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.
Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)
Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.
Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.
I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)
Great. Fantastic job everyone /S
At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.
In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.
> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.
Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.
To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.
You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.
For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.
Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).
I always get a positive response.
I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!
Thanks mom!
But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where it only works where there already is a shared understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of the comments on HN are from actors having different understandings for technical jargon and talking past each other because they aren't even talking about the same thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.
What if wearing a suit is "being myself"? You'll be penalized in tech for that.
Not everyone views the wearing of suits as some kind of punishment.
My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-skill roles but I'd assume still present.
Turning up in formal business wear isn’t going to be a positive social cue if everybody you interact with is dressed casually.
The social cue you’d be giving off is that you stick out like a sore thumb and probably didn’t do your research on the company before you showed up.
Literally no different than turning up to Lloyd’s of London in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
So then by your own admission, the best way to come dressed is the same way your interviewer tends to dress.
Which is essentially what most people in this thread are arguing for - dress to match the company's culture.
These are just instances of my point (a): not having a clue about SV work culture.
> there are even people who wear suits all the time
Not in silicon valley tech. I mean, sure, maybe there's one guy and the number is not zero.
There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good, and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard time seeing how it will count against you.
Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!
Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear isn't productive
However, like it or not, it is a signal because it means you deviate significantly from the mode of the distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests that if anything, all else equal that signal is a negative one.
If you forgive me the analogy, and assuming you're American, would you think of checking the etiquette of entering into a shop? In the US, the concept itself is weird, you go in, buy stuff, and leave. In France, you must greet the shopkeeper right as you go in through the door. In Hungary, you must wish the shopkeeper a good day in reply to their greeting. It's simple... if you know it's even a thing you should check.
As long as suits and ties remain the uniform of politicians and managers, I don't think techies will ever willingly adopt it for themselves as well.
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.
I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.
I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most things other than formal occasions like wedding, funerals, or formal dinners.
(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.
(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?
(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.
(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.
That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.
So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.
> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.
I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.
As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.
> I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I'm not saying you immediately throw a candidate out for wearing a suit. It's entirely possible I'm wrong and my mind can be changed by their performance, but it is something that would make me take a closer look.
I'll give you another example I experienced recently: a candidate who would not stop drumming their fingers on the table throughout the interview. Is that specifically related to their performance? No, not really. Is it annoying, a bit disrespectful, and shows a lack of restraint? Yeah, it is. This candidate had other flaws that made them disqualifying, but their finger drumming didn't help them at all.
But I would like to point out that a rule that allows someone to openly state they discriminate during interviews but forbids a strong reaction to that statement might require some examination.
You could just as easily argue that people “discriminate” against candidates by making them do leetcode, when leetcode is unrelated to performance at the job. Leetcode is a performance some people look at during interviews, just like how you socially meld in an interview is a performance people look at during interviews.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming
I have no idea since I wasn’t there when you interviewed that person but it is something that came to mind.
I’d suggest you reacquaint yourself with the comment guidelines, as this just is a simple ad hominem attack on me, despite not even making any claims as to what I wear to work.
But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.
> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.
Especially if you’re an interviewer.
In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot impression wise.
'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.
Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.
The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)
Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.
Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will raise more questions about your sanity than score any points on preparedness.
He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.
In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
In case you mean JP Morgan, here's the CEO, Jamie Dimon, on cover of annual shareholder letter, back in ... 2015:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimons-style-telling-jp...
I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the front. The very definition of smart casual.
> - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.
> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.
> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.
My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.
Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.
I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.
I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode. LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business requirements are both "coding" but they're quite different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the former is probably good evidence they can do the latter, but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter without being able to do the former. So it is, in my view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on the job.
Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.
Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.
> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.
The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.
It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.
> Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
Apply that same logic to someone with one of those conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.
A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an hour is not a good employee where that is required. What makes the last one special compared to others? They can be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session musician/mover, I just don't see controversy
Simple accommodations can be made if needed and then there's no need to exclude people on old-fashioned prejudice.
maybe there is a company where being an amazing programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries the project and interacts nicely with customers when needed. The last one was probably the most valuable
I mean... that's what the title and context of the discussion thread is all about?
Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't mean they were before, and an instructor won't necessarily move through the poses with the class since they can have 2-3 classes per day.
