This was the demo/take-home (for https://monumental.co): https://github.com/rublev/monumental
Sorry about the job interview. That sucks.
I'm not saying that using AI for take-home assignments is bad/unethical overall, but you need to be honest about it. If he was lying to them about not using any AI assistance to write all those emojis and folder structure map in the repo, then the CTO had a good nose and rightfully caught him.
No emojis and any effort to be comprehensive? Everyone complains "what is this wall of text", or "this is industry not grad school so cut it out with the fancy stuff" or "no one spends that much time on anything and it must be AI generated". (Frequently just a way of saying that they hate to read, and naively believe that even irreducibly complex stuff is actually simple).
Stuff that's got emojis, a friendly casual tone and isn't information dense? Well that's very chatty and cute, it also has to be AI and can't be valuable.
Since you can't win with docs, the best approach is to produce high quality diagrams that are simultaneously useful for a wide audience from novice to expert. The only problem is that even producing high quality diagrams at a ratio of 1 diagram per 1k lines of code is still very time consuming to produce if you're putting lots of thought into it, double so if you're fighting the diagramming tools, or if you want something that's easy for multiple stakeholders with potentially very different job descriptions to take in. Everyone will call it inadequate, ask why it took so long, and ask for the missing docs that they will hate anyway!
On the bright side, LLMs are pretty great at generating mermaid, either from code, or natural language descriptions of data-flows. Diagrams-as-code without needing a whole application UI or one of a limited number of your orgs lucid-chart licenses is making "Don't like it? Submit a PR" a pretty small ask. Skin in the game helps to curbs endless bike-shedding criticism
> Stuff that's got emojis, a friendly casual tone and isn't information dense? Well that's very chatty and cute, it also has to be AI and can't be valuable.
As a counterpoint, I can confidently say that I've never once had anyone give any feedback to me on the presence or absence of emojis in code I've written, whether for an interview, work, or personal projects, and I've never had anyone accuse my documentation of being AI generated or gotten feedback in an interview that my code didn't have enough documentation. There's a pretty wide spectrum between "indistinguishable from what I get when I give an LLM the same assignment as my interviewee" and "lacking any sort of human-readable documentation whatsoever".
Should I also be "honest" about tab-completion? Where do you draw the line? Maybe I should be punished for having an internet connection too. Using AI for docker/readme's/simple scaffolding I would have done anyways? Oh the horror!
There was no lying because there was no discussion or mention of AI at all. Had they asked me, I'd have happily told them yes I obviously use AI to help me save time on grunt-work, I've been doing this stuff for like 15 years.
It's an unpaid take-home assignment. You'd have to be smoking crack to think that I would be rawdogging this. Imagine if I had a family or a wife or an existing job? I'd dump them after getting linked their assignment document.
Honestly at this point in the AI winter if you are a guy who has AI-inspired paranoia then I don't want to work for you because you are not "in the know".
Given what you’ve said in your other comments, it seems like you used AI in a way that I wouldn’t have a problem with but just briefly looking through I can see how it would look suspicious.
It's not defensible in any case.
That being said, I think the CTO's "vide coding paranoid" after seeing this repo is 100% justified.
I'd probably draw it somewhere in the miles-long gap between tab completion and generating code with an LLM. It sounds like that's where the company drew it too.
I'm not a math/university educated guy so this was truly "from the ground up" for me despite the math being simple. I was quite proud of that.
>Had you disclosed to then that you used LLMs for coding "basic" features outside the math and whatnot?
No it seems completely immaterial. I'll happily talk about it if asked but it's just another tool in the shed. Great for scaffolding but makes me want to rip my hair out more often than not. If it doesn't one-shot something simple for me it has no use because it's infuriating to use. I didn't get into programming because I liked writing English.
I spent around 40 hours of time and during my second interview, the manager didn't like my answer about how I would design the UI so he quickly wished me luck and ended the call. The first interview went really well.
For a couple of months, I kept asking the recruiter if anyone successfully solved the coding challenge and he said nobody did except me.
Out of respect, I posted the challenge and the solution on my github after waiting one year.
Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem: https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge
discussion / punchline http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...
Start of main content: http://conway.rutgers.edu/~ccshan/wiki/blog/posts/WordNumber...
That doesn't look too challenging for anyone who has experience in low-level programming, embedded systems, and reverse engineering. In fact for me it'd be far easier than part 1, as I've done plenty of work similar to the latter, but not the former.
It’s also relative because a $50/hr contract job isn’t exactly attracting low level FAANG engineering talent. But it’s a nice take home challenge for some second rate engineer like myself who will tackle any problem until I figure it out.
The fucking CTO thought I vibe-coded it and dismissed me. Shout-out to the hiring manager though, he was real.
Doing it slowly over many days is only taking your time and probably wont get you the job anyway since the solution will be a hard to read mess compared to someone who solves it quickly since they are familiar with the domain.
The job market is brutal right now, and you have my sympathy. I hope you can find a good fit soon.
You have also not attempted to hide that, which is interesting.
Luckily the hiring manager called me back and levelled with me, nobody kept him in the loop and he felt terrible about it.
Some stupid contrived dumbed down version of this crane demo was used for the live test where I had to build some telemetry crap. Nerves took over, mind blanked.
Here's the take-home assignment requirements btw: https://i.imgur.com/HGL5g8t.png.
Here's the live assignment requirements: [1] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png & [2] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png.
At this rate I'm probably going to starve to death before I get a job. Should I write a blog post about my last 2 years of experiences? They are comically bad.
This was for monumental.co - found them in the HN who's hiring threads.
This never happened to me in a job interview before I turned 40. But once I knew I was too old to look the part, and therefore and had to knock it out of the park, mind blank came roaring in. I have so much empathy now for anyone it ever happened to when I was giving the a job interview. Performing under that kind of pressure has nothing to do with actual ability to do the job.
These are the same link
I hope you can at least leverage this demo. Maybe remove the identifications of it and shove it into your CV as a "hobby project"? It looks pretty good for that.
Best!