relevant are you rather clumsily trying to hide?

It's a red flag? Come on, if I wear a suit it's because I want too and has no impact on my skills as a software engineer.

Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear isn't productive

I would go as far as to say being this hyper-focused on clothes rather than if the person is sociable and competent is a red flag itself. It is rather superficial. Vague platitudes about "culture" might get thrown out, but are we engineering and building things or are we putting on a fashion show?

Calling it a red flag may have been too harsh. It's certainly not an immediate no.

However, like it or not, it is a signal because it means you deviate significantly from the mode of the distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests that if anything, all else equal that signal is a negative one.

I've gotten a job offer from every technical interview I ever took in a suit, so it Worked For Me. And none of the jobs that I took I ever wore a suit to again (except for conferences or trade shows, and occasionally when I was going out after work to somewhere posh, which did provoke fun "Omg are you interviewing" questions!) Which I actually have found a bit of a shame because I do quite like a chance to wear a suit, though I'm also grateful not to have to iron infinite shirts.

Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!

An interview is not a regular work day. If only things relevant to the job were required in an interview, no one would be talking about whiteboard exercises.

can you just ask them before the interview? "is it okay to wear a suit, or do you guys have a stick up your..."?

I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.

It has spread to other industries and circumstances other than suits.

I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most things other than formal occasions like wedding, funerals, or formal dinners.

Yep. The great thing about the expectation of suit is always knowing what to wear.

> I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most things

Can't go wrong with “smart casual”

// not sure that helps :)

"Be yourself"? What does that mean?

What if wearing a suit is "being myself"? You'll be penalized in tech for that.

Not everyone views the wearing of suits as some kind of punishment.

Seeing someone wearing a suit for a dev interview would make me think one of the following:

(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.

(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?

(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.

(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.

That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.

Sad because I /like/ wearing a suit, even to the grocery store. I know I must look weird, but I feel more comfortable with and confident in myself.

You probably wear suits that fit and the confidence probably shows through. Not to stereotype, but I suspect a large number of developers have one or two suits they wear for job interviews, weddings and funerals, and they bought them long enough ago that they are too loose or too snug by now, and consequently feel uncomfortable when wearing them. At least this used to be me.

Personally, I feel uncomfortable in any suit, not because of size or fit, but because I must be wary not to make it dirty at all, otherwise cleaning is a pita. Say you want to go for lunch with coworkers and someone orders spaghetti/pasta. Great ... I rather wear something simple, so there is no problem, if something unfortunate happens.

This feels like such a narrow view of the world. Not necessarily discriminatory, but on the path to get there.

So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.

I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.

Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.

> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.

> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.

How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.

I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.

You do see how discriminatory your statement is right?

Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.

As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.

No, I don't. Like I said at the end:

> I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.

I'm not saying you immediately throw a candidate out for wearing a suit. It's entirely possible I'm wrong and my mind can be changed by their performance, but it is something that would make me take a closer look.

I'll give you another example I experienced recently: a candidate who would not stop drumming their fingers on the table throughout the interview. Is that specifically related to their performance? No, not really. Is it annoying, a bit disrespectful, and shows a lack of restraint? Yeah, it is. This candidate had other flaws that made them disqualifying, but their finger drumming didn't help them at all.

[flagged]

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understand and respect your decision to moderate my comment, and I’ll be more careful going forward.

But I would like to point out that a rule that allows someone to openly state they discriminate during interviews but forbids a strong reaction to that statement might require some examination.

Respectfully, what I’m describing is not discrimination in the hiring sense. Discrimination is unfair treatment related to immutable characteristics about a person such as race, age, gender, etc.

You could just as easily argue that people “discriminate” against candidates by making them do leetcode, when leetcode is unrelated to performance at the job. Leetcode is a performance some people look at during interviews, just like how you socially meld in an interview is a performance people look at during interviews.

Maybe the person you interviewed was on the autistic spectrum (or had ADHD) and the finger drumming was a form of stimming?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming

I have no idea since I wasn’t there when you interviewed that person but it is something that came to mind.

You’re welcome to disagree with people and present your opposing view, but we just need you to do so without escalating into hostility and personal insults. This site exists to be a place of curious conversation, not a battleground.

> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.

> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.

I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.

Sounds like we mostly agree. You don’t have to like or agree with anyone’s personal choices, but you do have to respect them and treat them fairly.

Especially if you’re an interviewer.

I was once turned down by Microsoft (in the 1990s), because I wore a suit to the interview. They made a point of mentioning it.

So tech got rid of the suits, but kept the desire to judge people at interviews based on their clothes?

Great. Fantastic job everyone /S

I remember reading, when IBM turned "business casual," that everyone adopted the same outfit: Khaki slacks, and blue polo shirts.

As a 25 year hoodie-wearing tech person, I'd pick suits over Khakis and polo shirts any day.

Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity.

At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.

Please explain from the first principles, why a suit is "aesthetically better" and more dignified than a t-shirt/jeans combo.

In human dynamics, very little is based on “first principles”. Some words are considered vulgar and others are not. Why? Aren't they just a sequence of letters? They certainly are, but those sequences have been assigned a meaning that does not derive from any “first principle”.

In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.

I absolutely agree, humans are creatures of context, that's why GPs opinion that not wearing a suit is a "perverse mirror image" and "mediocrity" is out of touch.

> In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men.

Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.

> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.

It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.

Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of clothes that are designed to look good on a male silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of wider society surrounding tech.

Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.

To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.

You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.

Most of the popular outfits are "designed to look good" to a high degree, and then humans are quite bad at fitting the garments on average. Poorly fit suits that don't look good on a male silhouette are absolutely a thing, and I'd posit that an unkempt male wearing a poorly fitting cheap suit looks "lower status" than a fit and well groomed male wearing a stylish t-shirt/jeans combo.

So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.

100% agreed. I’ve seen way more than enough people in poorly-fitting expensive suits to last me a lifetime, and it is just painful to watch.

The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.

For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.

Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.

Hehe explain aesthetics from first principles sounds like demanding the equation that proves Mona Lisa is a good painting.

I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).

It's just a different set of in group // out group signals, not some sort of moral failing. You're well within your rights to not like the signals though.

At least t-shirts and stripey socks are comfortable

[in NYC accent] What, you think you're better than us

[in a Mid-Atlantic accent] No, I know that I'm better than you.

[chuckles in Texan]

Too real. I once got turned down by the Apple Store for a retail position because I wore a collared shirt to the interview (after being told in advance not to wear anything formal). Interviewer let me know I came off as too formally dressed to get their vibe. The discrimination/bias was real.

I mean, if they said not to wear something formal, that doesn't really seem like bias as much as just not following instructions. If I showed up to an interview where they said to wear a suit and I was in jeans and a polo, I'd expect to get turned down too.

A button up shirt isn't formal.

I'd mostly agree, but with them specifically calling out "not anything formal" as part of the expectations for interview attire wouldn't be the time I'd want to be riding the line of "is this too close to formal". This isn't a job at a tailor or stylist. You're not being tested on your understanding of the roles of various garments in different levels of fashion over time.

Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.

We might be getting a but pedantic about what “formal” meant at the time, but you would have had to be in that Apple culture circle to consider a button down formal. Seems normal today, but it was not back then in most parts of the world. Today I would agree that folks would already know the expectation.

A button up shirt without a jacket, at the time, was business casual at most. What they wanted was a t-shirt and jeans. Even Walmart, when I’d worked as a teen, expected a collar and appreciated a sports coat for interviewing. Different times for sure.

Sure, but t-shirt and jeans is also what everyone working at an Apple Store wears. It'd be one thing if they didn't say what to wear - then I'd totally understand going a bit above, but if they specifically put in "not formal", then it seems reasonable to assume they mean "match the uniform generally".

They didn’t say what to wear, they said a vague what not to wear. Almost all interviews at that point in time expected attire a step above your intended position. I personally think it was just a silly test of whether you already know what they expect. “You are a great hire but you dressed too nicely for the interview” is certainly a thing that I chuckle at.

I didn't wear a suit, but in 2012 I wore slacks, tucked in collared shirt, and a tie, and got the same response from Microsoft. It was for an internship which is hilarious.

I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)

I was hired by MS wearing a suit in the 2000s

The only programmers I've ever seen wearing a suit to work were the ones working in a bank. Not sure if that was a requirement or just a local tradition. Just saying that it happens, but seems very rare.

It's not unusual in Europe - but then Europeans tend to dress smarter than Americans in general too.

I wore a suit to my very first tech interview on the advice of my well-meaning but ill-informed mother.

I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!

Very close story here as well. lol. “You can always underdress but never overdress!”

Thanks mom!

Take it to the limit and show up to an interview in full white tie attire.

I've made it a point to always ask beforehand: "what is the dress code expectation? I've seen everything from t-shirts to suits in the tech industry and I'd like show up dressed appropriately."

I always get a positive response.

I was told by a recruiter to "suit up" for an engineering position 15 years ago. I was met by the VP of engineering wearing cutoff jeans. I never listen recruiter sartorial advice.

To be fair, "suit up" usually means to put on a uniform rather than to wear a suit. The phrase seems to have originated in sports. T-shirts and hoodies are the uniform of tech.

I don't think it's fair to the candidate to expect them to think that when a recruiter says "suit up" they mean in t-shirt and jeans or cutoffs.

It is a common phrase that, as commonly used, has no connotations with the suit as a style of dress: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suit%20up

But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where it only works where there already is a shared understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of the comments on HN are from actors having different understandings for technical jargon and talking past each other because they aren't even talking about the same thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.

This must be localised; where I live "suit up" means "wear a suit".

> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again

It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.

It's not expectation of sameness, it's that they will be working with 'normal' people and need to meet some standard to not be a net negative for any team they're in.

I think there's a tacit expectation to fit into a mold and that mold is heavily skewed towards extroverted neurotypical traits.

Neurotypical means something, after all. Extroverted, I wouldn't say.

Basic game theory, really. Business are not charities. Hiring a neurodiverse person is riskier than a neurotypical one.

Neurodivergent people have always had to learn social skills, plenty of people come off as weird/insane/awkward over zoom

Hm, it turns out suggesting that someone buy a suit for a job they need is a litmus test.

You've had multiple comments about orgs explicitly not hiring candidates that show up in suits, yet call it a "litmus test" if someone doesn't?

You sound like a typical classist MBA; don't you have Linkedin posts to make and employees to micromanage?

> And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit

No company worth working for would refuse to hire someone just because they didn't wear a suit to their interview

Dress nicely, sure. Wear a collar? Yeah probably. A tie? Meh.

Let's get rid of this old fashioned boomer nonsense from hiring please

My advice is to ask to hiring manager who invites you to come in about the dress code expectation / norms, and try to be on the higher end of the range they give, without going over.

I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.

> And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.

Perhaps the suit wasn't the one level up that people are talking about? If you accidentally go 3 levels too formal, you've definitely ruined the initial impression.

Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.

The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.

> People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries.

Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-nāṣir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...

Man, how annoyed do you have to be with someone to carve your complaint into stone!

Pressing an edged tip into damp clay to write a complaint or ledger is almost as fast as quill and ink writing, the clay takes longer to dry solid than ink though.

it is very easy to understand if someone is saying useless ai soup or he knows what he is talking about if you are good in your field. At least in software it is.

I get where you're coming from, especially on the cost of bad hires: it really is one of the riskiest bets a company makes. But I'm not convinced going back to the "fly them out and grill them on a whiteboard" era is the right answer either.

There's an opportunity for wework for hiring - rent out a conference room for a couple hours and have a third party be present during the interview. The first one to figure this out and not go bankrupt a year or two later wins. Probably not a unicorn business, though.

In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason. It is not an expensive as people think to fire someone who deceived your hiring process. However, institution inertia is real.

That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.

> In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason.

In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.

Every big tech company in the US has their version of PIP, to protect them from potential law suits as I understand, that lead to a situation that low performers might occupy their positions for months and years.

NCC Group fired me with no notice, no severance, and no stated cause. PIPs exist; that doesn't mean you have to use them.

Unfortunately, in very large organizations the onboarding process can take a while. It can be months before you have credentials to the repository. By then, full benefits will kick in, worker protections, etc.

And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.

If you make a bad hire you stop looking to fill that role, and then if you fire them 2-3 months later you are back at square zero.

wrote something similar a while back: https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/ai-is-the-reason-intervi...

The industry is probably going to have to consider the concept of a "qualification", that is a test you take once and then present to employers rather than have each employer make up a different one.

I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.

I mean, aren't great degrees such tests, though they don't check the practical knowledge.

We just need some sort of qualification which tests practical knowledge.

Did you ever work with developers? Maybe if you hire for consultants in some industries some of this is relevant (I doubt it), but with social skills + suit part alone will make sure you miss out on a significant pool of talent.

