9 ms·

The idea that spotting cheating is obvious is a case of selection bias. You only notice when it's obvious. Clearly, the person put 0 effort towards cheating (a

• al_borland 3y ago
  Maybe I’m a slow reader, but reading, understanding, and paraphrasing the response seems like it would take enough time to be awkward and obvious as well. I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for.
  • xboxnolifes 3y ago
    > I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for. $$$,$$$
    • dmoy 3y ago
      Well, five moneys at least. They might figure out and fire you before you get to six moneys (but maybe they won't, who knows).
      • WalterBright 3y ago
        It will take 3 to 6 months to determine that a new hire is incompetent, especially if you're required to document their incompetence before firing them.
        • skeeter2020 3y ago
          I've never had a job without a probation period where you can let someone go without cause within the first 90 days with nothing more than two weeks pay in lieu of notice. It definitely doesn't take 6 months to identify someone who only got their job because they used AI in the interview.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    As an interviewer, if a candidate can use chatGPT to give a better answer than other candidates, I'm not gonna mark them down for use of chatGPT. It's a tool, and if they can master it to make it useful, then credit to them. Alas, ChatGPT seems to be a jack of all trades, but master of none, which is gonna make it hard to pass my interviews which test very specific technical skills.
    • lucasmullens 3y ago
      That's like being okay with a candidate Googling the answer during an interview. Not unheard of, but unusual. It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way.
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        I'm okay with them googling too. And I tell them that at the start. But if they take ages to lookup the answer when others just know the answer, it's gonna hurt their chances.
        • gtirloni 3y ago
          Sure, they can search it live but you have to assess if they understand what they found. Usually, if they really know their stuff, whatever they find is just gently pushing their working memory to connect the dots and give a decent answer. Otherwise it's pretty easy to ask a follow up question and see a candidate struggle. It's like in college when you're allowed to take textbooks to an exam. You can bet the professor spent more time crafting questions that you can't answer blindly. That being said, I think both types of questions have their place in an interview process. You can start with the no searching allowed questions in the beginning to assess real basic knowledge and, once you determine the candidate has some knowledge, you start probing more to see if they can connect the dots, maybe it's architecture decisions and their consequences, maybe it's an unexpected requirement and how they would react, etc.
      • yunwal 3y ago
        Seems much easier than trying to prevent them from using google
  • notnaut 3y ago
    Consider a situation where you’re applying for a job that you’re 50% qualified for and then using chatgpt to cheat on the interview. Would be much more difficult to catch is my guess.
    • throwaway2037 3y ago
      This is an interesting thought experiment. If you slide from 50% to 99%, how do people feel about using ChatGPT? What is more honest: Many people here were hired when they were less than 100% qualified, and did very well in their new role. It has happened to me more than once.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    > I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for. Well, I suck at interviewing and/or leetcode questions, but have so far done perfectly fine in any actual position. I can totally see how you’d resort to ChatGPT to give the interviewers their desired robotic answers after 3 months of failing to pass an interview the conventional way.
    • munk-a 3y ago
      I understand that you have no control over who you're interviewing with but... if you're a good fit and the interviewer leaves thinking you're a terrible fit that's a sign of a bad interviewer. Obviously there are non-proficiency things you can do to skew that perception (bad hygiene, late, obviously disinterested) but a good interviewer (especially one used to working with developers) should be good at getting by all the social awkwardness to evaluate your problem solving. And yes, most large companies have terrible interviewers.
      • aydyn 3y ago
        Yes agreed that it is a problem with interviewers, but in practice all the responsibility falls on the interviewee. I've never once seen an interviewer getting better in any company I've worked for. What happens is they just move onto the next interviewee.
      • Aeolun 3y ago
        I refuse to believe that all the interviewers I had over the course of 6 months were all terrible. It must be something about the process that is pathologically broken (especially when getting hired at larger companies)
        • verve_rat 3y ago
          I mean... if the interview process is even a little broken then doesn't that mean that over time worse and worse interviewers will get hired, making for worse and worse interviews meaning that worse and worse interviewers get hired...
    • 3y ago
  • bradlys 3y ago
    Just because I can’t recite rabin-karp off the top of my head or some suffix tree with LCA shit for some leetcode question about palindromes doesn’t mean I’m unqualified to do the work of an engineer. I’ve gone public, been acquired by Google, and scaled solutions to tens of millions of users. I’m probably overqualified for your CRUD app.
