[jamesgasek]

"Preparing with AI" sounds like an issue here, and it's not. The issue is lying about your experiences, which people have done since the beginning of time. I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful. Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

This shouldn't be surreal at all. A candidate just wasn't able to make up relevant experiences on the spot.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.

[_bin_]

My compromise here is invisible words in the PDF. I pack it with every freaking keyword I can think of because I have absolutely no issues with lying to a robot and don't feel the need to a respect a hiring process where they can't be bothered to so much as read my resume. Funny enough I often get offers after that even when I don't have some specific technology.

That said, my personal ethics don't let me lie to an actual person.

[polishdude20]

Do OCR systems still detect invisible words? I would have thought by now they'd use pixel based image recognition.

[filoeleven]

I doubt they're using OCR. More likely they're using one of the many text extractors available for PDFs.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3650957/how-to-extract-t...

[hoerzu]

I think nowadays they directly use screen share and image recognition like https://interview.sh for example

[hansvm]

Interesting, that still works? I first heard about that a decade ago.

[sarlalian]

You can occasionally prompt the AI resume review systems using the white text as well.

[wyclif]

Really depressing to think about, as one who has never tried to game the system.

[jajko]

Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.

This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.

[wqaatwt]

> would flag you internally

And how would they figure that out if you lie by exaggerating your experience and skills and not outright making up entirely false stuff?

[jajko]

Its up to interviewers but discussed matters can be checked quickly (ah you claim 10 years java backend integration experience? Ok lets dig deep. If reality is (almost) 0 thats lying in plain view).

Also not sure you understand english language, greatly exaggerating or making up stuff is still same lying, details are irrelevant.

[wqaatwt]

> is still same

No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.

Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?

What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..

Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.

[SR2Z]

Even reneging on an offer in the US gets you blacklisted for like 5 years max. It's not personal, it's just business.

[wyclif]

What do you mean by "reneging on an offer"? Do you mean simply turning down an offer? How is that a blacklistable offence?

[nerdile]

Reneging on an offer means revoking it after it has been accepted, and that's poor form.

Turning down an offer puts you into a small category of "people we would hire if we had the chance" and the recruiters or hiring managers will follow up with you for some set period of time just in case something changes on your side. They already have decided you would be a good fit, after all.

[wyclif]

But here's what I don't understand about this: wouldn't that be the company revoking the offer, not the employee? If the company revokes the offer or has "exploding offers" or whatever, that's a corporate thing, not an employee issue.

[remram]

It's seen as wasting their time.

[gspencley]

> Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt.

Really? That's the bigger issue?

Company wants to pay money to someone in exchange for services. They have unreasonable expectations. So that makes it OK for people to deceive them in order to have them believe that their unreasonable expectations have been met?

I don't think that unreasonable expectations should be rewarded. But an unreasonable expectation is just "being stupid and harming yourself."

Deceiving others in order to take their money under false pretences (which is fraud) is immoral and harms others.

The two are not remotely comparable.

> This promotes lying

No it doesn't. If someone feels "encouraged" to lie and defraud others because they want something from them (even if the "someone else" is objectively stupid), that is no one's fault but their own. And their wishes and desires are just as unreasonable as the company's. [The wish/desire on the part of the applicant is wishing that the company had reasonable expectations]

[miki123211]

The problem is that if everybody lies and you're the one not lying, you're worse off. In that scenario, the choice is between lying and being on even footing with everybody else, versus staying honest and getting an unfair disadvantage for it.

If enough participants lie, some of the honest participants get pushed out of the system, which makes lying more socially acceptable, which causes even more participants to lie... and so the feedback loop goes.

[ralferoo]

Not everyone lies. To say everyone does is just lying to yourself in an attempt at rationalisation.

Tell the truth. If you perform poorly in an interview, you now know where your weaknesses are. Work on them. Do a hobby project that lets you gain experience in that area. Use that as an example in your interview. Not only can you be truthful, you'll be more confident as you'll actually understand what you're talking about and can turn it into a positive - "I was weak in this area, so I went off an studied it myself" reveals more about your character than just the specific thing you learned.

