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Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

I conduct interviews pretty often for various levels. Interviews seems so broken from both sides. Hard to find jobs that aren’t ghost jobs. Hard to find candidates that won’t cheat using AI and actually know their stuff. Just feels like AI has made hiring in tech even more inefficient which says a lot.

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if its remote initially, closed eye interviews where you just have a discussion might be easiest way. Pretty easy to tell if someone is bullshitting if they can't discuss topics that likely should excite them somewhat, or at the very least topics they've been around for years.

Feel like any test nowadays should INCLUDE ai, but you likely just want insight into how they are getting from A to B. I don't wanna assume what you mean by cheating with AI, could be as simple as answering live questions with cheating software or whatever, which is obviously a huge issue. I wanna respond and say it should be expected for any take home type stuff, and be rolled into the expectations if anything, but that could be way off of what you mean.

both sides of the entire process is just a nightmare now, one side has all this noise to sift through, and the other side is pressured to mass apply because of all the competing noise they can't be seen through. I was listening to something about AI generated responses, and they seemed to have no empathy for the people who gave human responses, but used AI to give them an overview of the company and what it does for the question "why do you want to work at x?", and sorta mocked the person because they can tell they asked for a generic description of what the company does.

There has to be some give and take, initial applications if you are spending hours researching a single company, you are setting yourself up to be absurdly let down if that same company sends you an automated rejection within a day. A reasonable person will only do that so many times, before just giving up and waiting for the other side to be the first mover instead.

Is AI use by current employees considered cheating?

If I were in a meeting with a current employee, and discovered that they were reading an LLM script at me instead of considering and responding to my questions, I would definitely tell them and their manager that this is unacceptable.

Why you don’t make harder questions that would probably require to use ai?

Real job you have ai, so no point to ask too many things that ai can answer anyway.

Ok, some big level stuff like node has an event loop.

Most technical interviews aren't designed to emulate what the job will be like, so what you would or wouldn't have access to on the job isn't really relevant. The goal is to evaluate the human being applying for the job. An interview that effectively emulates the job would really have to be done over at least a week, and most good candidates can't or won't make time for that.

If they can't do even a vibe check without reading from a screen, I'd say yeah, it's worse than cheating.

I've also caught a few people using LLM cheating software accidentally revealing it.

If I’m asking you about previous projects you’ve worked on using X technology, then yes I would consider it cheating to use AI to answer.

So where's the line? And how is that communicated?

Or is this another arbitrary power play to suffer?

The reality is most companies will force you to use AI in various forms likely from day 1, so the hypocrisy is quite stark

The line is where ever it needs to be for the role and the candidate. Hiring is subjective, using AI to tell me about your previous projects is a signal you are sending. For some roles that may be a positive signal for others it may be negative.

But if you can’t talk about your personal experience without AI telling you what to say, then I don’t want to hire you.

You're not engaging in the discussion of the hypocrisy and the contrast of how hiring managers behave versus what the job requires.

I know hiring managers on HN love to wade in to these topics all haughty and boasting who they don't hire, acting the mr big shot etc. It's a shame that this is that yet again

At least you implicitly admit it's an arbitrary line and a power play of sorts.

I've been asked to do take homes for different companies recently. Each time I was very confused whether using AI is acceptable, desirable, required or unacceptable. One time I asked just in time, the other time I wasn't sure if even using Google was okay.

I mean in University there were tests where you were allowed to bring a cheat sheet, or even a bag full of books. So called bag tests. And people were still able to fail. Although I never had the latter in my curriculum.

I think it's necessary that teams for which people are hired for brainstorm up-to-date tests. Just recycling the same challenge from 3 years ago isn't good enough.

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