I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.

I knew some colleagues who were alright as developers (maybe over-eager, e.g. building a microservices architecture by themselves when that didn't actually solve the real problems the company had) who had a suit phase for some reason.

No Computer Science degree = forget about it.

In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.

I'm inclined to agree, but at the same time, I've worked with people who proved themselves in the industry already. My senior developer at the time, had 15 years experience but no formal relevant education.

Except you can use AI (against the rules, but there is 0% chance they’re catching everyone) for a degree.

The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”

Id say it depends on the specifics of the job role; In most cases, "the fundamentals" arent relevant at all; they are items on the runtime library of a given high level language of choice. There are exceptions, obviously, but you do not need to be a rocket scientist to maintain an ERP or an e-commerce application; on the other hand, there are plenty of "hard problems" where computer science is also mostly useless, because the steepness of it is advanced math, not algorithm design.

> it's time to buy a suit

Yeah, no. I'd deduct points if the candidate wears a suit. What a huge red flag, missing all sorts of context and appropriateness cues.

This is insane to read. You don't get brownie points for what you're wearing, but deducting points for someone trying to impress folks by dressing more formally than what you're typically used to?

Yes. I deduct points for people who can't into social cues and context. Such is life, we are social animals. I'd deduct points if a candidate showed up in beach shorts too. (A suit is as wildly inappropriate in this context as beach shorts.)

In most countries, you have trial periods where you can terminate without too much hassle. Here in Germany, that's usually six months and I know of people in pretty senior positions that got screwed over and terminated towards the end of that period.

The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.

And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.

I've been on both sides of the table.

My process for hiring is:

- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.

- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).

- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.

- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.

Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.

>a string of meh employers

What's a meh employer?

A lot of people look down on companies that solve 'boring' problems with 'boring' technologies. I guess it's an open question if having been writing in-house CRUD apps using a 10 year old tech stack for several years is a proxy for lack of competence.

I've seen a "senior" developer who didn't recognize what VSCode was. Like, not that they hadn't heard of the specific program—they didn't recognize the sort of program it was.

Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.

The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.

A company pretending to be some fancy place that everyone wants to work that just isn't that great. The whole A's hire A's and B's hire C's but are pretending to be A's kind of thing. Let's just say that not every company is like Google in the early days (free 3 star restaurant food, clean t-shirts, slides in the office, and all the rest). Even Google is not like that anymore.

There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.

Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.

AI has definitely changed the dynamic; more people think they can get away with lying without getting caught. They trust the AI’s ability to lie more than their own.

>And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa

> awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.

Whatever future interviews look like, I sure as hell hope we don't maintain this ^ attitude.

> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.

No man, it's not and never was - unless you are aiming for a "career" at JP Morgan and the likes.

A suit is just another one of those lies that people have been doing for centuries.

I’ve literally never, in almost 20 years in the industry, been asked to or expected to wear a suit. I’ve never ever had anyone say anything to me about my clothes period. It’s simply not a consideration in my experience. In fact the one time I worked for a place that had a dress code, it specifically exempted my department (software engineering) from the policy - and if that hadn’t been the case I wouldn’t have taken that job.

The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.

"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.

In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!

> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?

Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

> what is one to do

Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.

> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?

> Switching to a tech stack is not the same as switching to brain surgery.

> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".

I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!

> So white lies are the only way.

It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.

> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege

This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.

> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...

I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.

We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.

> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...

We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

Not all jobs are created equal. I know the quality control for software written for Web is very very different than the software written for cloud.

You're arguing that the standards for medical device firmware should be the same for Pinterest which is honestly just a waste of and effort.

I can see both sides of this specific discussion but treating SW engineering generally as rocket science is lying to yourself ;)

I consider unjustly harming others to be bad, whether you're exploding a rocket or not. That's why I added this part:

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

You're not harming anyone with grooming and pump up your resume to give yourself the best possible chance. Jobs aren't assigned and reserved to people from birth based on fate in order to be something you can steal from them with this. You don't deserve a job just because, you have to compete and interview for it like everyone else, and if you can get it and do the job, then good for you.

If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility to adapt to the variable interview process and prove yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge, cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to play their best hand all the time and honesty is not always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.

Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

>> You're not harming anyone

I refer you to the below lines in the post to which you replied:

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.

----

>> Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".

In other words, might makes right. If you manage to scam an old lady out of her retirement savings, you deserve to have it! There's no such thing as "she deserves", only "she competed and she lost", etc etc etc.

It's a good thing there are people in this world that don't subscribe to this "fark you, anything goes, as long as I got mine" style of "ethics".

> critical component of both medicine and rocket science

Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write software for rockets or medical devices after applying for a generic web development job?

> from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified

That’s all very nice. Unless you end up being that someone yourself.

> and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

That’s highly debatable. It’s possible a lot of them did the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it really “deception”?

Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying is not even remotely a binary thing.

> who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not

Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.

It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... :

> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).

Not the case in my jurisdiction, exaggerating in your resume is not illegal. And I really don't care, call it whatever you want if that makes you feel better. Companies are dishonest all the time to their customers and to their workers and especially to their candidates. Been screwed 3 times by dishonest employers, I'm only reciprocating their attitude.

I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the top. Companies aren't religious holier than though, they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's the case, I can play the same game.

Are you former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson? Because that’s what he said too.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/05/08/yahoo-ceo...

Outright lies? Perhaps but even then it’s not clear if it meets the legal definition in all cases.

Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not telling the full story with all the details? Well that’s entirely subjective.

> under false pretenses

Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he didn’t explicitly declare that during the interview without being bc prompted?

Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but it’s non-“professional” experience since he learnt it pn his own and again.. didn’t disclose that during the interview?

Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and you somehow find out he wasn’t 100% honest about some finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers that stuff anyway?) you’d still feel the same way?

What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?

And there's the reputation loss if someone decided to do due diligence.

I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.

Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.

You touched on an important topic: if a candidate has potential but HR has no way to tell if that candidate is any good, should they hire him?

How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?

>Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?

Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.

I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.

How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?

>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?

Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.

>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.

Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.

>What are you giving them to work with?

Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.

> Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector.

That's a cheap excuse. That's not their job. Their job is to hire someone, anyone, within the budget and that meets minimum requirements. Their responsibility is to get a butt on a seat that can do the work. Any candidate that passes that hiring bar is a safe choice.

You're talking as if their goal was to hire the absolute best based on rigorous objective criteria and crisp stack rankings. It is not. They look for someone, anyone, that is able to do the job, fit in, and not shit the bed. And they need to be able to defend their choice. That's why education matters, prior experience matters, certiciation matters, and even recommendations matter.

Why do you think internal recommendations are a fast track to hire? Do you have any excuse like corruption? Or do you understand that the goal is to find people who are able to do the job, fit within the organization, and not cause problems?

If you fail to understand the problem, you will never find it's solution.

> What then? Should I be unemployed?

Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.

I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.

When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.

You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.

>Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market.

In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?

I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.

But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?

The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.

When you're got a thousand resumes, it is not possible to interview them all. You'll pick the most promising handful.

That's why you lie to make sure you get in the promising handful.

That's why there are leetcode interviews to detect the frauds.

These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.

There are many recruiters out there that will flat out reject someone if they aren't a perfect match for every single skill listed. I don't have a problem with lying to get past that gauntlet.

Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them, you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all, it's the same game.

That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine".

> it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead.

Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them

I'm sorry you feel hurt or harmed by someone. I've felt that, too, and it really sucks. It's not a good feeling.

I avoid recruiters unless they can serve me well, too (increased salary, signing bonus, etc), instead preferring to applying directly to individual companies whose mission is interesting and whose culture matches mine.

That said, I don't think hurt is a valid justification for hurting someone else, like the innocent parties I mentioned (potential future coworkers, other job applicants). That perpetuates a chain of hurt. Break the chain.

Nobody's getting hurt when you can do the job. In fact you're doing them a favor by taking a job and making money for them.

>> Nobody's getting hurt when you can do the job.

> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them. [0]

> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview. [0]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43623155

If you wish to reply, it'd be appreciated if you could reply in the referenced thread where you originally made your above claims, and where they were originally refuted. Arguing the same claim over multiple posts seems like it'd be a waste of your time.

Employers pay big fees to recruiters who deliver qualified candidates.

Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen match customers with providers. For that, they get paid.

They are not "harming" either, as the relationship and deals made are voluntary.

They don't need a percentage of my salary. Why don't they work hourly like I do? I don't work for a percentage of the company's revenue

People who run businesses don't do it for an hourly wage.

"it's like that because that's how it is"

If you ever decide to open your own busines, it'll be immediately apparent why you aren't paid by the hour. (You're paid the profit, if there is one.)

Why would they take a percentage of your salary? You're the recruit. They're providing the business a service (good recruits who can fill a position), so they charge the business. You're providing the recruiter a service (being that good recruit), so they pay you in the form of a signing bonus. Additionally, since the employer pays the recruiter a percentage of one year's salary, the recruiter is incentivized to make that salary as high as possible, so they'll negotiate on your behalf in that regard.

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but of if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

> And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those?

Perhaps the first step anyone should take is to arrive at the realization that the point of a hiring process from the perspective of a hiring manager is not to find the absolute best candidate. The goal is to pick anyone, anyone at all, from a pool of acceptable candidates. If they are able to get through the door and not shit the bed, they are a superb hire.

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound authentic.

AI is the GOAT of Buzzword generation or should I/Gemini say

"Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword generation."

It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”

Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?

Probably get promoted to C-suite.

Recruiters have gone beyond keyword matching, they're now using AI to judge the resume.

> Hiring is broken

How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?

Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well. So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check. Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.

I don't know. Depends on a case by case basis. Maybe someone has solid credentials, maybe someone has some FOSS contributions.

this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.

i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.

Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.

IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.

> The issue is lying about your experiences

I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.

That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.

Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.

How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time?

Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?

> if you want to prepare for a C dev interview

Spend an hour reading a book about C?

I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for time spent you'll ever get.

He did, and got a $300,000 offer.

I'm not sure that it's a good thing if "ability to produce convincing lies" is something that a company requires in a job candidate. People getting into jobs who aren't exceptional liars when they couldn't have otherwise seems like win to me.

>The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.

> Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt.

Really? That's the bigger issue?

Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?

I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."

Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.

The two are not remotely comparable.

> This promotes lying

No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]

So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even an experienced person) whose resume says experience in ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system that does the screening.

The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it.

If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.

Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.

Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.

Half the issue is companies where you won't even get to an interview without a juiced-up CV, and the rest is a interviewing and hiring decision process that doesn't penalize liars. If people felt your advice was the best way to get ahead, then they'd follow it, but when they see people who are just good bullshitters rocket past them in the system, they're not gonna feel good about it.

(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)

This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.

Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.

If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?

You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted.

I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.

> It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against.

This is still based on a false assumption, because you want to justify it to yourself.

If the company had lots of CVs being submitted but not a single person made it through their screening, they'd realise their screening bar was either too high (as you assume) or that their bar was correct but they couldn't find the candidate they wanted. Maybe their standards are too high, in which case they might then re-evaluate their expectations are repeat their hiring process with a lower acceptance criteria.

If they're only looking to fill a single role, it doesn't matter if the process screens out 99.9% of the candidates as long as they get through at least one candidate that fulfills the requirement. Of course, if the situation is as you describe, for such a rare talent, the candidate is possibly looking for money than they're prepared to pay, at which point they can again calibrate their expectations lower or decide to pay more. But that's a business decision for the company to decide, not you as a jobseeker.

But the people who know what the company is looking for, and how many people get through their filtering is the company themselves, not you. Just because you don't have the skills required and you extrapolate that to "no-one has these skills", it doesn't mean you're correct and it doesn't mean you're justified in lying.

You then say that you haven't "been desperate enough to try this". In that case, you shouldn't be defending this behaviour either - it will be hurting you when the jobs you are qualified for and have a legitimate shot at getting end up getting filled by a candidate who's not actually up to the task and managed to lie and BS their way through the interview. How is that a good outcome for you or for the company?

You're really missing the point here. It isn't about the idea world, it's about things as they actually are. Mental gymnastics to justifying something is not the same as a sober assessment of the incentives and dynamics of a system.

Lying on your CV and in an interview isn't a "sober assessment of the incentives and dynamics of a system". It's deceit.

I never implied such an equivalence.

Perhaps you could reread GP? You seem to have misunderstood what he wrote. Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit.

I think maybe you should re-read my posts too, because it seems you misunderstood what I wrote. "Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit." suggests that you are arguing about a totally different thing to me. I've never once suggested that it's deceitful to discuss their motivations, I was arguing that the actions caused by those motivations are deceitful.

To be clear, I understand their motivations - essentially "I want this job whether I'm qualified for it or not", but lying about their experience is never acceptable IMHO.

