[explorigin]

Part of my resume review process is trying to decide if I can trust the person. If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate.

Once you get to the interview process, it's very clear if someone thinks they can use AI to help with the interview process. I'm not going to sit here while you type my question into OpenAI and try to BS a meaningful response to my question 30 seconds later.

AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

[brianstrimp]

Good interviews are a conversation, a dialog to uncover how the person thinks, how they listen, how they approach problems and discuss. Also a bit detail knowledge, but that's only a minor component in the end. Any interview where AI in its current form helps is not good anyway. Keep in mind that in our industry, the interview goes both ways. If the candidate thinks your process is bad then they are less inclined to join your company because they know that their coworkers will have been chosen by a subpar process.

That said, I'm waiting for an "interview assistant" product. It listens in to the conversation and silently provides concise extra information about the mentioned subjects that can be quickly glanced at without having to enter anything. Or does this already exist?

Such a product could be useful for coding to. Like watching me over the shoulder and seeing aha, you are working with so-and-so library, let me show you some key parts of the API in this window, or you are trying to do this-and-that, let me give you some hints. Not as intrusive as current assistants that try to write code for you, just some proactive lookup without having to actively seek out information. Anybody knows a product for that?

[kmoser]

That might be good for newbie developers but for the rest of us it'll end up being the Clippy of AI assistants. If I want to know more about an API I'm using, I'll Google (or ask ChatGPT) for details; I don't need an assistant trying to be helpful and either treating me like a child, or giving me info that maybe right but which I don't need at the moment.

The only way I can see that working is if it spends hundreds of hours watching you to understand what you know and don't know, and even then it'll be a bit of a crap shoot.

[sien]

I'm pretty sure I've been in an interview with an 'interview assistant' and that it was another person.

This was 2-3 years ago in a remote interview. The candidate would hear the question, BS us a bit and then sometimes provide a good answer.

But then if we asked follow up questions they would blow those.

They also had odd 'AV issues' which were suspicious.

[ktallett]

This, and tbh this has always been the best way. Someone who has projects, whether personal or professional, and has the capability to discuss those projects in depth and with passion will usually be a better employee than a leet code specialist.

[remus]

Doesn't even have to be a project per se, if they can discuss some sort of technical topic in depth (i.e. the sort of discussion you might have when discussing potential solutions to a problem) then that's a great sign imo.

[polishdude20]

My resume has a bunch of personal projects on there as well as work experience and the project experience seems to not help at all. Just rejections after rejections.

[ktallett]

My suggestion was in an ideal world which sadly this isn't. Your issue suggests they aren't tailored for each application, which could potentially be a reason. It is better to show why one project makes you a great fit as opposed to how many projects you have done. Sometimes the person in charge of hiring may not fully have all the expertise in the area they are hiring for.

[vunderba]

Agreed. This is why - while I won't ding an applicant for not having a public Github, I'm always happy when they do because usually they'll have some passion projects on there that we can discuss.

[pdimitar]

I have 23 years of experience and I am almost invisible on GitHub, and for all those years I've been fired from 4 contracts due to various disconnects (one culture mis-fit and two under-performances due to illness I wasn't aware of at the time, and one because the company literally restructured over the weekend and fired 80% of all engineers), and I have been contracting a lot in the last 10 years (we're talking 17-19 gigs).

If you look solely at my GitHub you'd likely reject me right away.

I wish I had the time and energy for passion projects in programming. I so wish it was so. But commercial work has all but destroyed my passion for programming, though I know it can be rekindled if I can ever afford to take a properly long sabbatical (at least 2 years).

I'll more agree with your parent / sibling comments: take a look at the resume and look for bad signs like too vanilla / AI language, too grandiose claims (though when you are experienced you might come across as such so 50/50), or almost no details, general tone etc.

And the best indicator is a video call conversation, I found as a candidate. I am confident in what I can do (and have done), I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day (provided the onboarding process allows for it) and it shows -- people have told me that and liked it.

If we're talking passion, I am more passionate about taking a walk with my wife and discussing the current book we're reading, or getting to know new people, or going to the sauna, or wondering what's the next meetup we should be going to, stuff like that. But passion + work, I stand apart by being casual and not afraid of any tech problems, and by prioritizing being a good teammate first and foremost (several GitHub-centric items come to mind: meaningful PR comments and no minutiae, good commit messages, proper textual comment updates in the PR when f.ex. requirements change a bit, editing and re-editing a list of tasks in the PR description).

I already do too much programming. Don't hold it against me if I don't live on the computer and thus have no good GitHub open projects. Talk to me. You'll get much better info.

[johnnyanmac]

Iroincally I'd probably have more github projects if I didn't spend 20 months looking for a full-time job.

And tbh, at the senior level they rarely care about personal projects. I must have had 60+ interviews and I feel a lack of a github cost me maybe 2 positions. When you job is getting a job, you rarely have the time for passion.I'm doing contract work in the meantime; prevents gaps from showing, more appealing than a personal project, and I can talk about that to the extent of my NDA (plenty of tech to talk about without revealing the project)

[pdimitar]

> Iroincally I'd probably have more github projects if I didn't spend 20 months looking for a full-time job.

