Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer.
Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping.
Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work.
Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure.
Take home project? It's too much work to do for free.
Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations.
Either you enforce a minimal level of competency upfront in the form of an academic degree, industry-standard exams such as a PE Exam, etc. OR you push the entire responsibility of vetting prospective applicants downstream to the employer—which is exactly why interviews are multiple week long gauntlets.
The tech world likes to complain about all of this but other occupations 100% DO have high standards - it's just that it's paid up-front.
Want to become a lawyer? - You've got to pass the LSAT, get into law school, and pass the bar.
Want to become a doctor? - You've got to pass the MCAT, get into medical school, and do residency.
Want to become a pilot? - You've got to get your PPL, pass your check ride, do your IFR, multi-engine, commercial rating, ATP
God there are some days that I ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS INDUSTRY.
Feels like in some sections of the US like big tech, the talent vetting process has evolved into some adversarial battle of attrition where the idea is to grind down the pool of candidates until only a few are left rather than find some potential new colleagues. Tools like this have emerged as a direct response to that process.
What a bizarre way to begin a working relationship.
I’m reasonably certain that I interviewed someone using this or something like it in the last few days.
Lots of eye scanning while looking above the window they’d been typing into. Pauses. Big pastes. One of my excellent colleagues noticed that the candidate made use of exciting C++ casts before ever defining the variable’s types. Complete inability to explain or debug the code just written.
So. Frustrating in two dimensions. First a waste of time for everyone. Second, occasional signs of real ability make me think the candidate might’ve made it work honestly. The fool.
This, and this alone, makes me pine for in-person interviews. But I suspect those won’t be back for some time. (For good reasons that are out of scope here.)
Why bother with this style of interview where the candidate is under extreme time pressure and isn’t allowed to use any of the research tools they would normally use in their job? What is this controlling for?
It barely made sense when these were conducted in person, and it’s completely inane over video meeting.
Instead of grilling people, talk to them. Give them meaningful take-home exercises that you can discuss together during the interview. If they can explain the decisions they made and discuss alternatives and trade-offs, that’s a much better indicator of job performance than pretending to invent a leetcode party trick algorithm in 10 minutes.
Just in case this repo isn't a joke and some job seekers are seriously thinking of this tactic...
Companies already know about cheat methods like this and candidates still have to demonstrate skills in-person on a whiteboard in a 2nd round of tech interviews.
A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview.
That still may not deter some folks and they'll try to continue to find some cheating technique to use in front of the whiteboard. In that case, some creativity is going to be required. E.g. : https://www.google.com/search?q=chess+cheating+anal+beads
The issue is that "chess board moves" is very low bandwidth and can be efficiently encoded into pseudo-quasi- Morse Code vibration schemes. However, if you're asked to "invert a binary tree" or any other open-ended random puzzles, it's more difficult to compress a secret 2-way high-bandwidth communication with ChatGPT into a hidden butt plug. (But then again, if a candidate is actually able to fool people with hidden ChatGPT hacks in a face-to-face interview, maybe FAANG should hire them based on that alone.)
Keep on the lookout for a github repo with ChatGPT butt-plug communication.
vunderba ·18 days ago
Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping.
Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work.
Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure.
Take home project? It's too much work to do for free.
Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations.
Either you enforce a minimal level of competency upfront in the form of an academic degree, industry-standard exams such as a PE Exam, etc. OR you push the entire responsibility of vetting prospective applicants downstream to the employer—which is exactly why interviews are multiple week long gauntlets.
The tech world likes to complain about all of this but other occupations 100% DO have high standards - it's just that it's paid up-front.
Want to become a lawyer? - You've got to pass the LSAT, get into law school, and pass the bar.
Want to become a doctor? - You've got to pass the MCAT, get into medical school, and do residency.
Want to become a pilot? - You've got to get your PPL, pass your check ride, do your IFR, multi-engine, commercial rating, ATP
God there are some days that I ABSOLUTELY HATE THIS INDUSTRY.
Show replies
davedx ·19 days ago
What a bizarre way to begin a working relationship.
Show replies
colinb ·19 days ago
Lots of eye scanning while looking above the window they’d been typing into. Pauses. Big pastes. One of my excellent colleagues noticed that the candidate made use of exciting C++ casts before ever defining the variable’s types. Complete inability to explain or debug the code just written.
So. Frustrating in two dimensions. First a waste of time for everyone. Second, occasional signs of real ability make me think the candidate might’ve made it work honestly. The fool.
This, and this alone, makes me pine for in-person interviews. But I suspect those won’t be back for some time. (For good reasons that are out of scope here.)
Show replies
pavlov ·19 days ago
It barely made sense when these were conducted in person, and it’s completely inane over video meeting.
Instead of grilling people, talk to them. Give them meaningful take-home exercises that you can discuss together during the interview. If they can explain the decisions they made and discuss alternatives and trade-offs, that’s a much better indicator of job performance than pretending to invent a leetcode party trick algorithm in 10 minutes.
Show replies
jasode ·19 days ago
Companies already know about cheat methods like this and candidates still have to demonstrate skills in-person on a whiteboard in a 2nd round of tech interviews.
A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview.
That still may not deter some folks and they'll try to continue to find some cheating technique to use in front of the whiteboard. In that case, some creativity is going to be required. E.g. : https://www.google.com/search?q=chess+cheating+anal+beads
The issue is that "chess board moves" is very low bandwidth and can be efficiently encoded into pseudo-quasi- Morse Code vibration schemes. However, if you're asked to "invert a binary tree" or any other open-ended random puzzles, it's more difficult to compress a secret 2-way high-bandwidth communication with ChatGPT into a hidden butt plug. (But then again, if a candidate is actually able to fool people with hidden ChatGPT hacks in a face-to-face interview, maybe FAANG should hire them based on that alone.)
Keep on the lookout for a github repo with ChatGPT butt-plug communication.
Show replies