Edit: replaced "triggered" with "don't like"
This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?
> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate.
Then what is leet code about?
That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company and project has its own requirements.
This does not reject the value of soft skills and being able to interact with other people.
You can also frame this from another perspective. How far should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber have the right to advance in hiring processes just because others found him unpleasant to work with?
You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.
Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.
All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.
Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.
* special demerits to Canonical
No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.
Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.
Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?
In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.
If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.
And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.
1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.
2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.
I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”
If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.
>expected to showcase your skills
Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.
EVERY job in EVERY industry???
Well apparently the penguins have to pay tariffs. Do you know what industry they are in and how they do interviews?
The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.
Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?
Why should it? What problems would they solve? Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?
We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.
> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.
The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.
Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.
Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.
All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.
> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?
Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure
No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.
> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.
At FAANG and friends? Discouraging job hopping to slow wage growth.
Elsewhere? "FAANG does it and they're rich, so if we want to become rich we should also do it".
It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."
In fact many mention it up front on the screening call before any questions are asked.
so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able to function well around other humans is a job requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why do you think behavioral questions are often asked during interviews?
For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of any accommodation provided.
I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reas...
The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.
As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.
This was in Germany.
Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.
Anyway in Germany I bet there’s a Taubenausweis (Gehöhrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of official status marker, and the employer would expect you to show it to HR.
It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually ends up having people trivialise the problem a person might suffer from.
As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a position behind "you need to be able to function in society" is an indecent request to people that have difficulties doing so.
And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I for one would like my manager and my employer to understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.
How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for accommodations.
> And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well. Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.
> How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often come with suggestions tailored to your specific disability.
Just a doctor's note/certificate actually.
> Fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy needed to get a government approved certificate is a chore
Well that is a separate problem. Yes, bureaucracy causes a lot of problems(even renewing your driver's license is a pain), but that doesn't mean the entire basis of needing to prove you are disabled should be thrown away. Everyone in their life faces shit bureaucracy, it's not news.
When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of organisation that treats employees as "resources" will work in a decent way.
But neurodivergense is not just a lack of social skills. Painting it this way is one of the reasons people don't understand it and act with bias against those suffering from it. It is a disability and is recognized by the ADA.
Typically, in a context where practical accomodations are being discussed one would want to address specific needs. A person with dyslexia isn't going to need the same accomodations as someone with ADHD, for example
All this aside, if you have e.g. crippling anxiety such that you can't make it through an interview unaided, you probably won't be successful in that job, whatever it is. Whereas a deaf person or someone in a wheelchair would have no long-term problem.
And while someone on the autism spectrum is born that way, anxiety is inflicted. Of course, Genetic temperament plays a role in one's predisposition to anxiety, just like with many physiological illnesses.
In a nutshell, Autism is neither an illness or disorder, but merely a "different order", while crippling anxiety is actually a disorder.
The kind of autism discussed here is, trivialize their experiences and challenges. It's borderline insulting to those for witch it is a disorder.
I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.
You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.
If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.
This is not bigotry, is it?
If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.
A more charitable interpretation might mean “the candidate is able to clearly explain (through some medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and why they picked that solution. They were also able to correctly answer follow up questions”. If _that_ is what is meant, then that’s not bigotry IMO.
For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.
That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills. Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers filter them out. Problem averted.
While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.
Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.
Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.
I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.
Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.
There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.
(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)
People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions. People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that. People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.
I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.
- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.
- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.
- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.
- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
How is it not logically consistent?
It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.
That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.
That's a false equivalence on your part. Real equivalence would be to find out that the store decided to keep zero tills manned and forced you to do the work yourself and go the self checkout. You go do the self checkout and keep a few items extra as a form of payment for the work you did. This would be the real equivalence
But not using it for creating lies and pretending you're skilled in areas where you're not.
Or would you say that if HR uses humans to screen CVs, you can cheat by using a friend's CV instead (using a human, like HR)
i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think its fair game to use their words to lie.
screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be used to lie.
most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI, just certain uses of it.
If your interview format allows people to use outside help but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness to ask. In most interview formats it would not be acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.
If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret for people to discover.
The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?
and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.
In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?
At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.
Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.
The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.
I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.
That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.
In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.
And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.
It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.
Basic game theory, really. Business are not charities. Hiring a neurodiverse person is riskier than a neurotypical one.
