I'm seeing this pattern pop up more and more all over the place now. It's pervasive throughout Reddit too for example: pick a sub in the area that you built your app in, pose some problem, and then have another account also controlled by you present the solution that you built. All the writing styles in these posts are similar too; it's all likely written by AI, including the post we're commenting on.
I recently interviewed for my team and tried this same approach. I thought it made sense because I want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job.
It proved to be awkward and clumsy very quickly. Some candidates resisted it since they clearly thought it would make them judged harsher. Some candidates were on the other extreme and basically tried asking ChatGPT the problem straight up, even though I clarified up front "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."
After just the initial batch of candidates it became clear it was muddying things too much, so I simply forbade using it for the rest of the candidates, and those interviews went much smoother.
Over the years, I've walked from several "live coding" interviews. Arguably though, if you're looking for "social coders" maybe the interview is working as intended?
But for me, it's just not how my brain works. If someone is watching me, I'll be so self-conscious the entire time you'll get a stream of absolute nonsense that makes me look like I learned programming from YouTube last night. So it's not worth the time.
You want some good programming done? I need headphones, loud music, a closed door and a supply of Diet Coke. I'll see you in a few hours.
Yep, if I’m forced to talk through the problem, I’ll force myself to go through various things that you might want to hear, that I wouldn’t do.
Whereas my natural approach would be to take a long shower, workout etc and let my brain wander a bit before digging into it. But that wouldn’t fly during an interview..
Ironically this is exactly how I am too. Even at work, if I'm talking through a problem on a presentation or with my boss, I'm much more scatterbrained, and I'll try to dodge those kinds of calls with "Just give me 30 minutes and I'll figure it out." which always goes better for me.
That said, now we're just talking about take home challenges for interviews and you always hear complaints about those too. And shorter, async timed challenges (something like "Here's a few hours to solve this problem, I'll check back in later") are now going to be way more difficult to judge since AI is now ubiquitous.
So I really don't think there's any perfect methodology out there right now. The best I can come up with is to get the candidate in front of you and talk through problems with them. The best barometer I found so far was to set up a small collection of files making up a tiny app and then have candidates debug it with me.
The interview works as intended because the main priority is to avoid hiring people who will be a negative for the company. Discarding a small number of good candidates is an acceptable tradeoff.
In an interview, the coding challenge is often to produce something new from scratch while being closely monitored by people you don't know, who control your financial future.
When working with a "junior," you'd already be fairly familiar with the code base, build system, and best practices. And with a junior, you're not likely to be solving things that require deep concentration, like never-before-seen problems or architectural work (or screwball interview-tests). And, unlike an interview, if something does require all my focus, it's very easy to defer. Take a break and think about it alone.
One example would be looking up syntax and common functions. In a high-pressure situation it's much tougher to bumble around Google and Stack Overflow, so this would be a way for solving for "I totally know how to do this thing but it's just not coming to mind at this moment" which is fair. Usually we the interviews can obviously just tell them ourselves though, but that's what I was going for.
But yeah, the point is that once I applied it in practice it did quickly become confusing, so now I know from experience not to use it.
I think the other suggestions in this thread about how to use it are good ones, but they would present their own meta challenges for an interview too. Just about finding whatever balance works for you I guess.
Did you tell them that you “want to see how people can actually work and problem solve given all the tools at their disposal, just like on the job”? Just curious.
> "You can even use ChatGPT as long as you're not just directly asking for the solution to the whole problem and just copy/pasting, obviously."
No, it's not "obvious" whatsoever. Actually it's obviously confusing: why you are allowing them to use ChatGPT but forbidding them from asking the questions directly? Do you want an employee who is productive at solving problems, or someone who guess your intentions better?
If AI is an issue for you then just ban it. Don't try to make the interview a game of who outsmart who.
See my answer to the other comment on this question. We figured there were some good use cases for AI in an interview that weren't just copy/pasting code, it's not about guessing intentions. It seemed most helpful to potentially unstick candidates from specific parts of the problem if they were drawing a blank under pressure, basically just an easier "You can look it up on Google" in a way that would burn less time for them. However we quickly found it was just easier for us to unstick them ourselves.
> If AI is an issue for you then just ban it.
Yes, that was the conclusion I just said we rapidly came to.
I've had a few people chuck the entire problem into ChatGPT, it was still very much useful in a few ways:
- You get to see how they then review the generated code, do they spot potential edge cases which the AI missed?
- When I ask them to make a change not in the original spec, a lot of them completely shut down because they either didn't understand the code generated well enough, or they themselves didn't really know how to code.