Going further, to me it's not clear which specific post you mean by GP here, as this is now many levels deep and my argument hasn't changed since the my first post on this topic and the argument I've been responding to hasn't changed. Do you mean the GP of that or the GP of the post you replied to? I'll quote them both.

The GP of my original reply was: "Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?" which was answered by somebody justifying that behaviour.

The GP of your reply was: "You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted."

The view expressed by both of these, and that I am fundamentally in disagreement with, is that the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.

The problem with this view is that it's the candidate who's making this assessment. They have no idea if there are any suitable candidates, only that they are not suitable and they aren't prepared to accept that perhaps there is someone more qualified than themselves who is suitable.

Perhaps such a person who's more qualified wouldn't want to work in this job. Perhaps the company's requirements are in fact unrealistically high and they don't get any applicants. None of this is the candidate's concern. What is their concern is that they are not qualified for the role, and so should not be applying. Perhaps they think they're close to the requirements, and apply anyway with a letter such as "my skills aren't an exact match, but maybe you would consider me anyway".

If the company's requirements turn out to be unrealistic, they will realise that soon enough, and decide what alternatives they have. It might be that they re-advertise the role with requirements that the potential candidate now meets, in which case they can and should apply at that point.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the motivations are, the issue just boils down to "is it acceptable to lie so you can the outcome you want while negatively impacting the other party?" I'd argue no.

GP of my initial comment. I think I spotted the misunderstanding. I read you to be accusing GP but perhaps that wasn't your intent. The rest follows from there.

> the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.

The claim isn't that it's acceptable. It's not "this is ideal and good and you should aspire to it" but rather responding to your idealism by examining the dynamics.

I doubt anyone disagrees with you in principle. However in practice if you leave something valuable out in a bad part of town it's getting stolen. You can preach that theft is wrong until you're blue in the face but it doesn't change the reality.

A virtuous refusal to compromise your ethics means you lose out yet the situation is expected to remain the same. That's fine if you have plenty of other options but you can't realistically expect everyone to be in that position. It's not a matter of ethics but rather human behavior. The scenario where the company is forced to acknowledge that their hiring process is broken will almost certainly never come to pass.

Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is only necessary to pass the “filter” and that it has limited impact on the candidate’s ability to perform the actual work its not necessarily that straightforward.

I mean, we have companies out there posting "entry level" positions and demanding 10 years experience in a technology that's only existed for five.

All bets are off, man.

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology.

That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.

Do OCR systems still detect invisible words? I would have thought by now they'd use pixel based image recognition.

I doubt they're using OCR. More likely they're using one of the many text extractors available for PDFs.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-t...

I think nowadays they directly use screen share and image recognition like https://interview.sh for example

Interesting, that still works? I first heard about that a decade ago.

You can occasionally prompt the AI resume review systems using the white text as well.

Really depressing to think about, as one who has never tried to game the system.

Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.

This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.

> would flag you internally

And how would they figure that out if you lie by exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright making up entirely false stuff?

Its up to interviewers but discussed matters can be checked quickly (ah you claim 10 years java backend integration experience? Ok lets dig deep. If reality is (almost) 0 thats lying in plain view).

Also not sure you understand english language, greatly exaggerating or making up stuff is still same lying, details are irrelevant.

> is still same

No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.

Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?

What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..

Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.

Even reneging on an offer in the US gets you blacklisted for like 5 years max. It's not personal, it's just business.

What do you mean by "reneging on an offer"? Do you mean simply turning down an offer? How is that a blacklistable offence?

It's seen as wasting their time.

Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.

Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.

But here's what I don't understand about this: wouldn't that be the company revoking the offer, not the employee? If the company revokes the offer or has "exploding offers" or whatever, that's a corporate thing, not an employee issue.

No, this is the following set of steps:

1. Person A interviews at company B

2. Company B says "we'd like to hire you at $X/year"

3. Person A says "that sounds good, I'll start in a month." Company B stops trying to fill the job.

4. Up to a month passes.

5. Person A tells company B "lol nevermind" and doesn't actually start work. Normally this is because company C is offering to pay $Y and $Y >> $X.

It's an employee issue because the employee is not following through on what they said they'd do. Because employment is at-will in the US they're legally in the clear, but the company that was planning on hiring them is still kind of screwed.

> I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems

I've been really impressed with how much a of performance lift working on leetcode with AI is. It's so much easier to focus on developing rapid problem decomposition skills and working with an interviewer during the problem.

Unfortunately it's also necessary to improve this process because the current standards for the companies still doing leetcode interviews are getting pretty wild these days. Meta requires 2 med-hard question solved in 20 minutes or less each for the screen these days! Even if you have solid algorithmic thinking solving and implementing solutions that quickly requires you to be insanely prepped.

English is not my first language, and yet I'm fluent, but some of the questions I've been asked to solve are insanely confusingly worded and so I have a harder time because the interview process at some places is unrealistic.

Many interview coding questions are purposefully worded weird with the intent of seeing if you ask clarifying questions.

I had no ability to do so, it was on some leetcode esque site.

The interviewer might be looking to see how you deal with bad specifications which, in my experience, are also often confusingly worded, vague and/or conflicting.

>I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful.

It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.

I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal.

If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.

If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.

I mean, as an alternative to 133tcode, perhaps they could maybe demonstrate real world applicable skills:

* ability to communicate

* ability to empathize

* ability to be a nice person you’d want to see every day

And yet, ability to code — or actually ability to learn to think algorithmically — is elementary for IT positions, and on average an uncommon enough that it's very much worth it for companies to test for it. You're not trying to suggest just employing any competent middle manager or marketing person to code, after all.

> Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

i got a high paying job at meta once i started see it as 'presentation' and not a 'conversation' .

I play this stupid ass game to make money

It's really easy to catch these scammers. Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written. Actually take the time to read through the code and understand at least a part of it. In an interview, ask them some questions about it. People who actually wrote the code or did the thing can talk at length about about what they did, the history behind it, trade offs, have colorful stories about it, etc. I don't even care exactly about the technical details of it, I'm looking for signals that they are a liar.

If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag. If they can't describe how something works, that's a bigger red flag. You're not looking for photographic memory, but it's very obvious once you do it a few times who is real and who is lying.

It's common sense, if you don't put in at least a tiny bit of effort in your hiring process, you can only expect to attract similar low effort candidates.

"Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written."

I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.

Spending a few hours to write some open source code seems like a reasonable tradeoff to get a high paying job.

It is surprising to me that folks looking for a new job would not do this proactively.

Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on my personal github page and even thought it's listed on my resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at it. This includes contributions to a widely used OSS project.

YMMV, but all the high paying jobs I've received were due to knowing the tech stack they used and being able to walk through the projects that I've done in detail.

Admittedly, the last time I changed jobs was 2024, so things might be different now.

Exactly, the most I've gotten from my personal projects has been a "oh cool".

>Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on my personal github page and even thought it's listed on my resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at i

If it helps, I do! When someone has this available on their resume, I will look around. It allows me to ask better questions, for starts.

Unfortunately, what I have found, is for every one person who has a legitimate track record of contributions and/or working/worked on projects beyond the basics, there are 100 people who simply do a bunch of cookie cutter projects to make their Github look good, but everything is shallow.

Ironically, those with the cookie cutter projects set themselves up to get weeded out easily, as there is a clear pattern of 'learning to pass the test' rather than learning to learn

  no interviewer has ever looked at it

How do you know this? Did you challenge every interviewer to tell you whether they'd looked at any of the code on your personal github page?

If I review code on someone's github page, that doesn't mean I'll proactively ask them about it in an interview.

Everyone can produce _something_ they have written. Yes there are people who literally clock in at work and code 8-5 for 10 years and never touched a hobby project or contributed to an OSS project. And you might not want to filter that group out completely. But if I was in that group and I was considering switching jobs, I'd definitely make sure I had some of that proprietary code stashed away so I could show a potential future employer. Yes you won't be allowed to do that. And it would be understandable if in some cases (like you work as a defense contractor) it's completely impossible. But for most people it should be possible to show something.

Very easy but time-consuming

If one cant take 30mins to vet a candidate code sample, one should not be hiring. Or working in anything that requires proper reasoning - its akin to not writing tests or do code reviews because "they take time".

> If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag.

If I just have to give a code example of mine on the spot during an interview with no prep, I'm sure as hell not going to remember why I took a certain approach unless there are comments.

> If they say they don't remember, that's a red flag.

Is it? I can think of projects I've worked on that have come up with friends that I have no idea how they worked anymore, just barely if at all. If the project was within the last 2 years, then yeah, but if its 8 year old plus code, I don't expect anyone to remember. However, they could have looked at it when they sent it over and refresh their minds.

OK, so ask them for something they've written in the past 2 years.

Everything I've written in the past 2 years is either proprietary or deeply private to me.

Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example:

1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.

2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.

Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.

If the unredacted parts of the resume were entirely fabricated, what harm is there in having the lies out there? The candidate will be scrubbing from their honest version going forward anyway.

Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.

Generally I agree with this advice, but if the goal is to make the dork findable with a modicum of plausible deniability this is fine.

I'm often surprised when someone will paste a screenshot of a tweet with the name blurred (presumably to protect them from harassment). The contents of the tweet are easily searchable...

Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).

> Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.

I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating?

As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.

Regular sharpening doesn't work.

But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.

This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.

There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.

Well, let's see you do it! Can you deblur something like the first 2-3 letters of a name?

> Well, let's see you do it!

That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just trying to provide some helpful info.

If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret knowledge.

So then I'm going to interpret that as not being possible.

You can interpret it however you want. That doesn't mean you'll be interpreting it correctly. Good luck.

Knowing that it is possible is different than having the tools, having the expertise, and wanting to take the time to do it for a random HNer.

There are several papers on the topic if you're that interested.

3. This probably counts as copyright infringement, unless it's chatbot output.

IANAL, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was found to be legitimate fair use.

There’s a few red flags here on the hiring side too.

I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.

Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.

OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.

OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.

(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)

> having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time

Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.

I'm together with sethammons in that "rounding error". I actually go further and explicitly list things which I'm not good at on my resumé.

If you’re really good at what you do, there’s no need to embellish. Company is looking for five years of experience in something that’s only been available for four years? Screw ‘em, you don’t want to work at such a stupid place anyway. Good employers know how to find good employees.

Yes me too, zero, and I'm pretty sure it's closer to zero than to 100% among others also, here where I live

Me, too.

But, sadly, OP is right.

When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.

For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:

  SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;

(EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER BY id;)

I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.

You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.

Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.

I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.

You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.

(I won't use this particular one again.)

> You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know).

I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though.

(Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)

Sorry, I wrote this in a hurry. Of course I would have included an ORDER BY clause.

The one without that clause was still fun to think about, so no harm done!

I was sharing this story and responding to various comments (here) in my conversations elsewhere on the Internet, and as part of my statements I questioned about quoting/paraphrasing the "word gets around" to determine if this is best way to reference the point, and thought I may as well share it here too. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_c0378709-b716-48af-8996-a0e4...

Thanks, interesting point and it hadn’t occurred to me that it would read like a direct quote.

I can’t edit it now, so will leave this here to say that it’s not a direct quote.

On 2, I was surprised the author included the screenshot in their write up so I did some very pointed searches on some of the strings, and was surprised to see just how many profiles on LinkedIn were sourced for this farce. Good work LLMs

As someone who has conducted interviews with candidates almost certainly using AI in both the phone screen and coding portion. The biggest giveaway is the inability to explain the why of things. Even some of the simple things like "why did you initialize that class member in this method rather than in the constructor?"

I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.

Yep, it's less about if you're using AI and more about how you're integrating it into your workflow. At this point, using AI tools is becoming a baseline expectation in many roles, not a red flag. But yeah, the moment someone can't explain the rationale behind a decision (especially in their own code) that's a huge issue.

We get a few thousand fresh grads applying to us each year. It’s practically impossible to interview every one of them. At the same time, any sort of coding assignment we give is easily defeated by AI—so that’s not useful either and there are very few signals there.

What we do instead is send out a test - something like a mental ability test - with hundreds of somewhat randomized questions. Many of these are highly visual in nature, making them hard to copy-paste into an AI for quick answers. The idea is that smarter candidates will solve these questions in just a few seconds - faster than it would take to ask an AI. They do the test for 30 minutes.

It’s not expected that anyone finishes the test. The goal is to generate a distribution of performance, and we simply start interviewing from the top end and make offers every week until we hit our hiring quota. Of course, this means we likely miss out on some great candidates unfortunately.

We bring the selected candidates into our office for a full day of interviews, where we explicitly monitor for any AI usage. The process generally appears to work.

On a different note, things are just getting weird.

