[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.

[satvikpendem]

Indeed, so what's the solution? How can a startup afford to hire anyone these days with essentially AI + employee fraud?

[gopher_space]

They'd check their network for a seed engineer who can recognize talented people by talking to them.

To put the whole concern in a nutshell: If AI was good enough to fool a seasoned engineer in an interview, that engineer would already be using the AI themselves for work and not need to hire an actual body.

[satvikpendem]

Not exactly because AI can excel at rote Leetcode problems by being dismal at actual work. This is in fact exactly the state of today's LLMs.