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I'd hate being interviewed by a bot. Talking to these stupid automated answering machines is bad enough. That said, the other side of the equation is also bad,
by akudha 1y ago
I'd hate being interviewed by a bot. Talking to these stupid automated answering machines is bad enough.
That said, the other side of the equation is also bad, for employers. I was asked to conduct some interviews recently. I asked the most basic of questions (like absolutely basic stuff, "what is an interface?" level basic). The number of people who said "I don't know" is far less than the number of people who tried to spin stories, make shit up on the fly etc. One guy boasted that he learned programming on his current job (never coded before) and now is a rock star leading a team of 5 people. His confidence was so high, I thought we might have a winner. For the next 20 minutes, he couldn't answer anything, even from his own resume. That is not even the worst part - while leaving, he had the audacity to ask "When can I start?".
Recruiting is broken from all sides. Recruiters working on commission are the worst, but employers and job seekers aren't far behind. I have no clue if this is true in other industries, but in tech it is bad, very bad
- elAhmo 1y agoThose people should be filtered by CV screening, maybe some sort of email exchange before with a few questions to answer to 'ensure' human wants to invest some time in the interview process, rather than just spray and pray.
- gloryjulio 1y agoIsn't that the 1st phone round? Most such people would not pass the technical portion of the phone call
- kccqzy 1y agoThis is also why I specifically told the recruiter at my employer to never ask me to do the 1st phone round. Too many under qualified people at this stage and it's depressing to write No Hire again and again.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hyperadvanced 1y agoBut but but now that we have genAI anyone can do it!
- kccqzy 1y agoCV screening doesn't do much. They exaggerate and lie. My current employer has recently started to direct applicants to an online coding exercise. Like leetcode but easier, just to prove they can write code.
- Balgair 1y agoWait, how does this thing work? Can't you just vibe-code your way through it? Genuinely curious on your thoughts on this idea here.
- strbean 1y agoThey're probably using a platform that lets you replay the entire development session (see the pace of typing into a web IDE, what files they are looking at, etc.). Applicants will have to work pretty hard to fake natural-looking input of AI-generated code.
- hawk_ 1y agoBut then someone has to watch the recording which you can speed up by say 2-4x but not much more than that. This doesn't scale. The number of terrible candidates out there who have no business being anywhere near an IDE is insane.
- tayo42 1y agoI'd guess you do it like bot detection. An online coding platform is going to be all js. You can track key press and mouse events and probably get a good idea of what's obviously real and what's not.
- arrowsmith 1y agoProbably not hard to create a bot that controls your computer and makes it looks like you're typing the code in, pausing to think, going back to fix typos etc.. The arms race never stops.
- lucraft 1y agoTo an extent I think would be surprising to anyone who hasn’t done interviews, all developer CVs below about Staff level are the same. Everyone’s architected a system, handled communication with stakeholders, contributed to technical direction of the team, mentored other developers, etc etc
- throwawayoldie 1y agoI mean...that's what the job is.
- prepend 1y agoYou’d think that but I remember one interview where the candidate was highly recommended and they had never communicated with a stakeholder. A PM had always done that. They had never talked with a user. Ever. They had 15 years of experience. It’s funny the stuff I assume is really easy and common and keep getting reminded that the world is really diverse.
- mlboss 1y agoI don't think you will ever talk to a user if you work in a big company. There are so many layers of abstraction.
- Aeolun 1y agoAnd it’s not even because you don’t want to. It’s just because that’s how things work. I spent years talking directly to users and then I started working for a multinational, and I haven’t seen a user in 7 years…
- ivape 1y agoCoding is now part of the current "side hustle" trope that's going on.
- bee_rider 1y agoI think “what is an interface” would trip me up actually, haha. My thought process was: Well, most of the code I use uses a Reverse Communication Interface. But, I think these are pretty old-school projects, maybe I should start by talking about the Object Oriented interface to the library that we recently did. Or maybe I can talk about the file IO based interface that I did, it was extremely cursed but kind of funny. Wait, oh shit, is this about UI?
- econnors 1y ago"Can you clarify what you mean by interface?" is the right answer
- vkou 1y agoSo far, in my experience, that kind of clarification question is highly correlated to be followed by a firehose of bullshit. But I keep an open mind, and am always ready to be pleasantly surprised.
- jg0r3 1y agoIt really depends what your industry is. I've been writing some printer drivers for custom hardware + windows applications at work. Much of the technical jargon I've been learning during development involve things like "driver interfaces" and "communication interfaces". Depending on how recently I'd been working on our printer drivers I also would likely need clarification. Now if the job is "frontend developer" I agree, someone needing to clarify if you're talking about a user interface or communication layer interface is probably a bad sign. But if it's a looser role I'd definitely look to clarify the question!