We still do a coding assignment, but a significant chunk of the technical interview is dedicated to a walkthrough of the code. Thus far, that’s been able to detect those who relied solely on AI.

…If you used AI and can still explain to me why code works and what it does, even better. You have learned how to use new tools.

(have not tried the randomized question approach to compare, but I’m curious to try it and see what happens)

We do it similarly and it's pretty easy to tell if someone knows their stuff, especially as the assignment is just a platform to dig deeper in the face to face interview.

However, the coding assignment was a really good filter and allowed us to dismiss the majority of candidates before committing to a labour-intensive face to face.

I haven't interviewed anyone since AI took off, but I am assuming that from now on the majority of candidates that would usually send us crap code will send us AI code instead; thereby wasting our time when they finally appear for the face to face.

Have you encountered that yet?

Yes, but we had that problem before when somebody would farm out coding assignments to a friend. I couldn’t say yet how it’s impacted the coding assignment’s effectiveness as a filter yet. We still do get crap code just sometimes it’s obviously AI generated.

when you say "visual questions" - are you referring to questions in the style of Mensa/gifted tests?

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Simpler - eg. A table of some numbers, with a question to quickly compute averages of a filtered set, after performing some quick boolean logic to filter them.

As a candidate, this sort of test gives me the worst possible impression of the company.

- 0 effort on your side - very stressful for me - completely unrelated to job - ridiculous definition of someone being “smart”

Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.

Seriously. I’m interviewing as a programmer and you give me some ridiculous “which cube is next in the sequence” nonsense that probably has three different arguably correct answers for every question? Pass.

> Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.

Unpopular observation: Many people say this, but when they actually want or need a job they change their mind quickly.

I've lost count of how many of my peers went from "I will never grind LeetCode!" to working their way through LeetCode challenge lists as soon as a recruiter from a big tech company contacted them.

I talked to one hiring manager at a company who tested their mobile developer applicants by having them make an entire demo app with some non-trivial functionality. I assumed they wouldn't have any applicants, but his current problem was that too many qualified applicants were applying for every position and begging to do the test.

We have to use some criteria when all applicants are effectively the same - 4000 applicants and 6 interviewers. We interview each applicant at least 3 times.

Definition of being smart is to be quick at mental math and logic, but the puzzles are represented visually. And yes, both those skills are needed in the course of our work.

Contrary to what you might expect, over 80% take the test. I suppose during next hiring season, we could A/B against random selection to compare what % go past our interview.

> Definition of being smart is to be quick at mental math and logic

That's not smart. That's being quick at mental math and logic.

Very different things

You could also sort by SAT / ACT score. It will yield roughly the same results as your IQ test.

We don’t operate in the US. Our applicants can’t present any standardized test scores

I'm still mad at IBM for giving me one of those tests for an internship after 4 years. It required a lot of fast mental arithmetic, which is, medically speaking, not my strong suit. I thought the job was programming computers, not being the computer, but the test suggests otherwise.

I probably should have figured out how to request an ADA accommodation... oh well.

>something like a mental ability test

General-purpose "mental ability tests" are typically illegal for hiring in the US.

Yes, not absolutely illegal, but if an applicant challenges the legality of the test, the burden of proof is on the employer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview. Other people think an interview is just a matter of finding the "magic words" to get the job.

What I don't understand is, what did the candidate do with AI? Did they use the AI as a coach? Did they use it to suggest edits to the resume?

---

I once interviewed a candidate who was given my questions in advance. (I should point out that it was quite time consuming for me to design an interview, so I couldn't just make up new questions for every candidate.)

When the candidate started taking the "schoolboy" tone of a well-rehearsed speech, I realized that they had practiced their answers, like practicing for an exam. I immediately threw in an unscripted question, got the "this wasn't supposed to be on the test" response, and ended the interview.

> Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview.

So marketing works in the company's favor, and not the candidates? Its a tough pill to swallow, but bending the truth and lying seems to be the way folks get jobs now.

Perhaps not lying... But I've thought about the 1pt font white on white mega-tech-list attached to Workday resumes to get past THEIR ai-slop filters. And even had my SO get insta-rejected when whatever AI term wasn't explicitly there.

As a candidate, the market is horrific. Ghost jobs, fake jobs that gather market intelligence, scam jobs, blatantly lying candidates, AI blusters, and more. I can look at the usual places, or even HN. I've even applied to my share of HN jobs without so much as a 'no' as response.

It puts us who actually want to be honest at a pretty severe disadvantage.

Well, everyone tells their interpretation of the facts in a way that puts them in the best light.

For example, in 2003, I was fresh out of college and the job market was slow. I applied at a retail store so I could have some beer money. I was honest that I was looking for a job in tech and that I wasn't going to stay forever. Then I said I'd probably be there for 3-4 months.

I was there for 2 weeks, and I don't list the job on my resume.

Was I telling the truth when I said 3-4 months? I certainly gave them the longer end of the estimate in my head.

Was I telling the truth when I left the retail job off of my resume?

Leaving short-duration jobs off is common practice. The only way it might be "lying" is if you happened to, I dunno, have joined SVB just in time to commit a bunch of fraud, and then hoped no one googles your name. And even then, if it was three weeks, when your conviction comes up in the google search no one is going to think you lied leaving it off.

Similarly, it is typical that people will have a polite fiction for "why did you leave your last role?" that hints in the direction of the real reason without saying anything the company wouldn't want to be said publicly. That question is a test of your discretion as much as it is making sure the same reason doesn't apply to the new company.

However, saying you have a degree you don't, worked on a project you didn't, implemented something you didn't, led a project you only participated in, or used a technology you didn't: those are lies. Even if you get away with it, you are setting yourself up for a role you are unqualified to have. If you get caught, you will be correctly fired.

Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people can sue you.

It is one thing to frame your experiences in ways that are relevant to what the job is looking for: it is not only unethical to fabricate experiences, it is counter-productive. I will be checking references, and if their reports of the role you played on a project don't match yours I will not be hiring you. If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you. All you have done is waste my time and yours.

The sheer number of applications from auto-submit-to-every-job application processes have completely broken the system. There is simply no way for every recruiter to consider ever candidate, which is what they are now being asked to do. I know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.

We will eventually figure out how to defeat these candidate-spam bots. In the meantime the only hiring pipelines that are still functional are human-to-human individual networking.

> Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people can sue you.

That is also fungible as well. Some lies just aren't catchable, like experience with skills that you teach yourself quickly, or go through a quick online course. Not saying I should, but "fake it till ya make it" is a definite thing.

> If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you.

There's also a reason I'm leaving the role, and usually you don't want people near your position to know youre looking.

And also, demanding references is the old AI slop - you're only going to give glowing references. Nobody gives bad references. And the worst case is you have a friend answer, or you buy one of those reference services (yes, theres a service for that).

> know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.

I think you're missing the point of the type of 'lying' I was referring to. Workday uses an absolute terrible AI, that uses keyword search. With my resume, the human readable text is accurate and me, but to this ai-slop scanning woukd scan 1pt listicle of every keyword.

Its not lying, but it is. Play stupid AI bullshit games, get gamified AI slop solutions. And I hate it. But even having a discussion with someone would be a start.

That's all fun and games until a single company puts the top 3 or 5 candidates pitted against each other to see who waits the longest without a rejection and takes the lowest offer...

I heard this from friends, and despite being very comfortable where I am, I started interviewing cynically with no intention to take any job. I can confirm this is very much true and widespread. Hiring is at its worst ever.

Whenever supply and demand gets fixed, we'll see these behaviors go away.

It’s not at its worst ever. But many tech folks are coming off a period when they could waltz off one job into another in a week. That is not the norm for professional jobs. After dot-bomb the norm was lots of people left the industry forever and would you like does with that was not uncommon for many.

Completely agree with the distinction you're making: framing is fine, fabrication is a deal-breaker. It's frustrating how often people conflate "putting your best foot forward" with just making stuff up, especially when they underestimate how easily it can fall apart during reference checks or follow-ups.

> Lying isn't marketing. If you lie in marketing, people can sue you.

That's why we had our guys down in marketing come up with a new term for it. Focus groups, legal review, the works! Now we call it "puffery".

>I couldn't just make up new questions for every candidate.

Ask each candidate the same questions?

Yes. It was a programming exercise that took me a few hours to create. It was not practical to re-make it for every candidate.

BTW, it's industry normal for companies to come up with a programming exercise and reuse it.

Follow up questions will vary, but the bulk of most interviews is the same for every candidate, and candidates are then judged based on a rubric that is the same for every candidate (though often tailored to the specific role).

The consistency lets interviewers compare across candidates, and avoids the cognitive pitfall of defining a rubric after-the-fact that lets us hire the candidate who appealed to our lizard brains.

Even at startups, questions are also usually tested on several existing employees before it is used on the first external candidate, for calibration. Companies put a lot of time and money trying to hire for actual competence.

The first part sounds like what I’d expect a serious candidate to do. Didn’t you look at the questions we sent you?

The second part sounds like areal curveball unless you made it clear that the questions sent out were only representative/samples of what you’d ask.

The candidate wasn't supposed to know the questions in advance.

> The second part sounds like areal curveball

That was the point. The candidate wasn't supposed to know the questions in advance. Once the candidate can practice / memorize, there's no way to evaluate the candidate.

That was not clear from your original comment. I read it as the company gave them the questions to presumably think about/prep.

I had the same impression. It sounded like he was given the questions for preparation as part of the company’s process, and then OP deliberately tricked him by asking him one that wasn’t on the official list.

One can easily rehearse answers that sound natural. You could start with a partially wrong answer, realize midway and correct it. Easily fakeable. All the “ums”, “let me think for a second”, and even failing to answer 10% of the questions on purpose is easily doable.

Yeah, this is the gray area we're all bumping into now

I was in this situation on the candidate side :) however I started with "I had your question list beforehand and I searched wikipedia for the answers". I got the job

The way I read it is they used ai as a coach and ai probably told them some variation of “it’s ok to exaggerate”.

However, this to me would be a red flag because they somehow try to blame Ai for misrepresenting their experience. So they can’t even take responsibility for that.

let me get this straight ~ someone took the time to prepare for the interview and you basically penalized them for the preparation? people are truly ridiculous

The guy had to invent “cool” scenarios because companies think they are Google and working in backend doing normal things won’t get you hired. One could easily have prepared the whole interview with AI without failing to explain details (like what data was being paginated) just by lying a bit more. Not lying on your actual knowledge but on what your previous jobs were about. E.g., I have used k8s in pet projects but not at work, but this job ad for a backend position asks knowledge about k8s, so I’ll put k8s as skill under my last job and invent a credible story that I can talk about based on my experience during my pet projects.

I think the message here is: don’t ask for the moon, you are not Google.

While I think this view is probably apt in other situations -- and to be clear, I don't know much about the company -- all of the specific techniques mentioned on the candidate's CV and in the article are fairly "garden-variety".

The pagination example seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for both sides to want to talk about, and which becomes relevant at a level of scale much smaller than Google.

imho I think the pagination example alone wouldn’t get you hired even if told correctly. In over a decade of experience my “coolest experience” related to pagination is about not using LIMIT and OFFSET because it’s not performant… but that’s 101 knowledge and doesn’t sell.

What’s the better way to do pagination?

Not necessarily "better" but cursor-based pagination, for example, has a different set of trade-offs. It can be more performant, but tends to be trickier to implement.

This article looks like a decent overview: https://medium.com/better-programming/understanding-the-offs...

The easiest alternative is using a where clause and filtering by an ID range. Eg: "WHERE id between 1000 and 1200". But this introduces a ton of limitations with how you can sort and filter, so the general advice of not using LIMIT and OFFSET has a ton of caveats.

You don't use OFFSET because the btree index just sorts the rows from smallest to largest. It can quickly get the first 30 rows, but it can't quickly figure out where the 30th or the nth row is. When pagination is crawled it will crawl the whole table, so it's important that the worst case performs well.

The fix to this is to paginate by saying "give me 30 rows after X" where X is an unique indexed value, e.g. the primary key of the row. The RDBMS can quickly find X and 30 rows after X in the sorted index.

This makes it hard to implement a "previous page" button but nowadays everything is a feed with just a "show more" button so it doesn't matter much.

The pagination was chosen because it was prominently featured in the candidate's resume, and was something that interviewer was familiar with - it's not about "cool experience", but rather conversation starter.

When performing interview, asking about things mentioned on the resume is a pretty good conversation starter. No one wants random trivia, resume entries, especially from the most recent jobs, are absolutely fair game. And if they turn out too simple, we can always dig further based later.

The message is: good lie is not too far from truth.

They weren't asking Google questions. They were asking about basic pagination, which is an entry-level topic.

Hard to argue with their interview process when it successfully unmasked someone who didn't have the basic experience to discuss a simple topic.