[rcxdude]

Half the issue is companies where you won't even get to an interview without a juiced-up CV, and the rest is a interviewing and hiring decision process that doesn't penalize liars. If people felt your advice was the best way to get ahead, then they'd follow it, but when they see people who are just good bullshitters rocket past them in the system, they're not gonna feel good about it.

(How accurate this perception is is an important point: I'm inclined to believe that this nihilistic "everything is bullshit" philosophy is incorrect and self-defeating, but it's hard to deny many high-profile examples that show that bullshitting can be stunningly successful, while honesty and hard work can fail horribly)

[ralferoo]

This still doesn't justify lying to a potential employer. If your CV won't get you to an interview, then you don't have the skills they are looking for.

Aside from lying, you have other choices - spend some time working on personal projects to get the skills you need, obtain a recognised qualification in the skills you need, or try to find some way to obtain those skills in your current job. All of those will increase your real value to the potential employers, and gain you the opportunity to get the interview you want.

If a company catches you lying in an interview, they're absolutely right to blacklist you forever. How do you expect them to ever trust you to be telling the truth in the future if your very first contact with them is built on a lie?

[dennis_jeeves2]

So what would be your advise to a fresh graduate (or even an experienced person) whose resume says experience in ".NET 3.0" where as the job posting says experience needed in ".NET 3.1" ? Remember it's HR or some automated system that does the screening.

[wqaatwt]

Well if the idea is that the lying (to a sane degree) is only necessary to pass the “filter” and that it has limited impact on the candidate’s ability to perform the actual work its not necessarily that straightforward.

[mystified5016]

I mean, we have companies out there posting "entry level" positions and demanding 10 years experience in a technology that's only existed for five.

All bets are off, man.

[never_inline]

In India I know people using AI to craft resumes with half-lies and full-lies. They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

Indian SDE market is an extreme case of Goodheart's law, but that's a topic for another day!

[FirmwareBurner]

> They say they "use AI to match the keywords in job description".

If recruiters only pick up your resumes based on keyword matching themselves, what is one to do, if not adapt their resumes to said keywords so they can at least try to get to a human interview?

Not talking about India specifically, but in general. Hiring is broken, so everyone tries to fix it in their own ways to maximize their chances.

[never_inline]

AI will often casually lie / make up points which sound authentic.

[abirch]

AI is the GOAT of Buzzword generation or should I/Gemini say

"Synergistic AI-powered paradigm shift: the ultimate game-changer for disruptive innovation in buzzword generation."

[zellyn]

It's also the perfect excuse if you get caught lying. “Oh shit, I ran it through ChatGPT one last time after proof-reading, and forgot to review the output carefully. Sorry!”

[collingreen]

Lying, excused with more lying! What could go wrong?

[ohthatsnotright]

Probably get promoted to C-suite.

[rafaelmn]

> what is one to do

Find roles where your skills match the required skills ?

[FirmwareBurner]

What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then? Should I be unemployed?

If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work. If not, this is the same as lying anywhere else. What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified? Should I be unemployed? Of course I should, as far as brain surgery goes, but there are other jobs out there I can do while I train.

> We're still taking about SW engineering here, not medicine or rocket science.

SW engineering is a critical component of both medicine and rocket science, and doing it wrong can kill people. Beyond that, you'd be harming others by taking the job from someone who put in the work to actually be qualified, and harming your future coworkers by deceiving them.

So the real answer to your question depends on how much you value other people and your principles, compared to valuing yourself and getting what you want. If you don't want to wrestle with that, just add some personal projects to your personal studying.

[FirmwareBurner]

>If you studied and worked with the tech in your free time, you can say so, and show your work.

Recruiters or HR who check your resume never cared about what you do in your free time as counting as professional experience, they only do keyword matching on languages or stacks with "year of on the job experience". So white lies are the only way to pass through that initial filter and get to a technical person who will judge your knowledge less superficially.