I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.
If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)
Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.
Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.
Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.
Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps. Otherwise no – senior talent time is way too valuable to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.
The interview is the time to discuss if there is any benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are past interview territory at that point.
They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview is deemed important.
Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-nāṣir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
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.
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.
Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.
> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
In the real world, they don't.
If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.
It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.
There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.
Cortisol has never improved a line of code.
Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.
What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)
Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.
You’re absolutely right this would filter out candidates like me.
But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.
Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make.
> I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.
Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.
No, business casual is just fine. Who wants to try to do a grueling technical interview in a suit? No thanks. I sweat enough as it is in interviews.
The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.
I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.
We just need some sort of qualification which tests practical knowledge.
Whatever future interviews look like, I sure as hell hope we don't maintain this ^ attitude.
No company worth working for would refuse to hire someone just because they didn't wear a suit to their interview
Dress nicely, sure. Wear a collar? Yeah probably. A tie? Meh.
Let's get rid of this old fashioned boomer nonsense from hiring please
I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.
No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.
This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.
If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.
> It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor? Am I tailoring my own suit?
this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be right, but it's just sad.
personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look for suits like quants at an investment bank.
I am FAANG/FAANG adjacent. People making 400-700k/yr. I only see suits at holiday parties.
The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.
And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.
I've been on both sides of the table.
My process for hiring is:
- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.
- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).
- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.
- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.
Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.
What's a meh employer?
There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.
Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.
The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.
Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa
No man, it's not and never was - unless you are aiming for a "career" at JP Morgan and the likes.
You sound like a typical classist MBA; don't you have Linkedin posts to make and employees to micromanage?
In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.
The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”
Yeah, no. I'd deduct points if the candidate wears a suit. What a huge red flag, missing all sorts of context and appropriateness cues.
This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.
Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.
That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-t...
This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.
And how would they figure that out if you lie by exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright making up entirely false stuff?
Also not sure you understand english language, greatly exaggerating or making up stuff is still same lying, details are irrelevant.
No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.
Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?
What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..
Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.
Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.
1. Person A interviews at company B
2. Company B says "we'd like to hire you at $X/year"
3. Person A says "that sounds good, I'll start in a month." Company B stops trying to fill the job.
4. Up to a month passes.
5. Person A tells company B "lol nevermind" and doesn't actually start work. Normally this is because company C is offering to pay $Y and $Y >> $X.
It's an employee issue because the employee is not following through on what they said they'd do. Because employment is at-will in the US they're legally in the clear, but the company that was planning on hiring them is still kind of screwed.
Really? That's the bigger issue?
Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?
I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."
Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.
The two are not remotely comparable.
> This promotes lying
No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]
If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.
Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.
(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)
Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.
If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?
I'll note I generally have not been desperate enough to try this, firstly because I'm the kind of person who tends to have a pretty big list of skills in the first place (jack of all trades, master of none), and secondly there's generally enough companies I can apply to which have vaguely functioning hiring processes. But I can't say I look at the way some companies hire and say "Well, candidates lying is entirely a problem with them". People respond to incentives and consequences, and when you have a system with a strong incentive to lie and not much risk of consequences, don't be surprised when people do, even if it's not right.
This is still based on a false assumption, because you want to justify it to yourself.
If the company had lots of CVs being submitted but not a single person made it through their screening, they'd realise their screening bar was either too high (as you assume) or that their bar was correct but they couldn't find the candidate they wanted. Maybe their standards are too high, in which case they might then re-evaluate their expectations are repeat their hiring process with a lower acceptance criteria.
If they're only looking to fill a single role, it doesn't matter if the process screens out 99.9% of the candidates as long as they get through at least one candidate that fulfills the requirement. Of course, if the situation is as you describe, for such a rare talent, the candidate is possibly looking for money than they're prepared to pay, at which point they can again calibrate their expectations lower or decide to pay more. But that's a business decision for the company to decide, not you as a jobseeker.
But the people who know what the company is looking for, and how many people get through their filtering is the company themselves, not you. Just because you don't have the skills required and you extrapolate that to "no-one has these skills", it doesn't mean you're correct and it doesn't mean you're justified in lying.