I've interviewed some candidates (more senior than TFA) and I agree with OP that it is a uniquely uncomfortable experience.

Candidates who rely on AI seem to just be totally turning their brains off. At least a candidate who was embellishing in the old days would try to BS if they were caught. They could try and fill in the blanks. These candidates give plausible-sounding answers and then truly just give up and say "ummm" when you reach the end of their preparation.

I've been interviewing for 10+ years across multiple startups and this was never a problem before. Even when candidates didn't have a lot of relevant experience we could have a conversation and they could demonstrate their knowledge and problem-solving skills. I've had some long, painful sessions with a candidate who was completely lost but they never just gave up completely.

Developers I've worked with and interviewed who rely on AI daily are just completely helpless without it. It's amazing how some senior+ engineers have just lost their ability to reason or talk about code.

I suspect we are seeing the first wave of programmers who got a promotion to "senior" on the basis of being an early AI adopter at a place that valued lines of code written or tickets closed or other similarly-game-able metrics.

Alternatively, there are people who haven't been promoted but think their AI-fu is so good they obviously should have been, without realizing that "senior" is actually a different role, with additional responsibilities.

I've found asking about their pedagogy when coaching junior engineers is a great sorting strategy right now. It isn't something a lot of people have written about so ChatGPT's answers are full of useless platitudes, and mid-level engineers often don't even know that it is part of the job.

I linked this to my team and got back "I had almost identical experience with some candidates though no one admitted faking" and "One candidate just disconnected and was never heard back from after being asked to remove virtual background".

Interviewing is hard. Over the years the one thing I have learned is that for a technical role you want to interview people for how they THINK and REASON. This is hard and requires a time investment in the interview.

Back in the day when interviewing people for roles in networking, data center design, etc. I used to start by saying I am going to ask you a question and unless you have seen this very specific issue before you will NOT know the answer and I do not want you to guess - what I care about is can you reason about it and ask questions that lead down a path that allows you to get closer to an answer - this is the only technical question I will be asking and you have the full interview time to work thought it. I have people with 4+ CCIE family certs (this is back when they were the gold standard) and 10 year experience have no idea how to even reason about the issue. The candidates that could reason and work the problem logically became very successful.

For coding at my company now we take the same approach. We give candidates a problem with a set of conditions and goal and ask them to work through their approach, how they would go about testing it, and then have them code it in a shared environment of their choosing. The complexity of the problem depends on the level the candidate is interviewing for. For higher level engineerings besides the coding, we include a system architecture interview, presenting a requirement, taking the time to answer any questions, and then asking the candidate how they would implement it. At the end we do not care if it complies, what we care about is did the candidate approach the problem reasonably. Did they make sure to ask questions and clarifications when needed. Did their solution look reasonable? Could they reason on how to test it? Did their solution show that they thought about the question - IE, did they take the time to consider and understand before jumping in.

Anyone can learn to code (for the most part). Being able to think on the other hands seems to be something that is in short supply.

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I don't think this has anything to do with using AI for prep. 20 years ago I was interviewing candidates who had somewhat lied on their resume, knew some of the things that they'd written about, but had everything fall apart under a little more questioning of what exactly they'd done and why.

I think the difference is that you used to need a certain knowledge to be able to bullshit. You could still do it, but it would mainly be to embellish stuff you already somewhat know. With LLMs, it's easy to make it write a whole page of interview prep you can use to hide your tracks, without any prior knowledge. My guess is they saw that kapwing wanted experience in X,Y,Z and made an LLM create projects that sounds real in a way you otherwise wouldn't be able to do as easily.

From the article:

> but it had been some time ago, and they never worked on any of the features

It appears that the candidate might have actually worked on the daycare app, but not on what they said they worked - i.e., the ratelimiting and pagination. It appears that they might have been working on the frontend, and took the liberty of "expanding" their role - this used to be extremely common in a big sample of the resumes, and I'm guessing it still is. They might have used AI to prep - they used to use google earlier, but the prep was (and is) still inadequate if you've not actually worked on and implemented it. I don't think it was an entirely LLM created project...

Well I guess if the candidate would be a little be stronger and actually trying to reason with the LLM about the decision it suggested, he would be better prepared and maybe got away with his claims.

Or as current best chess player Magnus Carlson said, "if I would cheat, you would never know". Meaning very strong candidates will get away with flexing the truth with AI. But this means maybe, you shouldn't look for a perfect fit. Or check his merit by spending time and money to get in touch with his old companies.

Yeah.. but if he didn't actually work exactly on it, but took the effort to learn from coworkers (or LLMs or google or wherever) and is able to answer my questions on what he did, and more importantly on why he decided to do something a certain way and not some other way, then he/she must have spent considerable amount of time actually learning about it and figuring things out. So I'd still hire him/her. The trouble is most people who embellish are either not competent to go deep enough to learn, or think that they can get away with some superficial knowledge of it.

Wouldn't be surprised if the whole post was actually written up by AI as a "subtle" way of promoting the company, fueled by riding out the outrage from hiring managers on linkedin

I used to do a lot of hiring interviews long before ai and this exact situation has happened many times. People have been added to some project doing x haven’t really done much or engaged in it. They then see you need someone doing x then they add it to their resume. However, I do agree not being able to fully talk about a thing you have been working on and worse misrepresenting the extend of your involvement are red flags. Has nothing to do with AI though. Also sounds a bit like they wanted to say: “Ai encouraged me to exaggerate a bit” which again just means they wanted to shift the blame which is another red flag.

I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks.

Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on to another topic.

Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.

The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.

Doesn't seem to function all that differently from 'higher education'.

Fair for the ones who don’t put in any effort, but I don’t buy this generalization for the folks who are real people in the middle between “completely unqualified” and “telling the truth about their experience”.

Any effective screening strategy is going to catch the liars who do it only a little with some probability.

Not least because being willing to be dishonest during an interview is a strong signal the candidate will be dishonest while they are employed as well, and companies want very much to not hire those people.

Fair, but that’s different from everyone who uses AI ending up with the same keywords and content on their application (see GPP)

What might have happened is that AI tools helped them fabricate, maybe including one or more of:

* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.

* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.

* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.

It sounded like the candidate froze mid-interview to ask the AI to provide more detail about the things it'd already fabricated.

I guess they will have to get the AI to listen in on the call next time.

My memory had held back my career I am sure. I can't regurgitate the minute details of impact I did even 12 months ago, just broad strokes... so I prep as best I can but it probably sounds like I am lying. Now with AI and everyone is suspicious it is worse. Got downleveled to 4yoe level yoe from where I am 20yoe but I needed a job so.

It’s called a career document or a brag document. I update mine every quarter. It’s a detailed summary of the projects I worked on in STAR format including challenges I faced.

A lot of folks (and good engineers) arent that career oriented.

I have to do a bragsheet now anyway and yeah like gritting teeth. It is documenting your job basically!

It’s not about being careee oriented. It’s knowing that eventually you are going to need to interview for a job.

I have what probably qualifies as the relatively-recently-named "severely deficient autobiographical memory".

Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.

Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)

I think in this case the candidate didn’t even know enough to embellish the resume unassisted. Their nonsense response on rate limiting showed that they had no idea why you would rate limit or under what circumstances. Ditto for paginating data.

AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.

Oddly one impact on me from reading this is that Kapwing seems like probably a nice place to apply for a job -- simple enough application process, human review, sane and respectful take-home and no live pressure coding. I'm not affiliated in any way nor am I a FT software developer, but this seemed like a pretty sane process (which sadly the article reveals may not be sufficient to properly vet candidates).

I think this was the whole point of the blog post. As someone else mentioned, this didn't have much to do with AI so referencing AI seems purely like an attempt to capture some eyes for publicity.

I'd actually say that _not_ using AI to prepare for an interview is mistake, putting you at a major disadvantage (and there are plenty of honest ways to use it).

As an interviewer, I'm not testing for things AI is likely to help you with. I want to know how you are going to do the job, and experience first-hand how you collaborate in our shared profession.

You can practice with AI if you want, but it is definitely not necessary. I would much rather have someone say "I don't know that one" (and have hired many people who did), rather than have someone provide some content ChatGPT gave them the day before.

You may want to reconsider. They have written an article criticizing the applicant while posting half of the applicant's resume online. The only hope for Kapwing is if this story turns out to be fabricated.

Incidentally, I really-really like that they asked questions based on the person's resume.

That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money.

(And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been institutionalized.)

You can ask questions based on a resume without them disclosing IP, nor the appearance of it.

That resume-based questions thwarted a cheater in this case was a bonus.

I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed. Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?

They read the CV but placing too much weight on it makes it difficult to compare candidates objectively.

The CV is a starting point for conversations. On topics other than whether the person happened to memorize whatever Leetcode question was rolled on the dice. And it can more closely approximate actual work.

Regarding cheating, and the widespread organized sharing of "which questions did this company ask, and what are the answers", the conversation isn't so vulnerable to that.

At the company I work for, we are forbidden to ask questions based on resume, as it introduces biases. Reduction of bias means "ask same questions of every candidate".

Is that because

* they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or

* they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or

* DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or

* some other HR theory?

A combination of all three.

The problem with modern hiring practices is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hiring based on past experience is biased and often can lead to either subpar candidates (lemons) or overpaying. You're either left with the people who didn't succeed at their previous job (but are good talkers) or people who have a brand name college/company but aren't really exceptional. On the other hand, trying to completely ignore past experience means you're left asking questions completely unrelated to real world work.

I had a conversation with someone from a well known startup. He was complaining how in the last year he has noticed the trend of unqualified individuals passing HR screens and some even passed technical interviews (they are uncovered when they can’t even commit code). Their whole background is a lie. They would also send connection requests to people at the companies listed so recruiters don’t question it.

He proudly said they don’t ask questions based on resume, because they don’t care where you worked or where you went to school…as long as you know your stuff. In fact he only looks at the resume after the interview.

I wonder how long they will stick to this stubbornness.

That’s mental. Why have a resume in the first place then? Any info in the resume introduces “bias”. Well, actually, even wanting to hire the best candidate for a job is already a bias of its own.

So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process?

/s But only slightly.

From the candidate’s point of view, most companies’ hiring processes are indistinguishable from a lottery.

Are you doing technical interviews, or manager-conversation-type interviews? This makes sense for the former (whether someone was a Senior Whatever in Googlebook or wrote CRUD apps for a bank is irrelevant if you're just seeing whether they can find a bug in a library or whatever, but it may influence the interviewer's _perception_ of their performance, thus it is strictly better than the interview doesn't know), but seems quite impractical for the latter.

AI is a problem, so is lying, but this is a non issue already solved by the ancient tradition of in person interviews.

I assume the folks at kapwing are monitoring the responses, so if you're really open to ideas then i offer the following for your consideration:

The best interview I've had to date has been a live debugging challenge. Given an hour, a printed sheet of requirements, and a mini git repo of mostly working code, try to identify and solve as many bugs as possible, with minimum requirements and bonus goals for the ambitious.

This challenge checks all the boxes of a reliable and fair assessment. It cant be faked by bullshittery or memorized leetcode problems. Its in person so cheating and AI is out of the equation, but more importantly it allows for conversation, asking questions, sharing ideas, and demonstrating, rather than explaining, their problem solving process. Finally its a test that actually resembles what we do on a daily basis, rather than the typical abstract puzzles and trivia that look more like a bizarre IQ test.

Stumbling upon this format was such a revelation to me and I'm stunned it hasn't been more widely adopted. You'll meet many more "Sams" as your company grows - many will fool you, some already have. But a well designed test doesn't lie. Its up to you and your company to have the discipline to turn down cheap and easy interviewing tactics to do things the right way.

Please, no. I don’t want to travel hundred of kilometres each time I want to apply for a job.

Why would you interview with a company far away if you aren't willing to travel and eventually relocate there?

Job hunting has become a game of shotgunning your resume while employers cast the widest net, and this has been hugely detrimental. Internships, junior positions, and onsite training are disappearing across the board. Everyone instead wastes time shopping around without any real evidence that this way improves outcomes.

I'm not sure what this has to do with AI, except for being a buzzword to add to a title.

People have been lying about their experience since time immemorial. You don't need an AI to do it, you can just ask a friend with experience to invent a few plausible projects you could have worked on, and solutions you might have found. Or just look at a bunch of resumes online and read a few blog posts of people describing their work.

I'm not surprised this happened. I'm surprised by why the author was surprised. Maybe "Sam" was exceptionally bad at "faking it" in person, but I've done tons of interviews where the candidate had exaggerated their experience and couldn't answer basic questions that they should have been able to.

Honestly, this is why some companies do whiteboard coding interviews before getting to the interviews about experience, because it does a decent initial job at filtering out people who have no idea what they're doing.