>What if I want to perform brain surgery, but I'm not qualified?

Please stop arguing in bad faith. Switching to a different tech stack is not the same as switching to doing brain surgery. No offence, but your attitude, bad faith and lack of empathy seems to comes form a position of privilege who never had to endure poverty and unemployment.

So please stop over-dramatizing the hurting people part. As long as you can deliver at work what you said you can in the interview and both parties are happy and getting their expected value out of it, who cares what experience in your resume was a lie and what not?

[before_the_law]

> What then? Should I be unemployed?

Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market. All that money devs were getting this last decade has the dual side that tech is an aggressively capitalist industry. Competition is getting much more heated and, having been brought up in the dotcom bust, no not everyone who "wants" to be a software engineers gets to be one. I saw many, many people leave tech for lesser paying but at least hiring careers back in the early 2000s.

I feel that a lot of people that got into tech during this decade long boom period have never really experienced competition. In the last few years companies were often adding positions faster then they could fill them. If you passed the test, you got the job.

When I was getting started, virtually all hiring involved first building a pool of applicants, which could easily take weeks or months if the hiring team/manager wasn't happy with the quality of the pool. Then you had to interview with 5-10 other candidates that the team felt where at a similar strength to you. So even if you did your best, all it took was one other candidate that was better or even simply got a long better with the team to mean you didn't get the job.

You also had to wear a suit to an interview, even if it was for a role making a bit more than minimum wage.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Clearly philosophically I would love a world where everyone was taken care of, but this is a job market.

In my comment, did you see me complain about the jobs market? Or about the broken hiring process?

[WalterBright]

> What if there are no open positions on my experience and I have to pivot to another completely different tech stack that I studied in my spare time? What then?

I had some trouble finding a sw position after leaving mechanical engineering, but I went to the interview prepared to show I could do it, and it worked.

[FirmwareBurner]

But you still had to get an interview first, which is often the most difficult part. Not everyone is so lucky to get such a chance. What then? Go homeless or lie till you get an interview?

The funny thing is I'm not even a mechanical engineer, but a a CS engineer, just mostly experienced in a stack that's not used much anymore but it's not like I can't learn another stack, I just refuse to put up with discriminatory hiring practices that treat you as a checkbox list, and so I have to work around the employers'/recruiters' bullshit hiring practices.

[rafaelmn]

What do you think happens when you lie through the interview ? I recently had this in my team - we were hiring fast and hired someone we shouldn't have - fired after two weeks. So your best case is receiving 6 weeks income after getting lucky and scamming someone through an interview ?

[FirmwareBurner]

I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.

Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.

[skydhash]

And there's the reputation loss if someone decided to do due diligence.

[never_inline]

These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.

[gosub100]

There are many recruiters out there that will flat out reject someone if they aren't a perfect match for every single skill listed. I don't have a problem with lying to get past that gauntlet.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Just don't be surprised when you're passed over because someone else lied harder, and be aware that, like them, you're harming honest applicants by lying. After all, it's the same game.

That said, it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead. A few thousand years doesn't cover a lot of evolution away from "fark you, I got mine".

[gosub100]

> it's not surprising that humans are still okay with harming others to personally get ahead.

Recruiters are harming me by taking a cut of my salary and offering nothing of value other than screening some calls and adding my resume to a spam listing and robodialer. Do you think I care about harming them

[wqaatwt]

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but of if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

[motorest]

> And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those?

Perhaps the first step anyone should take is to arrive at the realization that the point of a hiring process from the perspective of a hiring manager is not to find the absolute best candidate. The goal is to pick anyone, anyone at all, from a pool of acceptable candidates. If they are able to get through the door and not shit the bed, they are a superb hire.

[wqaatwt]

And what happens when another candidate has the same skills and a bunch of other skills on top of those? Well maybe they don’t.. but if they manage to take your interview spot it hardly matters.

[WalterBright]

Recruiters have gone beyond keyword matching, they're now using AI to judge the resume.