You then say that you haven't "been desperate enough to try this". In that case, you shouldn't be defending this behaviour either - it will be hurting you when the jobs you are qualified for and have a legitimate shot at getting end up getting filled by a candidate who's not actually up to the task and managed to lie and BS their way through the interview. How is that a good outcome for you or for the company?
Perhaps you could reread GP? You seem to have misunderstood what he wrote. Surely discussing the motivations of those who act deceitfully is not itself deceit.
To be clear, I understand their motivations - essentially "I want this job whether I'm qualified for it or not", but lying about their experience is never acceptable IMHO.
Going further, to me it's not clear which specific post you mean by GP here, as this is now many levels deep and my argument hasn't changed since the my first post on this topic and the argument I've been responding to hasn't changed. Do you mean the GP of that or the GP of the post you replied to? I'll quote them both.
The GP of my original reply was: "Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?" which was answered by somebody justifying that behaviour.
The GP of your reply was: "You're still assuming the process is vaguely functional. It's entirely possible for a company to have a broken enough hiring process that no-one legitimately has the list of skills that the first line of CV filtering is pattern-matching against. Which is dumb, and they should fix their processes, but it basically means lying is required to get those jobs, and people do, the companies don't notice because they don't acually need the skills they put in the job description, and things kinda work but honest people get shafted."
The view expressed by both of these, and that I am fundamentally in disagreement with, is that the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.
The problem with this view is that it's the candidate who's making this assessment. They have no idea if there are any suitable candidates, only that they are not suitable and they aren't prepared to accept that perhaps there is someone more qualified than themselves who is suitable.
Perhaps such a person who's more qualified wouldn't want to work in this job. Perhaps the company's requirements are in fact unrealistically high and they don't get any applicants. None of this is the candidate's concern. What is their concern is that they are not qualified for the role, and so should not be applying. Perhaps they think they're close to the requirements, and apply anyway with a letter such as "my skills aren't an exact match, but maybe you would consider me anyway".
If the company's requirements turn out to be unrealistic, they will realise that soon enough, and decide what alternatives they have. It might be that they re-advertise the role with requirements that the potential candidate now meets, in which case they can and should apply at that point.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the motivations are, the issue just boils down to "is it acceptable to lie so you can the outcome you want while negatively impacting the other party?" I'd argue no.
> the companies are asking for the impossible and so it is acceptable to lie to get the job.
The claim isn't that it's acceptable. It's not "this is ideal and good and you should aspire to it" but rather responding to your idealism by examining the dynamics.
I doubt anyone disagrees with you in principle. However in practice if you leave something valuable out in a bad part of town it's getting stolen. You can preach that theft is wrong until you're blue in the face but it doesn't change the reality.
A virtuous refusal to compromise your ethics means you lose out yet the situation is expected to remain the same. That's fine if you have plenty of other options but you can't realistically expect everyone to be in that position. It's not a matter of ethics but rather human behavior. The scenario where the company is forced to acknowledge that their hiring process is broken will almost certainly never come to pass.
All bets are off, man.
Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!
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.
"Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword generation."
Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?
We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.
If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.
> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.
SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.
Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.
>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?
Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.
So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?
Just being blunt: that's called Fraud. Making false representations for personal gain (employment, in this case) is one of the classic examples.
It doesn't matter if nobody checks in the moment, or if you usually get away with it, dishonesty is dishonesty. If I were to discover that someone joined my team under false pretenses, you can bet I'll have very little faith in their credibility going forward.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... :
> The Fourth Circuit, reviewing a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 2314, also noted that "fraud is a broad term, which includes false representations, dishonesty and deceit." See United States v. Grainger, 701 F.2d 308, 311 (4th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 947 (1983).
Exaggerating, misinterpreting the requirements and not telling the full story with all the details? Well that’s entirely subjective.
> under false pretenses
Like if a person has only has 2 years of professional experience in tech X but the job ad required 5 and he didn’t explicitly declare that during the interview without being bc prompted?
Or claiming that he has experience with technology Y (but it’s non-“professional” experience since he learnt it pn his own and again.. didn’t disclose that during the interview?
Even if that person turns out to be great at his job and you somehow find out he wasn’t 100% honest about some finer points in the interview (who tracks or remembers that stuff anyway?) you’d still feel the same way?