Yup.

I personally wrote that I had experience in a programming language I didn't, back for an interview in 2010. I got called out on it too..!

My wife has run a couple of marathons and her friend called her up to hear about her experience, because she was putting it on her resume for a job. She got it (probably not because of her running experience).

I had a recruiter do that to me when I was 19 or so. Said I had some amount of c++ experience. Somehow the interviewers picked up on the fact that I did not.

I recently interviewed an engineer who was somehow using ChatGPT realtime on another laptop beside him. The irony was that the questions were pretty simple overall and our rubric also wasn't very strict, so he likely would have passed if he just used his memory and common sense. Though the answers weren't wrong overall, I still felt cheated because of the deception and had to reject him later.

I rejected an applicant earlier this year who was obviously reading off another screen for every answer (as in, blatant pauses while I could literally see their eyes moving back and forth). I don't understand if they thought I wouldn't notice or what.

This situation terrifies me as an autistic person. I can’t fathom maintaining eye contact while taking the time to think about a response to an interview question, even over a video call.

I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.

Look at the camera, not at the other person’s eyes on your screen. You are not maintaining “eye contact” but the other person will think you are. Genius!

It’s actually fun how in video calls everybody thinks they’re doing eye contact by looking at other people’s faces on screen which in reality makes them look down and not straight at the camera.

I know Apple corrects for this in FaceTime at least - see the “EyeContact” feature. Not sure about other video call providers.

I share my room with my family and turned my camera to an angle to avoid filming them.

The weird thing is, it looks like I’m looking at the off-screen when I’m actually watching the video, and vice verse.

You know you can just not make eye contact during a video call. I dont remember the last time I ever bothered.

Fellow autist here, I don't think you have anything to worry about, the eye movements of someone reading are very different to autistic scanning while thinking. Reading has a rhythmic left right pattern to the eye twitches while scanning (at least for me) tends to either be fixed in place or rolling in a way that is basically impossible to confuse with reading.

You’re assuming that the person interviewing you can distinguish between those eye movements. That’s a big assumption.

Closing your eyes is always an option, if you're trying to think deeply and without distraction. It helps a lot to explain your stream of consciousness as you think, even if it's disorganized, and you're definitely not cheating if your eyes are closed!

Thanks, I hadn’t considered this before.

My AI implants projects text onto my closed lids, so checkmate!

That sounds worth trying. And it would definitely be something to practice in advance...

When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet, or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about the immediate problem and related things.

(In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about the job opportunity that's the real point of the exercise.)

I don't understand how that works, but it usually works very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.

If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.

Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview, trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences, disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant, redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but energized and commanding manner. You might get permabanned from that company, for coming across like an aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky interview process. :)

With current trends, I'm starting to wonder if telling people to answer all the questions with their eyes closed is a viable interviewing strategy.

I'm not looking for eye contact, and if that person had been just the same but with their eyes closed I would have thought much better of them. I would have still rejected them anyway, because the whole performance wasn't great, but it obviously wouldn't be any ChatGPT thing.

But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and repeating the same thing for literally every question, even the ones that were intentional freebies based on their resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.

Most people have eye movements when recalling a memory, rather than maintaining eye contact (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...)

To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up what to say.

If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y and I'm trying to think if I could work around that... okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming from.

You can get an AI tool now to fix the eye movement. Sadly.

I enjoy remote work but I wouldn't want to start working for a company where I had never met anyone. It seems like a great way to get scammed.

One real-life interview would surely be beneficial for both sides.

I'd be very curious to see exactly what 'fixing' the eye movement actually looks like. Like are they always staring directly into the camera? Or are they sometimes randomly looking around all over the place? Cause that would look totally normal..

Example video with a side-by-side view of the real and and adjusted video:

https://twitter.com/1030/status/1615342312296534017

I sometimes take notes/talking points about things I want to cover in my interviews and reference those. This could arguably be considered cheating but definitely not as egregious as using ChatGPT but I worry it would almost appear the same to an interviewer (referencing notes vs ChatGPT).

I've had some fun ones, when interviewing folks - back in the days when people where hiring.

* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.

* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.

* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.

* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.

* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.

An interesting story!

I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution.

Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times - the simple ones that candidates can do in reasonable time is too easy for AI, and if we do realistic system, it's too hard for honest candidates.

> Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times

Take-home projects were never meant to be evaluated in isolation.

It was common for candidates to have their friends review the take-home or even do it for them.

You had to structure the take-home so the candidate could then explain their choices to you and walk you through their thought process. When you got a candidate who couldn't answer questions about their own submission, you thanked them for their time and sent the rejection later that evening.

The difference is that AI can now feed them explanations as well. Their friends (who IME were usually also mediocre coders: everyone I've seen who actually did well on a take-home actually was that good) didn't have the patience to sit around and help them memorize a bunch of extra nonsense.

At some point it feels like it would be easier to just get good at programming, and yet...

IMO take home projects still have value, provided you do a comprehensive follow-up interview with their project (which is the _actual_ interview, I feel). Those who just used AI on it are far less likely to talk about any tradeoffs, do deep dives, or even simple extensions of the project in the follow-up interview.

I think take home still has value, if it's of any size and they just vibe code it'll be full of long messy methods, unused variables, and lack of any thoughtful design.

They are, if anything, a more-accurate example now of the kind of code a candidate is going to produce on the job.

If we expect people to use AI, and it is available in most companies now, then being able to appropriately refactor, test, and sense-make of AI-generated code is even more important. The key is raising the bar on quality beyond mediocre, and not relying on those take homes to test skills they are no longer testing.

I've had situations where I submitted a take-home exercise, only for me to get feedback that it didn't match their required level.

After some back & forth I was able to (politely) prove their feedback was not correct, which actually granted me a follow-up interview.

Unfortunately, this was a unicorn, most companies don't give feedback, let alone admit they were wrong.

But, take-home is preferred, I want to use my IDE, with my keyboard shortcuts etc.

Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.

Next to that they don't allow you to work in an environment you're comfortable in. No debugger, etc. When an HVAC company hires a new tech, do they tell him/her to do a 1.5 hour repair with only a hammer and a lighter to diagnose and fix an issue? No, it's stupid. Why do developers have to do this then?

And the same applies to live coding exercises. While there is an opportunity to explain yourself, you're still in an extremely uncomfortable environment. Why is there such an emphasis to put people in an environment where they are not set up to succeed?

It’s like a scene in Swordfish where a hacker (Hugh Jackman) has to infiltrate a system while getting a blowjob and having a gun pointed at his head.

“If you can do the job under these constraints, imagine what you can do under optimal, normal conditions!! Hired!”

>When an HVAC company hires a new tech

HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.

Some parts of the IT industry do lean on certs.

IIUC, network engineering in particular is an area where vendor certs play a big role (mainly Cisco).

AWS, Azure and GCP all have certs. There are certs for Windows and Linux administration. Java has certs.

(I don’t know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but they do exist.)

I think in part, the difference in what I mean about certification (perhaps licensure is better word here) is an industry body - accepted and respected generally by the businesses within our industry - that will demonstrate some form of competence

I am not sure we can come to agree on what competence is.

I think if we try hard enough we can get there.

If we can divide the industry into many small subindustries, each with their own licensing, maybe. If we want to treat it as the one big industry like we do right now, no chance. We won't even be able to find agreement on surface level things, never mind the nitty gritty.

I would love to see a trade union-style group, where you are sponsored to join by an existing member and expected to do some work along side existing members before being certified as journey-level and recommended to employers.

It would require that group to agree on what being a "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one and if you don't agree with this one you could form your own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write testable code and be able to label design patterns, and another expects pure functional programming, and another expects deep security expertise, and companies could know which of those they are looking for and inquire appropriately.

We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you can be sure that if someone spent five years there they know their stuff. But we could have a version where workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than relying on a specific for-profit company.

It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the least-competent person who holds it. But the informal versions of this are pretty powerful.

I'd rather it be like passing the bar, accounting exams (CPA etc) or actuarial exams. They test very relevant deep knowledge and act as a proof of fundamentals - and software engineer does have technical fundamentals that could just as well be tested for in a meaningful way.

That is an instructive example.

In regular systems administration, having certs kinda suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job without a cert. Even people who had them would only include them on the resume when they were explicitly called for in a job description.

With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS cert is just testing if you know the six different names Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually understand LDAP or DNS.

If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe certs will finally become useful for developers too.

> I don’t know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but they do exist.

The clients in some consulting projects definitely do.

We have some certs. The problem is that software development is about thirty different skills in a trench coat, and half of them we don't know how to evaluate (like slicing, or abstraction.)

What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia.

It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.

People do take university courses in doing creative stuff, a fair number of sucessful novelists seem to have done one, RPG proposed that we could have something similar for software [1].

[1] https://dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

It would be nice if there was at least a bare bones certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop and if statement is. You’d still have to interview the candidate but you wouldn’t have to start at Hello World or FizzBuzz.

I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.

    > We should strongly consider this in our industry.

These were very hot for system admins in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Is it still a thing today? Do high quality employers still care about these certs in 2025? I doubt it.

    > Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.

This does not mirror my experience. Many times that I have interviewed with hackerrank/leetcode questions, I wasn't able to get all of the test cases to pass. After time was up, I explained my solution to the interviewer and talked about the failing test cases. Sometimes I passed the interview; and other times not. It was not binary: Imperfect means 100% fail.

Take home projects >>>>> live coding sessions, unless you're interviewing for some kind of twitch streamer position.

Just have a 1 hour or 2 hour call with candidate where you guys go through the project.

I would never spend time doing a take home test. The best paying companies never require it, so why would I jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation on the other side?

If they do it properly and walk through it with you afterwards, it can be a good opportunity for you to assess cultural fit as well based on the conversation that you have; are they hypercritical of unimportant details? Do they acknowledge good design and decisions? Do they offer their own insights, and if so, what do you think of those insights?

Also, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position of looking to find a job without already having one; many people find that a compelling reason to "jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation"

The best-paying companies jerk you around for months with hours and hours of in-person quizzes and expect you to memorize a bunch of trivia you will never use day-to-day so they can use their MIT intern interviews for everyone.

Take-homes are a much more reasonable expectation than memorizing how to implement quick-sort on a white board.

Given a choice between studying for admittedly meaningless leetCode style interviews and making $250k+ as a mid level developer at a BigTech or adjacent company and working really hard and slowly doing the corp dev grind for years to become a senior doing enterprise dev making $160K, why wouldn’t anyone who is young and unencumbered with kids not try to do the former instead of dismissing those types of interviews?

The $160K-$180k is about the median for a senior dev in most non tech companies in most cities not on the west coast. You can verify this on salary.com.

Yes I know most of the 2.8 million devs in the US are on the enterprise dev side and that’s where you will end up. But why not shoot for the moon?

For context, I am 50. Spent all of my career until 2020 on the “enterprise dev” side of compensation until a pivot and a position at BigTech in the consulting division fell into my lap (full time direct hire with cash + RSUs like any other employee).

But I tell every new grad to do whatever it takes to get on to the public tech company gravy train if possible.

That being said, at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech again. I’m good with where I am working for a smaller company.

I think the better/mature response to this cultural change is to design takehomes anticipating the use of AI and then seeing where the canddiate got lost in the weeds or gets lost when cross questoined about it

Don't see the point of these "take home projects". Just ask them what's the most difficult technical thing they had to do before, and have them walk you through it, probe, ask questions. If you don't like the one they talked about, ask about another one, or another one. You can generally weed out the bullshitters, they talk alot about "we" and hardly ever use "I" meaning they didn't do anything.

I would say "we solved this issue" if all someone did was hand me a coffee while I was debugging.

What compels you to play lingual games with peoples' livelihoods?

Well I find conversations with people in interviews to be less of a game than giving them “homework” to do, given that unless they’re totally green with no work experience, I’d assume they would actually have some stuff they’ve worked on and would like to talk about.

It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.

On the topic of interview prep - is it weird that I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it? I can’t be the only one, right? As best as I can tell it’s never really hurt me (okay, there was a Google interview I failed where grinding a few leetcodes might have helped…).

If you are trying to advance your career, I feel prepping for interviews is probably the number one most important thing you can do, unless you are freakishly gifted at acing interviews with no prep.

The number one most important thing you can do is to learn how to actually do the job. Your ability to pass interviews will follow from that. If the place you're applying to has an interview process that does not align well with the job, then you might not want to apply there -- they will be hiring a lot of people who are not a best fit for the role, and that's the environment you might end up working in.

