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by charleslmunger 520 days ago
Sieve of Erastothenes is often introduced alongside prime numbers in elementary school math class and it has a funny/memorable name - it's not that weird for someone to know it. It is weird to lie about having a practical use case for it since running it to the point of a cryptographically useful prime length is infeasible and it requires O(n) memory.

It seems vanishingly unlikely that this type of question can provide any signal any more outside an in person interview. The incentives are just too strong for candidates and the tools are too good.
1 comments
calabin 520 days ago
Great point on the Sieve - knowing it off of the top of his head wasn't itself a red-handed indicator of cheating, but claiming that he'd used it in a B2B SaaS app was. Especially given that he wasn't able to explain how he'd allegedly used it.

The candidates we're bringing into this screen typically have 1-3 prior positions on their resume, so the point here is to throw them some softballs that they should be able to crank through with some ease to demonstrate that their basic programming skills are there.

We've had experiences where people who have held legitimate programming jobs at F1000 companies struggle greatly with some of the basic questions that I've listed above. I'm not sure why, but it's the case.

We try as best as we can to adjust for anxiousness, I know that programming in front of others can suck, but all the same we're just trying to establish, "before we go forward, can you do some elementary tasks that anyone with your claimed experience should be able to do"

Do you have any suggestions on better questions?

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charleslmunger 516 days ago
All the questions I come up with that are both narrow enough in scope to reasonably do in an interview and get unhelpful answers from an LLM end up being trick questions for humans too, which is not really fair or productive.

What's particularly frustrating is that I've got some actual unsolved algorithms problems I want a solution to. One might think that since the LLMs are smart enough to re-solve problems from their training data in interviews, they could help - alas, they have been of no help so far.

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