I'm just playing the game so that I come up on top the same way they are doing it to us. That's capitalism for you, our current system doesn't reward honesty, it rewards those who are unscrupulous, as they end up at the top. Companies aren't religious holier than though, they're unscrupulous chasing profits, and then if that's the case, I can play the same game.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2012/05/08/yahoo-ceo...
SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
> Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching with "year of on the job experience".
I don't think this is always the case, as long as it's on the resume (skills + personal projects + YoE). Then, the technical person can judge your knowledge less superficially. It worked for me!
> So white lies are the only way.
It's actually just a regular lie: You'd be harming people by telling it.
> No offense, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes from a position of privilege
This is actually an offensive thing for you to say, because you are claiming I have attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy, all of which are false. Please focus on substance over name-calling.
> [added later] ...never had to endure poverty and unemployment...
I encourage you to explore empathy regarding the poverty and unemployment you'd be causing for a better-qualified applicant who was passed over due to lies, and not just towards yourself.
We are all people, you are not more important than them, and poverty and unemployment is no worse for you than it is for them.
> [added later] As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview...
We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
Do you know a lot people who ended up having to write software for rockets or medical devices after applying for a generic web development job?
> from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified
That’s all very nice. Unless you end up being that someone yourself.
> and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
That’s highly debatable. It’s possible a lot of them did the same thing and unless you outright lied (instead of exaggerating etc.) and are still able to do the job is it really “deception”?
Anyway.. there is a lot of nuance and lying vs not lying is not even remotely a binary thing.
You're arguing that the standards for medical device firmware should be the same for Pinterest which is honestly just a waste of and effort.
I can see both sides of this specific discussion but treating SW engineering generally as rocket science is lying to yourself ;)
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
If you're better prepared or better at selling yourself at the interview, then you're the one who's gonna get the job. If someone with less/no experience takes your job then maybe you suck at interviewing and need to get better, or maybe the interview process is bad at judging top candidates, but either way it's your responsibility to adapt to the variable interview process and prove yourself versus the other candidates using whichever way you can: work, practice, connections, insider knowledge, cheating, etc. Nothing in life is fair, everyone tries to play their best hand all the time and honesty is not always rewarded, which you'll find out the hard way.
Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".
I refer you to the below lines in the post to which you replied:
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.
> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview.
----
>> Everyone deserves exactly what they manage get for themselves. That's exactly how meritocracy works. You're not entitled to deserve a job from the start, out of of some holy moral principle. There's no such thing as "I deserve", there's only "I competed, and I won/lost".
In other words, might makes right. If you manage to scam an old lady out of her retirement savings, you deserve to have it! There's no such thing as "she deserves", only "she competed and she lost", etc etc etc.
It's a good thing there are people in this world that don't subscribe to this "fark you, anything goes, as long as I got mine" style of "ethics".
Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.
I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.
When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.
You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.
In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?
I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.
The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.
Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.
How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?
The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?
Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.
I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.
How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?
>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.
>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.
Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.
>What are you giving them to work with?
Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.
That's a cheap excuse. That's not their job. Their job is to hire someone, anyone, within the budget and that meets minimum requirements. Their responsibility is to get a butt on a seat that can do the work. Any candidate that passes that hiring bar is a safe choice.
You're talking as if their goal was to hire the absolute best based on rigorous objective criteria and crisp stack rankings. It is not. They look for someone, anyone, that is able to do the job, fit in, and not shit the bed. And they need to be able to defend their choice. That's why education matters, prior experience matters, certiciation matters, and even recommendations matter.
Why do you think internal recommendations are a fast track to hire? Do you have any excuse like corruption? Or do you understand that the goal is to find people who are able to do the job, fit within the organization, and not cause problems?
If you fail to understand the problem, you will never find it's solution.
That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine".
Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them
I avoid recruiters unless they can serve me well, too (increased salary, signing bonus, etc), instead preferring to applying directly to individual companies whose mission is interesting and whose culture matches mine.
That said, I don't think hurt is a valid justification for hurting someone else, like the innocent parties I mentioned (potential future coworkers, other job applicants). That perpetuates a chain of hurt. Break the chain.
> Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them. [0]
> We're explicitly discussing someone lying about their abilities and experience, and thus not able to deliver what they said they can in their resume and/or interview. [0]
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43623155
If you wish to reply, it'd be appreciated if you could reply in the referenced thread where you originally made your above claims, and where they were originally refuted. Arguing the same claim over multiple posts seems like it'd be a waste of your time.
Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen match customers with providers. For that, they get paid.
They are not "harming" either, as the relationship and deals made are voluntary.
Perhaps the first step anyone should take is to arrive at the realization that the point of a hiring process from the perspective of a hiring manager is not to find the absolute best candidate. The goal is to pick anyone, anyone at all, from a pool of acceptable candidates. If they are able to get through the door and not shit the bed, they are a superb hire.
> Hiring is broken
How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?
I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.
For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.
Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?
Spend an hour reading a book about C?
I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for time spent you'll ever get.
He did, and got a $300,000 offer.
It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.
If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.
If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.
* ability to communicate
* ability to empathize
* ability to be a nice person you’d want to see every day
I've been really impressed with how much a of performance lift working on leetcode with AI is. It's so much easier to focus on developing rapid problem decomposition skills and working with an interviewer during the problem.
Unfortunately it's also necessary to improve this process because the current standards for the companies still doing leetcode interviews are getting pretty wild these days. Meta requires 2 med-hard question solved in 20 minutes or less each for the screen these days! Even if you have solid algorithmic thinking solving and implementing solutions that quickly requires you to be insanely prepped.
i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.
Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.
IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.
i got a high paying job at meta once i started see it as 'presentation' and not a 'conversation' .
I play this stupid ass game to make money
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.
I haven't written non-proprietary code in a decade.
It is surprising to me that folks looking for a new job would not do this proactively.
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.
If it helps, I do! When someone has this available on their resume, I will look around. It allows me to ask better questions, for starts.
Unfortunately, what I have found, is for every one person who has a legitimate track record of contributions and/or working/worked on projects beyond the basics, there are 100 people who simply do a bunch of cookie cutter projects to make their Github look good, but everything is shallow.
Ironically, those with the cookie cutter projects set themselves up to get weeded out easily, as there is a clear pattern of 'learning to pass the test' rather than learning to learn
no interviewer has ever looked at it
If I review code on someone's github page, that doesn't mean I'll proactively ask them about it in an interview.
Is it? I can think of projects I've worked on that have come up with friends that I have no idea how they worked anymore, just barely if at all. If the project was within the last 2 years, then yeah, but if its 8 year old plus code, I don't expect anyone to remember. However, they could have looked at it when they sent it over and refresh their minds.
If I just have to give a code example of mine on the spot during an interview with no prep, I'm sure as hell not going to remember why I took a certain approach unless there are comments.
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.
I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.
Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.
OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.
OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.
(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)
Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.
But, sadly, OP is right.
When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.
For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:
SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;
I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.
You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.
Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.
I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.
You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.
(I won't use this particular one again.)
What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know).
I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though.
(Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)
I can’t edit it now, so will leave this here to say that it’s not a direct quote.
Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.
I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating?
As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.
But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.
This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.
There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.
That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just trying to provide some helpful info.
If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret knowledge.
There are several papers on the topic if you're that interested.
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.
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.
- 0 effort on your side - very stressful for me - completely unrelated to job - ridiculous definition of someone being “smart”
Actually, I would not even do the test most likely and I bet many others neither.
Unpopular observation: Many people say this, but when they actually want or need a job they change their mind quickly.
I've lost count of how many of my peers went from "I will never grind LeetCode!" to working their way through LeetCode challenge lists as soon as a recruiter from a big tech company contacted them.
I talked to one hiring manager at a company who tested their mobile developer applicants by having them make an entire demo app with some non-trivial functionality. I assumed they wouldn't have any applicants, but his current problem was that too many qualified applicants were applying for every position and begging to do the test.
Definition of being smart is to be quick at mental math and logic, but the puzzles are represented visually. And yes, both those skills are needed in the course of our work.
Contrary to what you might expect, over 80% take the test. I suppose during next hiring season, we could A/B against random selection to compare what % go past our interview.
That's not smart. That's being quick at mental math and logic.
Very different things
…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)
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?
General-purpose "mental ability tests" are typically illegal for hiring in the US.
I probably should have figured out how to request an ADA accommodation... oh well.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
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.
The second part sounds like areal curveball unless you made it clear that the questions sent out were only representative/samples of what you’d ask.
> The second part sounds like areal curveball
That was the point. The candidate wasn't supposed to know the questions in advance. Once the candidate can practice / memorize, there's no way to evaluate the candidate.
