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I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abuser
by pknomad 2y ago
I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.
One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.
- mvanbaak 2y agoFellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.
- throwaway2037 2y agoWhat is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term before today.
- beardedwizard 2y agoElitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing. Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem. This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?
- hipadev23 2y agoLatest rebranding of “sysadmin”, which became “devops engineer” or SRE a decade ago. It’s the people who shove kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.
- pknomad 2y agoPlatform Engineers are operationally focused software engineers who focus on enablement of other software engineering groups through building self-service tooling and create unified platform for app deployment. The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams through self service, whereas DevOps is more about reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).
- throwaway2037 2y agoTL;DR: Internal tool builder
- selimthegrim 2y ago>mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than your hiring success rate.
- teitoklien 2y agohahaha, i was thinking the same when i read it, such an odd way to phrase it. “Mouth to mouth” lol
- throwaway48476 2y agoThe English phrase for this is 'word of mouth'
- stackskipton 2y agoIn our remote interviews, I've started pasting the question into meeting chat that I've already fed into ChatGPT. Mainly because some candidates do actually do better with reading and thinking but it's also just pure bait to paste into their open ChatGPT window. Since I've already got input on my side, if they start reading off ChatGPT output, they get a strike, two strikes and interview is ended. However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but finance obviously screams about cost.
- bdangubic 2y agoit is surprising there isn’t some SaaS bullshit company that solves this problem. we have shit like Pearsons and whatnots when taking exams, I took few certification exams and it was like - install this thing that takes over my machine - 360 camera around to show my surroundings - no phone/watch/… One would think by now there’d be two Stanford grads with a SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating. Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call :)
- Terr_ 2y agoEven as we speak, scams are going on where pretend-employers are backdooring the computers of applicants that way. I fear the only applicants who would agree are also the ones who can't be trusted with any employee access to your corporate resources.
- bdangubic 2y agoa company would run this… Not your company taking over candidate’s computer, an intermediary that candidate and potential employer are using. candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/… now they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in 2025, some stanfords are on the case
- gray_-_wolf 2y ago
- mlloyd 2y agoWhen folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical' attempts to interact with it. You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result. It's a quintessential arms race. For what it's worth, I appreciate that you're trying hard to keep your hiring process broad and to mitigate your potential blind spots. That's refreshing to hear from a hiring manager.
- photonthug 2y agoYep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the funnel for real jobs. So now it’s a matter of sheer application volume for candidate employees more than ever, who after all are in a rather more desperate position than potential employers will ever be. Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that it’s completely normal these days to use so called “hiring” more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal to investors rather than to indicate you are actually hiring. I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and similarly for the time involved. And this happens without the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The only people that win here are the staffing platforms like indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal
- Seattle3503 2y agoI think there is a sort of just world fallacy employed here. It seems more like that there opportunists everywhere, and always have been. LLMs have amplified their destructive potential.
- jcutrell 2y agoRemember - the vast majority of candidates who take the time to do right by your process get zero reward for their effort. You get a reward in the end, so it feels imbalanced. This is true for VERY good candidates, as well.
- cellu 2y agoPrecisely my problem. I only apply if I know I’m a good fit and have the required experience. I spent countless hours manually adjusting my resume and writing cover letter out of my heart. Just got the usual cold rejection from a no-reply address. I know do the same with ChatGPT. I also get rejections, but at least I waste little time and can therefore submit many more applications - so my odds are higher