And you still get to see people who _do_ know how to use AI well, which at this point is a must for its overall productivity benefits.
That's a difficult question, but I think we can pretty clearly say that a user base with a high concentration of AdTech workers is probably a bit biased against a company that is pretty clearly anti-AdTech.
The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the search results as if that's a good thing. And these are far more common comments here than comments in favor of actually returning good search results or aligning your income with user interests.
I would think people in AdTech would be first in line to pay for a search engine that avoids AdTech. They understand how the sausage is made. They want the rest of us to use the AdTech products but they themselves are going to avoid them where possible.
How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only often enough to gin up a little PR.
Sure, but that doesn't translate into people telling the truth online.
And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in order to live with themselves.
More curious about your story of starting your own company on a near-whim! I've been grinding out trying to do the same over a year or so without any traction at all and I'm finding myself almost back at Square 1 without any more solid ideas.
Dalton and Michael talk about folks pivoting too much and not fully learning/validating from each pivot in this recent video. Obviously I don't know anything about what you've been doing but perhaps there's some wisdom here: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/when-to-pivot-and-when-to-s...
I’ve been working at the forefront of my speciality for many years. It doesn’t really matter where I am, I’m always working on solving the same challenges.
Jobs and stuff are an annoying necessity, the business is really just a thing I had to build to keep working on my primary tasks.
A lot of what looks like success on the outside is really just stubborn focus on a hard problem across many years. So I’ve had many prestigious jobs and titles, but it’s all just to allow me to do what I want.
This just tells me you’re not well versed in sales and marketing. Learn those first (specially direct response) and the other pieces will glide into place with less effort.
Unfortunately, experience. A good dose of people skills help, but you need to know what makes real money move and get contacts in your area. Find someone who has succeeded in your area, and try to get into those circles.
I'm using a combination of Duolingo, Babbel, watching and reading French content, and live drilling with local French speakers. Since I live in the US, it's difficult to replicate immersion here, but I do what I can.
I'm also studying Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and Esperanto. These aren't (yet) as intensive as the French, but a bucket list item of mine is to become a polyglot. Fluency isn't likely, but I should at least be able to chat with folks about food, the weather, and other pleasantries. Yeah, the language selections center on Europe and the Americas, but these languages are at least somewhat interrelated, which means that I get a boost when learning them, since I already know English and some French.
That's cool! I do all of those things as well, minus the uni classes and open-source. But for someone who has no interest in travel, then learning foreign languages would be a waste of time. I personally consider writing open-source software a waste of my time because it would be taking away from my closed-source side project ventures.
You can totally min/max your entire life and only do things for self-improvement, but then to what end? What do you expect to derive out of the continuing education classes that is going to be significantly valuable to your life/career?
I think it's important to note that many people are actually quite satisfied with their position in life, a lot of us are making a lot of money engaging in interesting work, so at a certain point doing things for the sake of minimizing opportunity cost comes with diminishing returns as you've already made the most of the opportunities you've already had. The whole point of working hard is to reach some stage of life where you can actually reap the rewards and have the time and resources to enjoy yourself however you please without worrying about it.
I don’t really use my language learning for travel—nearly everyone speaks better English than I do their native language.
But in the same way that learning Haskell or Lisp can change the way you write and think about code, learning a language like Japanese can fundamentally change the way you think about everything. There’s intrinsic value to being multilingual.
Of greater pragmatic benefit is that if you learn a language, like Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, or French, you gain exposure to a whole different media landscape, including information on news and world events that is drastically different from what you encounter in the anglosphere.
What makes any of those things more or less valuable than playing a video game?
Volunteering, sure, but the rest are just as self indulgent as any other pass time. Just because you value them higher doesn't mean you should discount the things that other people do to enjoy themselves.
In our intensely competitive capitalist society, gaming has a low expected utility. It also doesn't usually reinforce skills that make you more employable. You also usually don't get a salary or remuneration.
The elitist in me wants to say games are little more than hi-res Skinner boxes. But properly applied, games can teach us strategy, reason, and problem solving. Is that why I play God of War? No. I play it because KRATOS SMASH
All of those activities enrich my life and help me grow as an individual. I think someone should always be learning throughout their life, and I have yet to see a video game that accomplishes that.
I wonder how you measure balance between being lazy vs. not lazy by this definition? I agree with you, but it's not like it's feasible to remain full-on focused on coding or meetings or documenting for 8 hours straight each day.
Really good point. There's a big difference in checking HN in the 10 minutes between meetings vs spending 4 hours after noon reading and replying to threads.