However, this to me would be a red flag because they somehow try to blame Ai for misrepresenting their experience. So they can’t even take responsibility for that.
Ask each candidate the same questions?
The consistency lets interviewers compare across candidates, and avoids the cognitive pitfall of defining a rubric after-the-fact that lets us hire the candidate who appealed to our lizard brains.
Even at startups, questions are also usually tested on several existing employees before it is used on the first external candidate, for calibration. Companies put a lot of time and money trying to hire for actual competence.
BTW, it's industry normal for companies to come up with a programming exercise and reuse it.
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.
It is one thing to frame your experiences in ways that are relevant to what the job is looking for: it is not only unethical to fabricate experiences, it is counter-productive. I will be checking references, and if their reports of the role you played on a project don't match yours I will not be hiring you. If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you. All you have done is waste my time and yours.
The sheer number of applications from auto-submit-to-every-job application processes have completely broken the system. There is simply no way for every recruiter to consider ever candidate, which is what they are now being asked to do. I know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.
We will eventually figure out how to defeat these candidate-spam bots. In the meantime the only hiring pipelines that are still functional are human-to-human individual networking.
I heard this from friends, and despite being very comfortable where I am, I started interviewing cynically with no intention to take any job. I can confirm this is very much true and widespread. Hiring is at its worst ever.
Whenever supply and demand gets fixed, we'll see these behaviors go away.
That's why we had our guys down in marketing come up with a new term for it. Focus groups, legal review, the works! Now we call it "puffery".
That is also fungible as well. Some lies just aren't catchable, like experience with skills that you teach yourself quickly, or go through a quick online course. Not saying I should, but "fake it till ya make it" is a definite thing.
> If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you.
There's also a reason I'm leaving the role, and usually you don't want people near your position to know youre looking.
And also, demanding references is the old AI slop - you're only going to give glowing references. Nobody gives bad references. And the worst case is you have a friend answer, or you buy one of those reference services (yes, theres a service for that).
> know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.
I think you're missing the point of the type of 'lying' I was referring to. Workday uses an absolute terrible AI, that uses keyword search. With my resume, the human readable text is accurate and me, but to this ai-slop scanning woukd scan 1pt listicle of every keyword.
Its not lying, but it is. Play stupid AI bullshit games, get gamified AI slop solutions. And I hate it. But even having a discussion with someone would be a start.
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?
Similarly, it is typical that people will have a polite fiction for "why did you leave your last role?" that hints in the direction of the real reason without saying anything the company wouldn't want to be said publicly. That question is a test of your discretion as much as it is making sure the same reason doesn't apply to the new company.
However, saying you have a degree you don't, worked on a project you didn't, implemented something you didn't, led a project you only participated in, or used a technology you didn't: those are lies. Even if you get away with it, you are setting yourself up for a role you are unqualified to have. If you get caught, you will be correctly fired.
I think the message here is: don’t ask for the moon, you are not Google.
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.
When performing interview, asking about things mentioned on the resume is a pretty good conversation starter. No one wants random trivia, resume entries, especially from the most recent jobs, are absolutely fair game. And if they turn out too simple, we can always dig further based later.
The fix to this is to paginate by saying "give me 30 rows after X" where X is an unique indexed value, e.g. the primary key of the row. The RDBMS can quickly find X and 30 rows after X in the sorted index.
This makes it hard to implement a "previous page" button but nowadays everything is a feed with just a "show more" button so it doesn't matter much.
This article looks like a decent overview: https://medium.com/better-programming/understanding-the-offs...
Hard to argue with their interview process when it successfully unmasked someone who didn't have the basic experience to discuss a simple topic.
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.
I hope this guy's startup fails. That is what you get.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.
Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)
* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.
* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.
* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.
AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.
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).
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.
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.
He proudly said they don’t ask questions based on resume, because they don’t care where you worked or where you went to school…as long as you know your stuff. In fact he only looks at the resume after the interview.
I wonder how long they will stick to this stubbornness.
So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process?
/s But only slightly.
* 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.
* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.
* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.
* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.
* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.
I enjoy remote work but I wouldn't want to start working for a company where I had never met anyone. It seems like a great way to get scammed.
One real-life interview would surely be beneficial for both sides.
I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.
