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Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

• deleted 1y ago
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• theamk 1y ago
  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.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > 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.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • roguecoder 1y ago
      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...
  • Freedom2 1y ago
    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.
  • thefourthchime 1y ago
    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.
    • roguecoder 1y ago
      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.
  • OptionOfT 1y ago
    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?
    • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
      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!”
    • no_wizard 1y ago
      >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.
      • Tijdreiziger 1y ago
        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.)
  • angra_mainyu 1y ago
    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.
    • scarface_74 1y ago
      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?
      • Tcepsa 1y ago
        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"
      • roguecoder 1y ago
        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.
        • scarface_74 1y ago
          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.
  • squiffsquiff 1y ago
    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
  • laichzeit0 1y ago
    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.
    • hackable_sand 1y ago
      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?
      • laichzeit0 1y ago
        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.
        • hackable_sand 1y ago
          It's a constant tug of war between standards and expectations. I personally prefer hypotheticals, or some variant on live pair programming. Also, as someone with enough free time to do take-homes, I also prefer code reviews over that one-off code which then becomes a case of 100% "I did this and here's why". Even with that last example I would say, "well to optimize, etc., we could do this".
• bitlad 1y ago
  Sounds like all the interviews I do in india.
  • tandr 1y ago
    Would you be kind and share some examples?
  • esafak 1y ago
    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.
    • squiffsquiff 1y ago
      I'm sure that we'll still be able to spot candidates doing the needful, and kindly reverting the same
    • whatamidoingyo 1y ago
      ... you do realize that India is in Asia, right?
      • esafak 1y ago
        Yes. I did not mean India, so I chose a broader label.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  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.
  • ChicagoBoy11 1y ago
    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?
• inertiatic 1y ago
  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.
  • mathgeek 1y ago
    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”.
    • madeofpalk 1y ago
      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.
      • mathgeek 1y ago
        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”.
        • roguecoder 1y ago
          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.
          • mathgeek 1y ago
• lurker919 1y ago
  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.
  • crooked-v 1y ago
    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.
    • MrDarcy 1y ago
      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.
      • loloquwowndueo 1y ago
        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.
        • yojo 1y ago
          I know Apple corrects for this in FaceTime at least - see the “EyeContact” feature. Not sure about other video call providers.
        • charlieyu1 1y ago
• neilv 1y ago
  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.
  • criddell 1y ago
    Use blur, but blur a different string then paste it over your text. "Nice try" is always a good choice.
  • myself248 1y ago
    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.
  • reneretord 1y ago
    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.
  • jere 1y ago
    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...
    • sundarurfriend 1y ago
      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).
  • 1y ago
• rdtsc 1y ago
  > 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.
  • esafak 1y ago
    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...
    • rdtsc 1y ago
      https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1338436/reporting-fake-profiles?lang=en 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.
      • esafak 1y ago
        This is what I'm talking about: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/fake-job-seekers-use-ai-to-interview-for-remote-jobs-tech-ceos-say.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/08/fake-job-seekers-use-ai-to-i...
• ChicagoBoy11 1y ago
  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).
  • mavsman 1y ago
    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).
    • roguecoder 1y ago
      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.
  • ludicrousdispla 1y ago
    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.
• vonneumannstan 1y ago
  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.
  • infinghxsg 1y ago
    [dead]
• qoez 1y ago
  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.
  • esafak 1y ago
    They do do that. If it was merely for translation it would be okay, but usually it doesn't stop there.
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
• greenavocado 1y ago
  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.
• abc-1 1y ago
  [flagged]
• Glyptodon 1y ago
  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.
  • yieldcrv 1y ago
    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
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    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.
  • throwaway2037 1y ago
    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.
    • Glyptodon 1y ago
      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.
• neilv 1y ago
  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.
  • markus_zhang 1y ago
    I got asked of those questions every time I got interviewed. Maybe it's just a FAANG thing that interviewers ignore the CV?
    • esafak 1y ago
      They read the CV but placing too much weight on it makes it difficult to compare candidates objectively.
      • neilv 1y ago
        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.
  • raincom 1y ago
    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".
    • neilv 1y ago
      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?
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  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
  • madeofpalk 1y ago
    If someone used an AI tool, but they can’t talk about its output sufficiently, then they’ll cheated. They did themselves a disservice.
• jorgesborges 1y ago
  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.
  • saulpw 1y ago
    How do you make your "real" resume stand out among the thousands of fakes though?
    • roguecoder 1y ago
      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.
    • jorgesborges 1y ago
      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.
  • imhoguy 1y ago
    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.
    • ramesh31 1y ago
      >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.
• no-dr-onboard 1y ago
  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.
  • aaomidi 1y ago
    > 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.
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      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.
• janalsncm 1y ago
  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.