Agree becoming good at your job is number one, but interviewing is an independent skill worth developing. The places I've worked that required interview prep in one form or another, were all around better and all around had higher quality employees. That's not an absolute rule (nothing is) of course. But prepping for interviews gives you more "yes" opportunities to evaluate companies, and once you get competing offers you see something you normally don't. You can get paid substantially more for the same job, without ever negotiating. Merely having other opportunities, your prospective employers will magically offer you more money, a bigger signing bonus, more stock, for the same exact job, and you don't even have to ask for it. You merely tell them all what they are all offering. But of course the real value is being comfortable and confident enough to _take_ multiple interviews, and ask hard questions, and using that to find better companies.

(This of course works for all kinds of things, not just interviewing: Quotes for house work, car purchase / sell offers, etc. Simply get more than one, and poof you get better deals).

I agree with you but only for junior engineers. You have to distinguish yourself. A senior should be expected to show competency in something already on their resume, and be able to learn whatever is thrown at them. The bigger priority with interviewing a senior is making sure they aren't bullshitting.

You're not, and thank goodness for that. I hired about 10 engineers during the past six months, and as far as I could tell, at least 9 out of 10 didn't use AI in the interview process, as in, they demonstrated in day to day work, the same level of proficiency they demonstrated in the interview. If that's because they continue to use AI in day to day work, I have no problem with it as long as they don't exfiltrate IP and data in the process.

If you never prepared for the interview then you probably never really wanted/needed the job and so the requisite motivation wasn't there for you.

Nothing wrong with that - nice position to be in actually.

Or they might simply have some ADHD/autistic traits which make these things require additional effort.

I have a list of past projects I'm comfortable talking about. I can go to great lengths talking about any of them in detail if prompted. I'm also comfortable talking about technical topics including those I'm not intimately familiar with - that's part of my job after all. But most importantly, I'm confident enough that I can say "I don't know what that is, can you elaborate?" and "I'd need to look into that and get back to you".

I've you're going to leetcode me, I'm going to underperform. I've never had to do leetcode for a job. I also don't typically apply to the kind of companies that think leetcode is a good filter. Why should I waste their time and mine to apply to a job at a company I'm probably going to hate working for?

Okay, you don't like leetcode, that's fine. It doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare for an interview. In fact I'd say preparing for an interview might include researching their interview process and avoiding them if they use leetcode type questions which you don't like. It might also include learning about their tech stack, brushing up on relevant past experience, or learning a bit about the industry they operate in (for example).

It's more like those traits both making it tough for me to study but also great at test taking. :)

I'm the same, and it makes me paranoid. I feel like I'm investing purely in one company instead of any defensive diversification.

But my job is very demanding and I have 4 hours after work to spend with my wife and kids before I have to start all over again. I'm just not in a season where interview prep (which may as well be a university 16-week course) is reasonable.

That's exactly what they want: to filter out anyone who lacks time to prep. Such as those older candidates who have families and things to do outside of work.

It's been typical for me to get hiring managers/interviewers who don't feel it's a good question format for the job (this might be a .NET/C# cultural thing though).

Since the day-to-day job rarely requires it, and I've gotten jobs without it, there's little incentive to change unless I want to.

I usually have to grind some leetcode problems because interviewers love to ask the in-place linear time array questions that absolutely don't resemble any work I do on a regular basis.

There are levels to this. Most people will at least prepare a resume and visit the company's website. That's interview prep.

You have to match the level of prep to the jobs you're pursuing. You don't need to grind LeetCode to have a SWE career. Most people never do that.

However if you're trying to get the more competitive jobs then some prep is necessary, as you already discovered with your Google interview.

The reason so many people do interview prep is that the ROI can be extremely high. Spending 100 hours grinding LeetCode sounds like hell to most people. Spending 100 hours doing practice problems to get a $100K raise for a job where you stay for 3 years suddenly becomes a $3000/hour career booster. That high paying job opens doors for more high paying jobs in the future, so the real number is even higher.

That's why people do it. You don't have to do it and it's not guaranteed to get you the high paying job by itself, but for people in the position to take advantage of it, the ROI is huge.

>integrity and reputation goes a long way.

Was it really necessary to take the moral high ground and lecture the candidate? As if companies are honest and well-meaning in interviews. You caught him and that's the end of it.

When I'm in similar positions, if I see the honesty and feel the connection, I change the tone a bit to take off my corporate/higher up hat and make friendly remarks like that.

When caught in vulnerable positions, some people are very open to sincere remarks, but the situation is fragile. Not wounding the person further is the key.

I always try to remind myself, that I don't need to cut with the sword of truth. I can (and shall) point with it, too.

Of course it is. If nobody tells them that what they are doing is wrong and that it might have consequences, they will continue cheating.

I had a similar but different run in with bad AI use in interviewing earlier this month. I was interviewing a candidate during a technical screen, and I had earlier noted that it was ok to use AI, as that was how modern development is going forward, I would just observe how someone would develop with it. In my technical product screens I try to tell the developer, it's time for them to show off what skills they feel the most comfortable at.

What happened though was the candidate decided to paste the entire challenge prompt into cursor and I watched cursor fail at completing the assignment. I tried to nudge them to use their own skills or research abilities, but alas did not come to fruition, and had to end the interview.

The crazy part was they had 8 years of experience, so definitely have worked before not using AI, so it was very strange they did that, especially since they remarked that the challenge was going to be easy

Why do you assume the 8 years of experience were real?

The title seems to say that it's a bad thing to use AI to prepare for an interview, when in fact it can be quite useful to use AI (and before AI there were dozens of "Preparing for the technical interview" books). The real issue is that the candidate lied about their experience, not that they used AI to prep. They could just as easily have lied about their experience without using AI to prep.

I had done a few remote coding interviews in recent months where I suspect the candidate was cheating using AI. It's a bizarre experience: each individual answer is produced confidently and quickly, makes sense in isolation, occasionally is even optimal, but the different answers don't connect into a coherent whole. Contrived example: the candidate confidently states that one should use algorithm X to solve a particular type of problem because of such and such reason - and then five minutes later when it comes time to write some code, they rapidly type in, with no erasing or backtracking, a solution which uses algorithm Y, and seemingly no awareness that they switched from X to Y...

> For prospective job candidates, my advice is still that "the truth will set you free"

Is that really good advice?

If you have the wisdom of knowing when to embellish and when to blur, then you're more likely to get a job and more likely to fit in.

I'm a spectrum, and generally I'm over-truthful and I notice my habit regularly affects me negatively.

Providing too much information will weigh against candidates, sure. Filtering information to what is relevant is a very useful skill: it saves time, helps listeners focus by not overwhelming their working memory, and lets the speaker communicate clearly with show-not-tell.

Saying something that is untrue is completely different from blurring or glossing over some of the details. The interviewer can always ask follow up questions if they want to hear more details: lying removes the opportunity for accurate understanding.

Saying something that is untrue might sometimes help someone fraudulently land a job: if it is believable, if they can back it up when asked, if the company never finds a way to check and if they never contradict themselves at all.

But it is just as likely that the answer "I don't have any experience with that, but I would google '<phrase>' and start from there" would have done a better job with no possibility of being summarily and appropriately dismissed if they get caught.

Had an interesting live coding screen where the candidate was coding a solution, dropped from the call and screenshare for 20 minutes, showed back up with a full solution different from what they had before dropping and carried on as if nothing happened.

"It didn't make sense that the Twilio API would not be able to handle sending 30 SMS messages at once - this seemed like a scaling issue that would be easily resolved through upgrading the plan"

Twilio indeed can't handle batching of SMS requests -- even to this day several years after I asked them to :)

To be specific, what I want is what sendgrid offers, copy + replacements, so I can send the copy I want to send, a list of recipients and a list of replacements for each recipient in a single request.

> Twilio indeed can't handle batching of SMS requests

It's still a good idea to try to bullshit candidate on topic he claims to know well.

This guy sounds like a good manager, that took his responsibilities in vetting candidates, seriously. Kind of a "unicorn," these days, it seems. Many managers are tossed the CV, ten minutes before the interview, and are yanked off of whatever critical project they were stressing over, to do an interview.

I would probably have been fooled by the applicant's screening interview, but it would have rapidly come apart, in the ensuing steps.

My team was a very small team of high-functioning C++ programmers, where each member was Responsible for some pretty major functionality.

This kind of thing might be something they could get away with, in larger organizations, where they would get lost in the tall grass, but smaller outfits -especially ones where everyone is on the critical path, like startups- would expose the miscreant fairly quickly.

>Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

Yes, developers use AI in 2025 and this will only increase as the technology gets better. Shaming the use of AI is like taking away a plumber's toolbox because you'd prefer they work with thier hands alone. Developers at all levels have a use for AI, and given two developers with the same skill level why wouldn't you prefer one who could use AI as a tool.

If you are already hiring an engineer on their output over their comprehension, rate the output that they give you

The company cheats by being a tightwad and by conducting an online interview (which have always been prone to cheating or embellishing, and companies perfectly know it) and the candidate cheats by using this opportunity.

I can't stop repeating it, just invite the candidate to your office. That's it, that's how simple the problem is solved.

Wow.

Just in case anyone else in the audience is curious, this is what self-justification of egregiously bad behavior looks like.

If you can't be trusted to work remotely, absolutely stick to in-person roles. If you think your coworkers are any less deserving of your respect and candor because they aren't in the same room as you, you definitely aren't qualified to work remotely.

Honestly doing in person filters for so many red flags and the most egregious of remote work scams like over-employment and just fake candidates.

You also just get a much better idea if the person will work well in the team and if they're passionate about the work.

Stopped hiring people who can't show up for a chat.

A more motivated candidate might have had an LLM ideate potential follow up questions for their resume and then think about the answers themselves. I’ve done this live with ChatGPT voice mode, it’s quite nice for practicing.

I suspect that's what the candidate did! It's just that the AI didn't anticipate the question.

The thing with interviewing is that ultimately the questions are fundamentally unpredictable. No coach, or AI, can truly anticipate what the questions will be.

It says "Prepared with AI" in the title, but the article is about someone who blatantly lied about their past experience in the interview.

The AI was used as a tool to generate false stories, but that's not what I assumed when I read the title. It's common for people to "prepare" with LLMs by having them review resumes and suggest changes, but asking an LLM to wholesale fabricate things for you is something else entirely.

I do think this experience will become more common, though. There's an attitude out there that cheating on interviews is fair or warranted as retaliation for companies being bad at interviewing. In my experience, the people who embrace cheating (with or without LLMs) either end up flaming out of interview processes or get disappointed when they land a job and realize the company that couldn't catch their lies was also not great at running a business.

I had interpreted it as some of the answers being given during the interview had been generated by an LLM, which then choked when it was met with a more sophisticated query of how several of the answers connected together. Was this not the case?

I am in the process of recruiting a software engineer. You're on spot when saying "ask about human experience".

To add to your experience, I became increasingly suspicious of the "perfect fit" resumes. it's insane how so many people just put the right keywords. I think it might work to pass in larger companies where HR use automated systems to triage applicants.

If your resume is not a perfect fit, you don’t get an interview. So either it’s a almost perfect fit or no chance to get the job. What’s wrong about that?

I don't conduct interviews in that manner. It is more important for me to know that I can trust your words and that you are aware of your limits, so you can learn any missing skills on the job.

For example, if you have 3 years of working experience and claim, "I know Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Python, React, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and networking extensively," in 99% of cases, I can no longer trust anything you say.

As for the 1% hidden gem I might miss out on, I likely won't have the budget for them anyway.

> I think it might work to pass in larger companies where HR use automated systems to triage applicants.

I don't know if this is true per se, but many job seekers in online forums seem to believe it is. Typically, keyword stuffing is thought to placate some nebulous "AI system."

Whether such systems actually exist is unclear to me.

A kindergarten pick up app can be a CGI application written in shell scripts, keeping all data in text files, and running on a Pentium.

But we want to be modern!

That way we can spend massive piles of money on cloud compute, monitoring, documentation, not to mention the constant maintenance to mitigate the security issues in the multiple layers of libraries we depended on.

Despite how bad the job market seems at the moment it's things like this make me feel confident for when I have to search again.

How do you make your "real" resume stand out among the thousands of fakes though?

You talk to real humans.

Plenty of candidates are willing to lie and as we see here AI has made lying much cheaper. There is nothing you can put on your resume that AI couldn't have put there for anyone. But AI can't yet fake a network.

Personally, I'll put in second-degree referrals to my company: if someone I have worked with has worked with the person and is willing to personally vouch for them, I'll put their resume in and ping the recruiter (yes, it's gotten so bad even internal referrals don't break through the slush pile without a specific ping.) But I get the recruiter's attention because I only recommend people I have reason to think are actually good.

I have a footnote at the end of my resume about my interests -- it's short, authentic, and more of a way to showcase my personality than my actual interests. It's always been a point of contact during the interview process. If an organization thinks that's stupid or a human isn't reading it in the first place it's not somewhere I want to work anyway.