    • Atotalnoob 3y ago
      We are interviewing for a principal at my work, and the directions from management are to find someone really good. Instead of tearing into their experience, my coworker is asking what you would use the X class for. Drives me fucking nuts. Who memorized all the parts of a random, mostly unused .NET class. I asked the coworker afterwards if he ever used said class, dude said no. How is that a fair question if it isn’t even used here?
      • _hcuq 3y ago
        Exactly. I would never interview for a job, be humiliated by a moron. Luckily I have the contacts and experience to never have to.
  • redsoundbanner 3y ago
    >I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for. Easy. They have nothing to lose because the jobs they are qualified for don't even pay enough to survive. You probably could have figured this out yourself.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for. Money, obviously. Software jobs in particular are magic in this way - the pay is way above the average, and performance metrics are so poorly defined that one can coast for months doing nothing before anyone starts suspecting anything. Years, even, in a large company, if one's lucky. 80% of the trick is landing the first gig, 15% is lasting long enough to be able to use it as a foundation of your CV, and then 5% is to keep sailing on. No, really. There's nothing surprising about unqualified people applying for software companies. If one's fine with freeloading, then I can't think of easier money. (And to be fair, I'd say it's 10% of freeloaders, 10% of hard workers, and in between, there's a whole spectrum of varying skills and time and mental makeups, the lower half of that is kind of unqualified but not really dishonest.)
• irrational 3y ago
  We will have to start studying people's eyes to see if they are moving as if reading text.
  • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    I predict that that will be followed shortly by a mysterious sharp increase in applicants claiming to have nystagmus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nystagmus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nystagmus), which causes random involuntary eye movements, but without any medical documentation.
    • Volundr 3y ago
      What's interesting is this wouldn't necessarily imply cheating. That doesn't sound like an issue I'd necessarily draw attention to under normal circumstances, but if I knew interviewers were likely to be paying close attention to my eye movements I certainly would.
      • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
        Yes, exactly. I have nystagmus myself because of an underlying medical condition that causes other vision problems and it's depressing that interviewers might think it's reason for suspicion.
        • bitzun 3y ago
          I've been a pain in the ass in quite a few feedback sessions when people brought up a candidate not making "enough" eye contact. Usually I mention that they could be treading into infringing on a protected class and they shut up.
  • Fetiorin 3y ago
    There is already an app from Nvidia that simulates constant eye contact with the camera
    • 3y ago
• ozim 3y ago
  If someone is smart enough to go away with it is enough that I know but it doesn’t bother me much- I don’t mind. Had an interview take home assignment done by GPT and it was easy to spot after seeing dozens of solutions. Downside for the guy was - it didn’t work.
  • godelski 3y ago
    You probably should because this is a person demonstrating that they can and will hack metrics rather than consider what you're proxying.
    • ozim 3y ago
      In my current setting it doesn’t work like that. We have a small team of developers and you cannot hack metrics. You build and deliver what is in requirements or not. If you don’t deliver we don’t even have to have a discussion because team reviews code, tests features and gives feedback quickly if someone is slacking.
      • godelski 3y ago
        All metrics can be hacked.
        • ozim 3y ago
          Not going to write too much but I think this is best reply: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
          • godelski 3y ago
            Well you did say that your metrics "cannot be hacked." The XKCD one can actually be easily hacked. Just spam the system and rate every comment as helpful. Classifier learns to accept everything. There's dozens of way to hack this one and undermine the actual goal. But it is a comic, and it is funny. Doesn't need to be realistic.
• twic 3y ago
  What's your evidence for that claim?
• johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I mean, at some point if they go through so much effort to hide their cheating they probably have attained some mastery in the process. Kinda like how some friends in high school would try and sneak in note cards on a test but they probably spent so much time prepping them that they coulda gotten an A or B regardless. It's also why it's kinda annoying to do live interviewing trivia questions. Can I immediately answer what a partial template specialization is? Probably not, I never used them. Can I google it in 2 minutes and summarize it as as way for (often c++) template classes to bound some of the template arguments to values or pointers? Well, I just did. Should that cost me the interview? That's pretty much what I do on the job.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    I am a polyglot: Perl, Python, C, C++, Java, C#, etc. Not experts at all, but I can do fine with an existing code base. What is it about C++-heavy interviews that always regress to trivia? And asking about rarely used features? It is a bother. And rarely does the person asking the trivia have any depth whatsoever in other languages. It is my biggest gripe with "C++ people". For many, they have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Yes, "Java enterprise people" were the same in 2005-ish.