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"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "p

• _yy01 1y ago
  In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description". Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!
  • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    > They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description". If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview? Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      Recruiters have gone beyond keyword matching, they're now using AI to judge the resume. > Hiring is broken How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?
      • flaburgan 1y ago
        Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well. So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check. Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.
      • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        I don't know. Depends on a case by case basis. Maybe someone has solid credentials, maybe someone has some FOSS contributions.
    • rafaelmn 1y ago
      > what is one to do Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?
      • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.
        • ImPostingOnHN 1y ago
          > What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed? 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.
          • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
            >If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. 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?
    • _yy01 1y ago
      AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound authentic.
      • abirch 1y ago
        AI is the GOAT of Buzzword generation or should I/Gemini say "Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword generation."
      • zellyn 1y ago
        It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”
        • collingreen 1y ago
          Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?
          • ohthatsnotright 1y ago
            Probably get promoted to C-suite.
• sidrag22 1y ago
  this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences. 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.
• zemo 1y ago
  > The issue is lying about your experiences 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.
  • mytailorisrich 1y ago
    That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling. 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.
    • skydhash 1y ago
      Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.
    • devmor 1y ago
      How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time? 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?
    • WalterBright 1y ago
      > if you want to prepare for a C dev interview 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.
  • autoexec 1y ago
• dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
  >The issue is lying about your experiences 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.
  • gspencley 1y ago
    > 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. 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]
    • dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
      So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even an experienced person) whose resume says experience in ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system that does the screening.
    • miki123211 1y ago
      The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it. 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.
• before_the_law 1y ago
  > I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems 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.
  • giancarlostoro 1y ago
    English is not my first language, and yet I'm fluent, but some of the questions I've been asked to solve are insanely confusingly worded and so I have a harder time because the interview process at some places is unrealistic.
    • ender341341 1y ago
      Many interview coding questions are purposefully worded weird with the intent of seeing if you ask clarifying questions.
      • giancarlostoro 1y ago
        I had no ability to do so, it was on some leetcode esque site.
    • throwaway31131 1y ago
      The interviewer might be looking to see how you deal with bad specifications which, in my experience, are also often confusingly worded, vague and/or conflicting.
• exabrial 1y ago
  >I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. 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.
  • rblatz 1y ago
    I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal. 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.
    • exabrial 1y ago
      I mean, as an alternative to 133tcode, perhaps they could maybe demonstrate real world applicable skills: * ability to communicate * ability to empathize * ability to be a nice person you’d want to see every day
      • user5534762135 1y ago
        And yet, ability to code — or actually ability to learn to think algorithmically — is elementary for IT positions, and on average an uncommon enough that it's very much worth it for companies to test for it. You're not trying to suggest just employing any competent middle manager or marketing person to code, after all.
• apwell23 1y ago
  > Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful. 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