- bcrosby95 1y agoEven front end developers have more than 1 concept of an interface: there's both technical facing interfaces and customer facing interfaces. I guess you could just give a generic answer: an interface represents some kinda boundary between users and implementation details, and hopefully said boundary is easier to use than the details. I would guess some would flag that as a bullshit answer, but without clarification you can't do anything but speak in generalities. Now if it were the interface keyword, they're primarily a means by which to introduce polymorphism. They no more achieve the goal of a generally-defined interface than does a regular class, which already satisfies the definition of the generally-defined interface through their public methods. This might also sound like a load of bullshit to some.
- rightbyte 1y ago"what is an interface?" Heh. I had a brian freeze just reading that. That is not a basic question, just because the concept is fundamental.
- Jaygles 1y agoIn my opinion, a very generic question like that deserves a very generic answer, with a follow-up asking if that is what they had in mind. "An interface is roughly how a system is designed to be interacted with. A web page can be an interface with your bank if they have online banking. An API can be an interface for a back-end service to provide to other back-end services. Did you have anything specific in mind?"
- ponector 1y agoUsually the interviewer has particular definition in mind and you need to guess it to pass to the next stages.
- Aeolun 1y agoAnyone asking that question is generally ok with any of the answers. The important thing here is the concept, not the implementation.
- sebastiennight 1y ago> The important thing here is the concept, not the implementation. "Ah, so you meant OOP, got it!"
- limininsklyy 1y agoYup. I have been rejected once because I discussed a variety of options to harden a system instead of blurting out "VPN" as they wanted. They told me that after I discussed some trade offs in security for a little bit.
- 1y ago
- infecto 1y agoIt really is broken. I know on the recruiting side especially more recently I have so many folks that don’t even want to walk through the problem together or just straight out lie. It’s frustrating and broken for all parties.
- Animats 1y ago"I'll have my bot call your bot". There's already a user-side AI program for talking to customer service phone systems. (Need to find the reference. Really good idea.) (I can't find the reference. It's buried under a sea of advertising for company-side chatbots. Anybody remember the link?)
- kev009 1y agoThis kind of race to expensive meaninglessness is hilarious in a similar way a human language modem would be.
- arjvik 1y agoHoly shit, I’d totally pay for this!
- ukuina 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716414
- lufenialif2 1y agoIt was this one I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44716414
- fpoling 1y agoIf recruiting is so broken I expect more certification courses to appear or even language knowledge exams done by independent agencies in physical presence. Like it was done for TOEFL and similar exams in past.
- __loam 1y agoThe industry is practically allergic to the strict certification processes that are present in other fields like engineering. Don't expect this to change anytime soon. I think these companies prefer a wider recruiting pool to standardization.
- ghxst 1y ago"What is an interface?" reminds me of one of my favorite interview questions: "What happens when you open a browser and visit a webpage?". There’s no single right answer and when asked in the right way I find it helps surface knowledge and skills candidates might not otherwise bring up. Some go into OS internals, others talk about networking, some focus on UI and page load performance. Even when candidates expect the question it still reveals how they think and what they spent time reading up on.
- transcriptase 1y ago“324 unrelated companies are made aware of you visiting the webpage via a mountain of JavaScript, tracking pixels, cookies, and telemetry, and then your browser renders megabytes of code to display kilobytes of content, while prompting you to make an account or download an app”
- mindok 1y agoHope you just overlooked the auto-playing video ads due to the pressure of the interview. When can you start?
- johnnyanmac 1y agoIf your filters still get you unqualified candidates, I'd start looking at your filters first. Job reqs are being driven sky high, but people who get called back are horror stories like this that fail fizz buzz. Seems like the only ones who make it though are 90% liars and 1% unicorns. And perhaps soke 4-5% that could do the job but were failed anyway.
- Aeolun 1y agoI mean, _I_ am not interviewing right now. But I can imagine Mr. useless that doesn’t know shot is.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoI'm interviewing. I'm just not getting answers back. I have 9 YOE now so I've done the usual gauntlet hundreds of times by now. Paet of it is that a lot of places just aren't hiring to begin with. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that those who remain either have poor processes (maybe some by design) or don't know how to find what they are looking for.
- mh- 1y ago> I have 9 YOE now so I've done the usual gauntlet hundreds of times by now. I'm not sure how to parse this.. you've done hundreds of interviews, as the candidate, in 9 years of experience?
- wishinghand 1y agoIf they move jobs every two years, that’s 5 periods of interviewing. 40 interviews per period doesn’t seem too out there.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoI interpreted that as "I got laid off and I have 9 y.o.e. and I've done hundreds of interviews in this current period"
- account42 1y ago> Talking to these stupid automated answering machines is bad enough. I refuse to do that to. Usually you can just curse or talk gibberish until the system gives up and you get redirected to a human. If that doesn't work, just find another communication method that does - send an email to a C-level address if you can find/guess one.