When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet, or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about the immediate problem and related things.
(In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about the job opportunity that's the real point of the exercise.)
I don't understand how that works, but it usually works very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.
If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.
Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview, trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences, disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant, redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but energized and commanding manner. You might get permabanned from that company, for coming across like an aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky interview process. :)
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.
The weird thing is, it looks like I’m looking at the off-screen when I’m actually watching the video, and vice verse.
To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up what to say.
If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y and I'm trying to think if I could work around that... okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming from.
But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and repeating the same thing for literally every question, even the ones that were intentional freebies based on their resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.
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.
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.
At some point it feels like it would be easier to just get good at programming, and yet...
Just have a 1 hour or 2 hour call with candidate where you guys go through the project.
Take-homes are a much more reasonable expectation than memorizing how to implement quick-sort on a white board.
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.
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"
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?
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.
What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia.
It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.
I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.
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.)
In regular systems administration, having certs kinda suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job without a cert. Even people who had them would only include them on the resume when they were explicitly called for in a job description.
With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS cert is just testing if you know the six different names Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually understand LDAP or DNS.
If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe certs will finally become useful for developers too.
The clients in some consulting projects definitely do.
It would require that group to agree on what being a "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one and if you don't agree with this one you could form your own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write testable code and be able to label design patterns, and another expects pure functional programming, and another expects deep security expertise, and companies could know which of those they are looking for and inquire appropriately.
We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you can be sure that if someone spent five years there they know their stuff. But we could have a version where workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than relying on a specific for-profit company.
It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the least-competent person who holds it. But the informal versions of this are pretty powerful.
> We should strongly consider this in our industry.
> 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.
“If you can do the job under these constraints, imagine what you can do under optimal, normal conditions!! Hired!”
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.
What compels you to play lingual games with peoples' livelihoods?
It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.
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".
You have to match the level of prep to the jobs you're pursuing. You don't need to grind LeetCode to have a SWE career. Most people never do that.
However if you're trying to get the more competitive jobs then some prep is necessary, as you already discovered with your Google interview.
The reason so many people do interview prep is that the ROI can be extremely high. Spending 100 hours grinding LeetCode sounds like hell to most people. Spending 100 hours doing practice problems to get a $100K raise for a job where you stay for 3 years suddenly becomes a $3000/hour career booster. That high paying job opens doors for more high paying jobs in the future, so the real number is even higher.
That's why people do it. You don't have to do it and it's not guaranteed to get you the high paying job by itself, but for people in the position to take advantage of it, the ROI is huge.
(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).
But my job is very demanding and I have 4 hours after work to spend with my wife and kids before I have to start all over again. I'm just not in a season where interview prep (which may as well be a university 16-week course) is reasonable.
Since the day-to-day job rarely requires it, and I've gotten jobs without it, there's little incentive to change unless I want to.
Nothing wrong with that - nice position to be in actually.
I have a list of past projects I'm comfortable talking about. I can go to great lengths talking about any of them in detail if prompted. I'm also comfortable talking about technical topics including those I'm not intimately familiar with - that's part of my job after all. But most importantly, I'm confident enough that I can say "I don't know what that is, can you elaborate?" and "I'd need to look into that and get back to you".
I've you're going to leetcode me, I'm going to underperform. I've never had to do leetcode for a job. I also don't typically apply to the kind of companies that think leetcode is a good filter. Why should I waste their time and mine to apply to a job at a company I'm probably going to hate working for?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It's still a good idea to try to bullshit candidate on topic he claims to know well.
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.
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
I can't stop repeating it, just invite the candidate to your office. That's it, that's how simple the problem is solved.
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.
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.
The thing with interviewing is that ultimately the questions are fundamentally unpredictable. No coach, or AI, can truly anticipate what the questions will be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does require knowing how to collaborate remotely and being an already-skilled developer, but just because the bar is higher (and many people seem uninterested in meeting it) doesn't mean it has "failed".
There always have been. Companies have made remote exceptions for decades.
What we lost was the chance to normalize it for everyone. The bosses put that delusion to bed real quick.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Off topic, why have such a take home exercise then?
Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.
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.
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.
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.
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
So why bother with it?
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.
Why are we calling these "phone screens"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
Actually it would be interesting if the interviewer had an AI to counter these tactics