4 ms·

> 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. Tool usage

> 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. Tool usage is what separates us from animals and is generally ok where tools are available/expected, but in this case I think you misunderstand which tool we're talking about. The tool involved isn't actually chatGPT, it's more like strategic deception. Consider the structurally similar remark "as a voter, if a candidate can use lies to represent themselves as better than other candidates, I'm not gonna mark them down for use of dishonesty". The rest of this comment is not directed at you personally at all, but the number of folks in this thread who are extremely eager to make various excuses for dishonesty surprised me. The best one is "if dishonesty works, blame the interviewer". I get the superficial justification here like "should have asked better questions", but OTOH we all want fairly short interview processes, no homework, job-related questions without weird data-structures and algorithms pop-quizes, etc, so what's with the double standards? Hiring/firing is expensive, time-consuming, and tedious, and interviewing is also tedious. No one likes picking up the slack for fake coworkers. No one likes being lied to.

WalterBright 3y ago
> the number of folks in this thread who are extremely eager to make various excuses for dishonesty surprised me Not me. I see it all the time, online and offline. I suspect they think it confers status on themselves, but what actually happens is honest people wind up shunning them.
verve_rat 3y ago
The problem is that a good interview is only vaguely related to getting a good employee. Anyone can ace and interview and then slack off once they have to job. If someone aces the interview using an LLM and then does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? The work is getting done, so what's the problem? Compare a shitty worker to a deceptive one using an LLM. They both passed the interview and in both cases the work isn't being done. How are those two cases different?
- recursive 3y ago
  > Anyone can ace and interview I'm doubting this quite a bit. If it's so easy to ace an interview, why are there so many bad ones?
  - verve_rat 3y ago
    That's not the point I was making. The full quote is: >Anyone can ace and interview and then slack off once they have to job. In that a person can pass an interview, get hired, and then not do the job. An interview will never tell you if you will get poor job performance with 100% accuracy.
    - recursive 3y ago
      You can't ace an interview and then slack off if you can't ace an interview. Interviews aren't perfect, but they can still be good filters.
      - verve_rat 3y ago
        I don't think you are getting my point. You can totally ace an interview and then slack off. That's it, that's my point. Not the opposite, not something else, just that.
        recursive 3y ago
        Ok. I see. This is theoretically possible. But in practice, I haven't seen it. That's not something I really care about spending effort filtering for in an interview.
- photonthug 3y ago
  > does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? Maybe I'm wrong, but I find it very hard to believe that anyone thinks the "good work" part here is actually a practical possibility today. Boilerplate generation is fine and certainly possible, and I'm not saying the future won't bring more possibilities. But realistically anyone that is leaning on an LLM more than a little bit for real work today is probably going to commit garbage code that someone else has to find and fix. It's good enough to look like legitimate effort/solutions at first glance, but in the best case it has the effect of tying up actual good faith effort in long code reviews, and turns previously productive and creative individual contributors into full-time teachers or proof-readers. Worst case it slips by and crashes production, or the "peers" of juniors-in-disguise get disgusted with all the hand-holding and just let them break stuff. Or the real contributors quit, and now you have more interviews where you're hoping to not let more fakers slide by. It's not hard to understand that this is all basically just lies (misrepresented expertise) followed by theft. Theft of both time & cash from coworkers and employers. It's also theft of confidence and goodwill that affects everyone. If we double the number of engineers because expectations of engineer quality is getting pushed way down, the LLM-fakers won't get to keep enjoying the same salary they scammed their way into for very long. And if they actually learn to code better, their improved skills will be drowned out by other fakers! If we as an industry don't want homework, 15 interviews per job, strong insistence on FOSS portfolio, lowered wages, and lowered quality of life at work.. low-effort DDoS both in interviews or in code-reviews should concern everyone.
dr_kretyn 3y ago
> Tool usage is what separates us from animals It does not. Please ask any LLM for examples of animals that use tools. (My examples: chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, otters...)
- photonthug 3y ago
  I assume you know this is just an expression, and you know that I know that animals indeed use tools. So I'll refer you to community guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dr_kretyn 3y ago
    Apologies, I had no idea that you used this as an "expression". I have only heard this from people who believed it. Also, I don't think this is a good "expression"; at the very least it's misguided, but mainly it's scientifically constraining. As for the guidelines, I think I could quote it back at you.

WalterBright 3y ago

> the number of folks in this thread who are extremely eager to make various excuses for dishonesty surprised me Not me. I see it all the time, online and offline. I suspect they think it confers status on themselves, but what actually happens is honest people wind up shunning them.

verve_rat 3y ago

The problem is that a good interview is only vaguely related to getting a good employee. Anyone can ace and interview and then slack off once they have to job. If someone aces the interview using an LLM and then does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? The work is getting done, so what's the problem? Compare a shitty worker to a deceptive one using an LLM. They both passed the interview and in both cases the work isn't being done. How are those two cases different?

recursive 3y ago
> Anyone can ace and interview I'm doubting this quite a bit. If it's so easy to ace an interview, why are there so many bad ones?
- verve_rat 3y ago
  That's not the point I was making. The full quote is: >Anyone can ace and interview and then slack off once they have to job. In that a person can pass an interview, get hired, and then not do the job. An interview will never tell you if you will get poor job performance with 100% accuracy.
  - recursive 3y ago
    You can't ace an interview and then slack off if you can't ace an interview. Interviews aren't perfect, but they can still be good filters.
    - verve_rat 3y ago
      I don't think you are getting my point. You can totally ace an interview and then slack off. That's it, that's my point. Not the opposite, not something else, just that.
      - recursive 3y ago
        Ok. I see. This is theoretically possible. But in practice, I haven't seen it. That's not something I really care about spending effort filtering for in an interview.
photonthug 3y ago
> does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? Maybe I'm wrong, but I find it very hard to believe that anyone thinks the "good work" part here is actually a practical possibility today. Boilerplate generation is fine and certainly possible, and I'm not saying the future won't bring more possibilities. But realistically anyone that is leaning on an LLM more than a little bit for real work today is probably going to commit garbage code that someone else has to find and fix. It's good enough to look like legitimate effort/solutions at first glance, but in the best case it has the effect of tying up actual good faith effort in long code reviews, and turns previously productive and creative individual contributors into full-time teachers or proof-readers. Worst case it slips by and crashes production, or the "peers" of juniors-in-disguise get disgusted with all the hand-holding and just let them break stuff. Or the real contributors quit, and now you have more interviews where you're hoping to not let more fakers slide by. It's not hard to understand that this is all basically just lies (misrepresented expertise) followed by theft. Theft of both time & cash from coworkers and employers. It's also theft of confidence and goodwill that affects everyone. If we double the number of engineers because expectations of engineer quality is getting pushed way down, the LLM-fakers won't get to keep enjoying the same salary they scammed their way into for very long. And if they actually learn to code better, their improved skills will be drowned out by other fakers! If we as an industry don't want homework, 15 interviews per job, strong insistence on FOSS portfolio, lowered wages, and lowered quality of life at work.. low-effort DDoS both in interviews or in code-reviews should concern everyone.

dr_kretyn 3y ago

> Tool usage is what separates us from animals It does not. Please ask any LLM for examples of animals that use tools. (My examples: chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, otters...)

photonthug 3y ago
I assume you know this is just an expression, and you know that I know that animals indeed use tools. So I'll refer you to community guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dr_kretyn 3y ago
  Apologies, I had no idea that you used this as an "expression". I have only heard this from people who believed it. Also, I don't think this is a good "expression"; at the very least it's misguided, but mainly it's scientifically constraining. As for the guidelines, I think I could quote it back at you.