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1. Interview candidates with cameras on. 2. Do not ask basic software literacy questions. First of all, this was completely stupid even before LLMs. Secondly,
by austin-cheney 1y ago
1. Interview candidates with cameras on.
2. Do not ask basic software literacy questions. First of all, this was completely stupid even before LLMs. Secondly, its easy to cheat. If you absolutely have to do this then do it terms of measures. Most people in software are entirely incapable of measuring anything and LLMs cannot fix their personality deficiency.
3. Ask all questions where the expected answer is a not some factoid nonsense but a decision they must make. Evaluate their answer on the grounds of risk, coverage, delivery, and performance. For example if you are interviewing a AI/ML guy ask them about how they overcome bias in the algorithms and how they weigh the consequences of different design outcomes. If they are a QA ask them about how they will take ownership of quality analysis for work already in production or how they will coach developers when communicating steps to reproduce a defect.
4. As an interviewer you should know, by now, how to listen to people. That is so much more than just audible parsing of words. If their words say one thing, but their body language says something different then they are full of shit. Its okay that they aren't experts in everything. Their honesty and humility is far more important. They can get every question wrong, but if their honesty is on and they can make solid decisions then they are at least in the top half of consideration.
5. Finally, after evaluating their decision making ability and risk analysis then ask them for a story where they have encountered such a problem in the past and had to learn from failure.
This question comes up at least once a month so this answer is copy/paste from a prior comment.
- al_borland 1y ago> 1. Interview candidates with cameras on. It could be worth reviewing Ogletree v. Cleveland State University before doing this. A court ruled that a room scan violated a person’s 4th amendment rights. There is also the risk that the person could have something on their wall which could indicate they are in a protected class, and if they don’t get the job, they could claim you used this information against them. While I’m sure cameras for interviews are likely commonplace, it does open up some risk. Some may see it as an acceptable amount of risk, others may not.
- austin-cheney 1y agoThat is entirely the candidate's liability. If they don't want certain identifying materials or decorations made visible during the interview then don't make them visible to the camera. There is no law that says as a hiring manager I must wear a blindfold or otherwise hide from the candidate. As a fully remote hiring manager I am interviewing a person and I need to see that person to know if or when they are full of shit when they talk. If that isn't acceptable they can interview somewhere else.
- muzani 1y agoSome software literacy questions are fine. My favorites are what is grep, what's functional programming, what is the difference between TCP and UDP, what does hashing do. Even if they were cheating, you could tell because the definition would be too definition-like. I expect people to stumble over what is functional programming, but they should be able to bring up things like immutability or the map() thing lol. Another favorite is "what is TDD". The wrong answer is being fanatical/emotional about it either way.