  • gwbas1c 1y ago
    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.
• hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
  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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• foobahify 1y ago
  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.
• VohuMana 1y ago
  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.
  • veunes 1y ago
    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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• kazinator 1y ago
  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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
• UncleOxidant 1y ago
  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.
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  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.
  • mystraline 1y ago
    > 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.
    • gwbas1c 1y ago
      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?
• tetromino_ 1y ago
  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...
• cynicalsecurity 1y ago
  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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
  • whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    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.
• mvdtnz 1y ago
  > 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?
• Foofoobar12345 1y ago
  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.
  • narnarpapadaddy 1y ago
    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)
    • koyote 1y ago
      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?
• crazygringo 1y ago
  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.
  • saxelsen 1y ago
    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).
    • dpkirchner 1y ago
      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.
• robocat 1y ago
  > 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.
  • roguecoder 1y ago
    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.
• black_13 1y ago
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• Clubber 1y ago
  >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.
• forthwall 1y ago
  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
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 1y ago
    Why do you assume the 8 years of experience were real?
• ofrzeta 1y ago
  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."
  • isbvhodnvemrwvn 1y ago
    Why is it ironic? Usage of AI doesn't mean you can just lie or not know what you are doing.
    • ofrzeta 1y ago
      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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• ipunchghosts 1y ago
  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.
• disambiguation 1y ago
  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.
  • dakiol 1y ago
    Please, no. I don’t want to travel hundred of kilometres each time I want to apply for a job.
    • disambiguation 1y ago
      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.
• designAndCode 1y ago
  Just do onsite interviews if you are that concerned.
• atoav 1y ago
  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.
  • WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    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.
• oulu2006 1y ago
  "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.
  • MoonGhost 1y ago
    > 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.
• gregncheese 1y ago
  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.
  • dakiol 1y ago
    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?
    • gregncheese 1y ago
      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.
  • colonial 1y ago
    > 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.
• dakiol 1y ago
  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.
  • frogulis 1y ago
    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.
    • dakiol 1y ago
      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.
      • coolThingsFirst 1y ago
        What’s the better way to do pagination?
        • duggan 1y ago
          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-offset-and-cursor-pagination-8ddc54d10d98 https://medium.com/better-programming/understanding-the-offs...
• thih9 1y ago
  > 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?
• veunes 1y ago
  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.
• thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > 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"?
• msravi 1y ago
  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.
  • matsemann 1y ago
    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.
    • msravi 1y ago
      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...
      • looofooo0 1y ago
        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.
• JSR_FDED 1y ago
  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.
• coolThingsFirst 1y ago
  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.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  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.
• ed_mercer 1y ago
  >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.
  • bayindirh 1y ago
    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.
  • phito 1y ago
    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.
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  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.
• cbmask 1y ago
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• slcjordan 1y ago
  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.
• acjacobson 1y ago
  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.
• yahoozoo 1y ago
  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.
• jamesgasek 1y ago
  "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.
  • _yy01 1y ago
    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!
    • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      > 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.
      • rafaelmn 1y ago
        > what is one to do Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?
        • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
          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.
• crabbone 1y ago
  > 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?
• Gavis22 1y ago
  [flagged]
• lysecret 1y ago
  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.
• curtisszmania 1y ago
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• giantg2 1y ago
  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.
• nsonha 1y ago
  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
• Bluescreenbuddy 1y ago
  Moral of the story? Don't tell em you used AI to prepare or they will write a whole article about you
• a_t48 1y ago
  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…).
  • astroalex 1y ago
    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.
    • hliyan 1y ago
      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.
      • cloverich 1y ago
        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).
• iamleppert 1y ago
  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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • wijwp 1y ago
    "Ask for a non-trivial code or work sample, something they have written." I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.
    • spongebobstoes 1y ago
      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.
      • mywittyname 1y ago
        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.
• intalentive 1y ago
  Consistent use of indefinite "they" is jarring and unnatural. It's one person, so use he/his or she/her.
• outside1234 1y ago
  Meanwhile, the company is free to lie to you nonstop about your prospects and then just randomly fire you one day.
• myrandomcomment 1y ago
  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.
  • sam36 1y ago
    [flagged]
• Lamad1234 1y ago
  [dead]
• speckx 1y ago
  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.
• feverzsj 1y ago
  It's called vibe interviewing.
• mk89 1y ago
  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.
• rDr4g0n 1y ago
  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.
• sashimimono 1y ago
  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.
  • Flozzin 1y ago
    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.
  • vunderba 1y ago
    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.
• minimally 1y ago
  >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
• p0sixlang 1y ago
  Hi, please don't produce dishonest clickbait content.
• j45 1y ago
  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.
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• fgonzalesv 1y ago
  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.