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Comment by elAhmo | Hacker News Reader

Those people should be filtered by CV screening, maybe some sort of email exchange before with a few questions to answer to 'ensure' human wants to invest some time in the interview process, rather than just spray and pray.

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To an extent I think would be surprising to anyone who hasn’t done interviews, all developer CVs below about Staff level are the same.

Everyone’s architected a system, handled communication with stakeholders, contributed to technical direction of the team, mentored other developers, etc etc

I mean...that's what the job is.

You’d think that but I remember one interview where the candidate was highly recommended and they had never communicated with a stakeholder. A PM had always done that. They had never talked with a user. Ever. They had 15 years of experience.

It’s funny the stuff I assume is really easy and common and keep getting reminded that the world is really diverse.

I don't think you will ever talk to a user if you work in a big company. There are so many layers of abstraction.

And it’s not even because you don’t want to. It’s just because that’s how things work. I spent years talking directly to users and then I started working for a multinational, and I haven’t seen a user in 7 years…

CV screening doesn't do much. They exaggerate and lie. My current employer has recently started to direct applicants to an online coding exercise. Like leetcode but easier, just to prove they can write code.

Wait, how does this thing work?

Can't you just vibe-code your way through it?

Genuinely curious on your thoughts on this idea here.

They're probably using a platform that lets you replay the entire development session (see the pace of typing into a web IDE, what files they are looking at, etc.). Applicants will have to work pretty hard to fake natural-looking input of AI-generated code.

But then someone has to watch the recording which you can speed up by say 2-4x but not much more than that. This doesn't scale. The number of terrible candidates out there who have no business being anywhere near an IDE is insane.

I'd guess you do it like bot detection.

An online coding platform is going to be all js. You can track key press and mouse events and probably get a good idea of what's obviously real and what's not.

Probably not hard to create a bot that controls your computer and makes it looks like you're typing the code in, pausing to think, going back to fix typos etc..

The arms race never stops.

Until that bot is widely available to candidates, it's not an issue.

If they built the bot themselves, they've already proven themselves to the extent that an online coding exercise would.

I would instantly fail it, because I'd go and solve it in some scratch file in IDE, and then paste it there.

I did one of those when applying to my current job which adjusted based on how well you did. But it leaned quite hard into theory and details rather than writing code. Bitwise logic puzzles that would be hard to solve without being schooled in c or find that kind of puzzles fun.

I got things like inverting signed values 2-complement form, or bit shifting a float, or casting structs to arrays and poking at the bytes.

After starting i asked them if they had checked with AI, and they had apparently tested the quiz and it scored quite bad, so it was a good filter. (even if a-lot of the questions leaned more into puzzle solving than coding or design)

Isn't that the 1st phone round? Most such people would not pass the technical portion of the phone call

This is also why I specifically told the recruiter at my employer to never ask me to do the 1st phone round. Too many under qualified people at this stage and it's depressing to write No Hire again and again.

But but but now that we have genAI anyone can do it!

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