This and many other cases are literally burning remote interviewing and offshore candidates. Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references. I guess this is your point.

>Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references.

Anyone paying attention has started planning accordingly for this over the last couple years. The remote work revolution has resolutely failed, and it's clear in retrospect it never had a chance.

This is very much not true: there are extremely-well-compensated roles still available in remote companies.

It does require knowing how to collaborate remotely and being an already-skilled developer, but just because the bar is higher (and many people seem uninterested in meeting it) doesn't mean it has "failed".

>there are extremely-well-compensated roles still available in remote companies.

There always have been. Companies have made remote exceptions for decades.

What we lost was the chance to normalize it for everyone. The bosses put that delusion to bed real quick.

Sounds like all the interviews I do in india.

Would you be kind and share some examples?

I've seen it more with candidates in Asia. And they claim to be based in the US :) A few even used digital face transplants, stuck in the uncanny valley, to hide it. I imagine it will be hard to tell in a few years.

I'm sure that we'll still be able to spot candidates doing the needful, and kindly reverting the same

... you do realize that India is in Asia, right?

Yes. I did not mean India, so I chose a broader label.

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> I told them that I feel that its important to be honest with their experiences

Oh my... I don't think I've ever seen a resume that didn't embellish or straight up lie about the applicant. AI does make lies more convincing and allows to go further with lies though.

Also, I'm impressed and upset that it takes so much effort to get a job doing something that sounds like entry-level Node.js / React stuff :( And the effort on the part of the applicant to manufacture this fake identity and experience to apply for this kind of job... and they are a masters student! Like... shouldn't this alone qualify you for the kind of low-stakes undemanding job?

The position's still open. It's ironic that it requires "Stay up-to-date on new AI technologies, including LLMs and generative models. Prototype and test new technologies to evaluate quality and improve performance."

Why is it ironic? Usage of AI doesn't mean you can just lie or not know what you are doing.

Sure, you are right. Still it seems that the candidate did "test new technologies to evaluate quality". Don't take it too seriously. No one likes cheaters.

A colleague of mine got his job using an AI assisted cover letter. I was part of the interview where he still convinced everyone that he knew his shit. I am happy with his hire now, a year later.

I never know what to write in those so it doesn’t just repeat highlights from my CV in a paragraph form. I would sure use some chatgippity to help me there.

I see quite a few comments about how this is nothing new and it's easy to catch scammers, etc, etc.

Scamming may not be new, but a person using AI in this way is able to penetrate quite deeply into (long, tedious, time-consuming) interview process if folks aren't keeping an eye out for it (and this article, like many personal experiences, indicate that people aren't yet). Having an AI voice in your ear, rapidly providing you answers in real time is something new; at least in terms of how easily accessible it is.

It's amazing to me that folks have the audacity to come to interviews like this. I think some candidates genuinely feel that it is a reasonable thing to do along the lines of stuffing their resumes with keywords to get through the various recruiter filters. It's like hey, everyone in baseball is doping, so I have to do it to keep up!

The behaviors are obvious once you've seen them before, but as an engineer and not a "talent acquisition" person, I feel deeply uncomfortable implying that some candidate I'm interviewing is lying or cheating, so it took me a bit to speak up about it.

These types of articles need to continue to come out and the conversation elevated, if just to save some poor devs hours of interviews with candidates who were able to bluff their way through the less technical initial conversations.

Regarding "Insist on camera ON phone screens.", DON'T do that.

Remember you try to hire a ${coder, admin, } not the next tv-news-presenter, beeing on screen is not a mandatory needed skill in most jobs.

By asking for something, that makes people uncomfortable, you will exclude a lot of likely brilliant candidates.

People who refuse to do video interviews may be for example: - people who value privacy, not only their own, but most likely yours too - people who feel very uncomfortable beeing watched by strangers and who think or even know that they will perform significant worse than in an audio-only interviewsituation - people who simply don't own a camera - people who use textonly computers offjob - poeple who have experienced that your 'standard'-videochat-app may not work, maybe because they use linux, bsd, os/2 or nonstandard operatingsystems - people who don't have broadband internet, yes there are still people like that - people who pay for every bit send, and yes having a not so cheap phone/internet contract is still common in some areas - people who feel uncomfortable to let strangers in their bedroom, even virtualy - people who have disabilities or cosmetic issues that they fear may distract you - people who have disabilities where moving and out-of-sync pictures distract them - people who tend to refuse unreasonable requests and who therefor regard you as unqualified to be their next employeer - ...

All of them have good reasons not wanting video interviews.

You, as an employer, may miss your best fit.

It's also about what you are avoiding. Its clearly a trade off, as you lay out. But then you are opening up another set of problems you will have to tackle. For the interviewer in the article, they prefer cameras.

It's not much different than choosing to interview people who will come into the office. Of course you are limiting yourself to people in the area. But employers know this.

Also, this idea that there is a single best candidate is rubbish. There are multiple candidates that are just as good as the next. And every person has their ups and downs, as well as trade offs. I also find it hard to believe that most employers are going to be able to tell the difference on such a fine scale as to not be able to choose certain limiting factors.

Given that the norm before remote work was literally face to face interviews and being seen on a daily basis in an office, I buy the "privacy excuse" for about 5 seconds.

The level of trust is simply too low - if being seen for a few hours over a web camera is that much of a dealbreaker for a candidate, there's plenty of candidates to take their place.

AI definitely makes take homes and non live coding exercises less viable (and even live ones to an extent).

Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.

Somewhat less but if you are having them do a monorepo with the latest major releases of the frameworks involved, AI will mess it up because there is a 4-6 month knowledge gap

I don’t think take homes should really be about the code, but about the developer being able to reason about why that was the code they wrote.

Asking developers to explain why they wrote that code mitigates against using LLM coding tools - if the candidate can’t back it up then they’ll do poorly in it.

I recently had a candidate submit an otherwise average exercise that was a big mish-mash of coding styles (inconsistently using var/let/const in js, for example). When asked about it, they weren’t able to explain their choice at all and just stumbled through it.

I agree that live coding is very hard on a lot of candidates. How do you feel about asking candidates to read code and explain it? I had that only once and I thought it was genuinely innovative. Even if I couldn't understand all of it, we can discuss various points about it.

I think if that's prompted well and designed well it might work. But if not careful it might just be a signal that reflects your own taste.

> Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

Off topic, why have such a take home exercise then?

I've run into something similar twice now in the last month. A candidate pauses or says 'let me think about that' on a relatively simple question as if to give an LLM time to respond. After the pause they give an overly long detailed answer - again like an LLM response.

One candidate was absolutely stumped and could not answer why and when they became interested in technology. They couldn't say anything about themselves personally. It was baffling.

Ha! One of my clients who was interviewing about a dozen candidates had the same experience with most of them, they have a few left to interview.

All the candidates did really well on the online intake questions and the general meet and greet over video. However, once they arrived for the in-person part of the interview, and it got relatively technical, most did nowhere nearly as good as they did on the online. Only one or two admitted to using AI.

Something I don't see mentioned here but is implicitly assumed is that the candidate wants the job. Given the lottery of passing leet coding interviews, interviews are a place to practice interviewing. Some candidates may not want the job but simply want to try different things during the interview and see what happens with the goal of practice for an interview for a role they really care about.

Weird that they wouldn't just use whisper to pipe the interview questions into AI to reply better. If you're gonna cheat at least do it well.

They do do that. If it was merely for translation it would be okay, but usually it doesn't stop there.

Has someone who’s interviewed candidates that do this, I like to think it’s fairly obvious when the candidate doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

I've seen this and it is always super-obvious when they are reading instead of having a conversation. I wish candidates would just stop: some of them we might have otherwise have hired, but instead it becomes a waste of time for us and them.

Anyone that’s been on the market lately know that some companies encourage AI use in various ways

so all I can say is fix your assessments because this whole “they cheated” idea isnt universal, and more likely matches what people do on your job already

but for anyone that didnt read this article yet, this one is just about embellished experience custom tailored to get the interview, and there was no technical assessment

If someone used an AI tool, but they can’t talk about its output sufficiently, then they’ll cheated. They did themselves a disservice.

> The next stage of our interview process, had this candidate moved forward, is to implement a take-home project that we have specifically designed for prospective candidates to complete. Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

So why bother with it?

This is why I will not interview for any job that mentions any of: React, Angular, Vue, Spring, or Rails.

The people in these positions are scared to death to write original code and then have the balls to whine about people who use AI to provide unoriginal answers.

This article highlights the AI part just as clickbait. The interviewed could have used job descriptions or interview guides/videos to exaggerate its resume, with the same result. Saying you used AI nowadays to find ANY information shouldn’t be more surprising than saying that you Googled a question.

> We've also been the target of hiring scams in the past, so one policy we have is to only conduct "phone screens" on live video calls with the camera turned on.

Why are we calling these "phone screens"?

Use this to your advantage. Tell the interviewer you’d much rather meet in person, because you’re 100% confident you have the required skills/experience and you’d like to avoid a bad culture fit situation.

Integrity and reputation goes a long way?

Except it doesn’t if he hadn’t stretched the truth in his bombastic resume he would never have received an interview.

I will defend him because companies do the same thing of stretching the truth.

Was it really preparing?

Because the preparation ended up not being sufficient.

Assuming people doing the hiring can be outsmarted in all cases like this is part of the problem.

Maybe 'preparation' can evolve to the candidates asking AI for a crash course and way to start using it instead of talking the talk.

It never ceases to amaze me that it's surprised it's hard to BS your way through tech jobs at tech companies. Maybe it works with tech positions at non-tech companies.

>The next stage of our interview process, had this candidate moved forward, is to implement a take-home project that we have specifically designed for prospective candidates to complete. Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

I have no doubt as well, but I couldn't help but noticing, "Don't bother with take home tests," wasn't on the list of remedies.

I don't understand how relevant is that this person used AI for preparing etc.

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this experience, and if you believe it's right so, it means you didn't interview before AI.

It was exactly like that. The only difference was the lack of availability of tools that can give you the answer right away, fake the voice, etc.

But even then, if it stinks, trust your guts.

On one hand, yeah, misrepresenting your experience, even if "AI-assisted," is a red flag, especially when the role clearly requires real, practical knowledge. But on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of outcome we should expect in the age of LLMs: people will use every tool available to bridge gaps, especially when under pressure in a hypercompetitive job market.

With AI, the onus is entirely on you to prompt the AI to perform an ethical practice interview and avoid gaining an unethical advantage by having AI make up answers for you.

It just makes me wonder about the importance that an understanding and commitment to ethics will play as people start to use AI more and more in their daily life.

Meanwhile, the company is free to lie to you nonstop about your prospects and then just randomly fire you one day.

Moral of the story? Don't tell em you used AI to prepare or they will write a whole article about you

This isn't an issue with "preparing" with AI. This guy is just a liar. The ironic part is, this author is just as much a liar by claiming this as due AI preparation as the candidate was about his experience at the daycare app.

This has nothing to do with AI. They lied in an interview like you could have done in 1980. You can prepare with AI and lie and you can prepare with AI and not lie. I have done the latter.

> I ended by saying that the software community is smaller than it seems, and integrity and reputation goes a long way.

Well who are they? How would the next member of the community know this is a fake candidate. I like the idea in general of finding a way to eliminate these time-wasters but how would that work? The candidate can adjust a bit and improve the AI "foo" to come up with online answers for them.

Report them to LinkedIn.

edit: I'm talking about egregious cases where the name, location, picture, and work history are false, not the exaggerations you mention. The profiles have few connections since they do get flagged and recreated with a new false identity...

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1338436/repor...

> If you feel that a profile may be fake or that it is inappropriate, you can report it. A profile may be fake if it appears empty or if it contains profanity, fake names, or impersonates public figures

They may use a real name and they may have worked some of those companies just lie about their technical level, experience, what part of the projects they worked on, etc. Those may not be covered by the reporting guidelines.

This is what I'm talking about: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/fake-job-seekers-use-ai-to-i...

It's called vibe interviewing.

Just do onsite interviews if you are that concerned.

The poor grammar in the resume should have been a red flag. English not being a first language isn’t an excuse. If they can use AI to cheat, they can run their resume through it.

Nothing about AI here, just a candidate making shit up, not even unique to software engineering.

Actually it would be interesting if the interviewer had an AI to counter these tactics

Hi, please don't produce dishonest clickbait content.

Consistent use of indefinite "they" is jarring and unnatural. It's one person, so use he/his or she/her.

It doesn't matter because I can always pry past the candidate's work in front of me to see if there is anything behind the facade. Usually there isn't even if their take-home assignment is done perfectly with of LLMs but there is no understanding behind the work being showcased.

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