Same. I could afford not working throughout most of 2023 but I had to deal with ruined health + my leeway didn't last as long as I hoped so I was back on the treadmill just when I was starting to enjoy some freedom and a peace of mind.

> And tbh, at the senior level they rarely care about personal projects. I must have had 60+ interviews and I feel a lack of a github cost me maybe 2 positions.

I have no idea how much it costed me but I was told in no uncertain terms 10+ times that having a GitHub portfolio would have meant no take-home assignment, and skipping parts of the interview I already attended. So it definitely carries weight _and_ can help shorten hiring processes.

So I don't feel it was a deal-breaker for the people who interviewed me either but I think it would have netted me more points, so to speak.

Assuming you are graded and are the same person:

Without portfolio: 7/10

With portfolio: 8/10

...for example.

> I'm doing contract work in the meantime

Same x2, but it's mentally draining. No stability. That removes future bandwidth that would have been used for those passion projects.

TL;DR a lot of things conspire to rob you of your creative potential. :(

[aakresearch]

Brilliantly put! Upvoted and "favorited".

I would also add meticulous attention to documenting requirements and decisions taken along the development process, especially where compromises were made. All the "why's", so to speak.

But yes, commercial development, capital-A "Agile" absolutely kills the drive.

[pdimitar]

Thank you. <3

And yep I didn't want to make my comment too big. I make double sure to document any step-by-step processes on "how to make X or Y work", especially when I stumble upon a confusing bug in a feature branch. I go out of my way to devise a 100% reproducible process and document it.

Those, plus yours, and even others, are what makes a truly good programmer IMO.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>I am energetic and love to go for the throat of the problems on my first day

The long term goal should be that you should NOT be energetic, yet be able to pretend that you are. We'll see where you are at the 33 year mark :)

[satvikpendem]

Also because most people are busy with actual work and don't have the time to have passion projects. Some people do, and that's great, but most people are simply not passionate about labor, regardless of what kind of labor it is.

[nyrikki]

To add to this, lots of senior people in the consultanting world are brought in under escalations. They often have to hide the fact they are an external resource.

Also if you have a novel or disclosure sensitive passion project, GitHub may be avoided even as a very conservative bright line.

As stated above I think it can be good to find common points to enhance the interview process, but make sure to not use it as a filter.

[AlgebraFox]

I really hate those who ask for GitHub profiles. Mine is psuedo anonymous and I don't want to share it with my employer or anyone I don't want to. Besides privacy, I do not understand why a company would even expect the candidate to have free contribution in the first place. Can't the candidate have other hobbies to enjoy or learn?

[yosito]

> If their resume seems too AI-generated, I feel less like I can trust that candidate and typically reject the candidate

So you just subjectively say "this resume is too perfect, it must be bullshit"? How the fuck is any actual, qualified engineer supposed to get through your gauntlet of subjectivity?

[colonial]

You'd be surprised at how good you can get at sniffing out slop, especially when it's the type prompted by fools who think it'll get them an easy win. Often the actual content doesn't even factor in - what triggers my mental heuristics is usually meta stuff like tone and structure.

I'm sure some small % of people get away with it by using LLaMA-FooQux-2552-Finetune-v3-Final-v1.5.6 or whatever, but realistically, the majority is going to be obvious to anyone that's been force-fed slop as part of their job.

[alok-g]

The strong language used aside, indeed, we should be cautious of our own potential biases when screening or otherwise.

I am imagining an AI saying my CV is AI-generated, when in reality, I do not even use Auto-correct or Auto-suggest when I (type)write! :-)

[RajT88]

> AI-proof interviewing is easy if you know what you're talking about. Look at the candidates resume and ask them to describe some of their past projects. If they can have a meaningful conversation without delays, you can probably trust their resume. It's easy to spot BS whether AI is behind it or not.

Generally, this is how to figure out if a candidate is full of crap or not. When they say they did a thing, ask them questions about that thing.

If they can describe their process, the challenges, how they solved the challenges, and all of it passes the sniff test: If they are bullshitting, they did crazy research and that's worth something too.

[satvikpendem]

There are much more sophisticated methods than that now with AI, like speech to text to LLM. It's getting increasingly harder to detect interviewees cheating.

[yowlingcat]

I think GP's point is that this says as much about the interview design and interviewer skill as it does about the candidate's tools.

If you do a rote interview that's easy to game with AI, it will certainly be harder to detect them cheating.

If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.

[satvikpendem]

> If you have an effective and well designed open ended interview that's more collaborative, you get a lot more signal to filter the wheat from the chaff.

I understood their point but my point is a direct opposition to theirs, that at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible. You can make it as open ended as you want but if AI continues to improve, the human interviewee can simply act as a ventriloquist dummy for the AI and get the job. Stated another way, what kind of "effective and well designed open ended interview" can you make that would not succumb to this problem?

[gopher_space]

> at some point with AI advances this will essentially become impossible.

In-person interviews, second round comes with a plane ticket. This used to be the norm.

