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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014.

Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another automated interview - just a less sophisticated one. A company using an AI interview where I'd normally see a Leet-code assignment (e.g a first round coding interview) would not strike me as a bad thing.

Of course if they wanted to the the entire interview loops with AI I'd stay away.

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1. Plenty of people have problems with any screening that requires work on the candidate side but nothing on the employer side. In that regard both of these options are equally bad.

2. Automated code screens usually have an objective right answer. With an AI interview you have no idea what the how you did or how your answers could trigger an LLM to reject you.

And there’s the fact that you have to talk to it like it’s a human which many maybe most people find at least a bit dehumanizing.

Online tests have very explicit grading criteria which you can be confident are applied equally. AI evaluations, as the linked video in the article points out, not only do not have explicit grading criteria but the companies promoting them can't even describe what it is.

So the meaningful difference is that unlike a test you don't know what it's looking for and you don't know if it's ranking you objectively.

Not necessarily, many online assessments I've encountered had a technical discussion session where you describe your problem solving process and design decisions. The ranking is more subjective for this component. Not to mention plenty of the assessments have more and less optimal solutions, as well as edge cases in the grading inputs that aren't in the sample inputs.

>Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems?

i think it is important to remember that ai interviews arent constrained to the tech industry. many people who have no idea what a 'leet-code' is, and who have always done normal human-human interviews, are now having to navigate being interviewed by ai as well.

A leet-code style automated assignment is like a test. We all did tests in school so I guess most people do not feel there is anything wrong about that.

However, an interview, which should be conducted by human, but instead by something AI pretends to be human, would make most of the current human beings feel disgusted, naturally.

Is there any formal proof that an AI conducted interview yields more than a pencil & paper test? Or is there any scientific research about that? I doubt there would be any in the near future. Then using such AI conducted interviews is simply a belief.

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