[satvikpendem]

Yes, that's eventually what will happen, but it becomes quite expensive, especially for smaller companies, and well, they might not even have an office to conduct the interview in if they're a remote company. It's simply best to hire slow and fire fast, you save more money that way over bringing in every viable candidate to an in-person interview.

[gopher_space]

If you're a small company you can't afford to fire people. The cost in lost productivity is immense, so termination is a last resort.

Likewise with hiring; at a small company you're looking to fill an immediate need and are losing money every day the role isn't filled. You wouldn't bring in every viable candidate, you'd bring in the first viable candidate.

FAANG hiring practices assume a budget far past any exit point in your mind.

[yowlingcat]

My POV comes from someone who's indexed on what works for gauging technical signal at startups, so take it for what it's worth. But a lot of what I gauge for is a blend of not just technical capability, but the ability to translate that into prudent decisions with product instincts around business outcomes. AI is getting better at solving technical problems it's seen before in a black box, but it struggles to tailor that to any kind of context you give it to pre-existing constraints around user behavior, existing infrastructure/architecture, business domain and resource constraints.

To be fair, many humans do too, but many promising candidates even at the mid-level band of experience who thrive at organizations I've approved them into are able to eventually get to a good enough balance of many tradeoffs (technical and otherwise) with a pretty clean and compact amount of back and forth that demonstrates thoughtfulness, curiosity and efficacy.

If someone can get to that level of capability in a technical interviewing process using AI without it being noticeable, I'd be really excited about the world. I'm not holding my breath for that, though (and having done LOTS of interviews over the past few quarters, it would be a great problem to have).

My solution, if I were to have the luxury of having that problem, would be a pretty blunt instrument -- I'd instead change my process to actually have AI use of tools be part of the interviewing process -- I'd give them a problem to solve, a tuned in-house AI to use in solving the problem, and have their ability to prompt it well, integrate its results, and pressure check its assumptions (and correct its mistakes or artifacts) be part of the interview itself. I'd press to see how creatively they used the tool -- did they figure out a clever way to use it for leverage that I wouldn't have considered before? Extra points for that. Can they use it fluidly and in the heat of a back and forth of an architectural or prototyping session as an extension of how they problem solve? That will likely become a material precondition of being a senior engineer in the future.

I think we're still a few quarters (to a few years) away from that, but it will be an exciting place to get to. But ultimately, whether they're using a tool or not, it's an augment to how they solve problems and not a replacement. If it ever gets to be the latter, I wouldn't worry too much -- you probably won't need to do much hiring because then you'll truly be able to use agentic AI to pre-empt the need for it! But something tells me that day (which people keep telling me will come) will never actually come, and we will always need good engineers as thought partners, and instead it will just raise the bar and differentiation between truly excellent engineers and middle of the pack ones.

[b112]

This is called fraud, and it is a crime.

People don't really call the police, nor sue over this. But they can, and have in the past.

If it gets bad, look for people starting to seek legal recourse.

People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time.

So you create an interview process that can only be passed by a skilled dev, including them signing a doc saying the code is entirely their work, only referencing a language manual/manpages.

And if they show up to work incapable of doing the same, it's time to call the cops.

That's probably the only way to deal with scam artists and scum, going forward.

[le-mark]

Can you cite case law around where some one misrepresented their capabilities in a job interview and were criminally prosecuted? Like what criminal statute specifically was charged? You won’t find it, because at worst this would fall under a contract dispute and hence civil law. Screeching “fraud is a crime” hysterically serves no one.

[b112]

Fraud can be described as deceit to profit in some way. You may note the rigidity of the process above, where I indicated a defined set of conditions.

It costs employers money to on board someone, not just in pay, but in other employees training that person. Obviously the case must be clear cut, but I've personally hired someone who clearly cheated during the remote phone interview, and literally couldn't even code a function in any language in person.

There are people with absolutely no background as a coder, applying to jobs with 5 years experience, then fraudulently misrepresenting the work of others at their own, to get the job.

That's fraud.

As I said, it's not being prosecuted as such now. But if this keeps up?

You can bet it will be.

Because it is fraud.

[nyarlathotep_]

> People aren't developers with 5 years experience, if all they can do is copy and paste. Anyone fraudulently claiming so is a scam artist, a liar, and deserves jail time.

I won't name names, but there are a lot of Consulting companies that feed off Government contracts that are literally this.

"Experience" means a little or a lot, depending on your background. I've met plenty of people with "years of experience" that are objectively terrible programmers.

[b112]

Yet said poor programmers would never pass the test I specified, without committing fraud. That, and the other conditions I specified, ensure so.

If the AI premise is true, then it's this or good programmers, and good companies will never meet.

[hackable_sand]

You want to coerce work through violence?

[hibikir]

There's candidates running speech-to-text that avoid the noticeable delays, but it's still possible to do the right kind of digging the AI will almost always refuse to do, because it's way too polite.

It's as if we were testing for replicants in Blade Runner: The AI response will rarely figure out you are aiming to look for something frustrating, that they are actually proud of, or figure out when you are looking for a hot take you can then disagree with.