> Hiring is broken

How would you, as an employer, filter out the frauds?

[flaburgan]

Personally, I think free software are really important, and I love the developers that I am hiring to be in this mindset as well. So the first think I am doing is to check their gitlab / github profiles. If they love to write code and to share it, there obviously will be code there to check. Of course this code could be written with help of an AI but, nothing is preventing the developer to use it while working as well. As long as the result if good, everything is fine.

[FirmwareBurner]

I don't know. Depends on a case by case basis. Maybe someone has solid credentials, maybe someone has some FOSS contributions.

[zemo]

> The issue is lying about your experiences

I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.

[mytailorisrich]

That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.

[devmor]

How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time?

Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?

[WalterBright]

> if you want to prepare for a C dev interview

Spend an hour reading a book about C?

I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for time spent you'll ever get.

He did, and got a $300,000 offer.

[skydhash]

Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.

[autoexec]

I'm not sure that it's a good thing if "ability to produce convincing lies" is something that a company requires in a job candidate. People getting into jobs who aren't exceptional liars when they couldn't have otherwise seems like win to me.

[exabrial]

>I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems, which is very helpful.

It would be better if we just stopped asking l33tc0d3 questions, since it's been shown over and over again it's a pointless waste of time on both side of the aisle.

[rblatz]

I don’t employ leet code questions in my hiring process, but I do think they can provide value or signal.

If a candidate is taking the time to practice and master leetcode it does show the candidate is motivated, demonstrates their ability to learn and internalize knowledge, and to utilize that knowledge under pressure.

If those are things you want to screen for and have a high volume of talented candidates I can see a use for them.

[exabrial]

I mean, as an alternative to 133tcode, perhaps they could maybe demonstrate real world applicable skills:

* ability to communicate

* ability to empathize

* ability to be a nice person you’d want to see every day

[user5534762135]

And yet, ability to code — or actually ability to learn to think algorithmically — is elementary for IT positions, and on average an uncommon enough that it's very much worth it for companies to test for it. You're not trying to suggest just employing any competent middle manager or marketing person to code, after all.

[before_the_law]

> I "prepare with AI" by having it help give me hints when doing leetcode problems

I've been really impressed with how much a of performance lift working on leetcode with AI is. It's so much easier to focus on developing rapid problem decomposition skills and working with an interviewer during the problem.

Unfortunately it's also necessary to improve this process because the current standards for the companies still doing leetcode interviews are getting pretty wild these days. Meta requires 2 med-hard question solved in 20 minutes or less each for the screen these days! Even if you have solid algorithmic thinking solving and implementing solutions that quickly requires you to be insanely prepped.

[giancarlostoro]

English is not my first language, and yet I'm fluent, but some of the questions I've been asked to solve are insanely confusingly worded and so I have a harder time because the interview process at some places is unrealistic.

[ender341341]

Many interview coding questions are purposefully worded weird with the intent of seeing if you ask clarifying questions.

[giancarlostoro]

I had no ability to do so, it was on some leetcode esque site.

[throwaway31131]

The interviewer might be looking to see how you deal with bad specifications which, in my experience, are also often confusingly worded, vague and/or conflicting.

[sidrag22]

this candidates version of preparing with AI was a portion of the issue for sure though. he utilized it to attempt to optimize his dishonesty about his past experiences.

i totally agree otherwise, there are a ton of other good proper ways to prepare for an interview using AI. for example his resume, im sure he asked for some refinements about how he was wording certain things, and who cares at all that its not word for word grammatically from his mind. getting past the resume screening process is a huge part of the battle, and all the scam attempts and bad candidates will be optimizing their resume as well. The info within it should still be relevant about your ACTUAL technical skills or you are just also falling into the scam/bad candidates category.

Of course your example is a solid one, which ive done myself as well for leetcode stuff and plenty of other stuff.

IF his experiences where actually real and he used AI to simulate an interview based on them, thats a fine use case for AI, so i guess this article likely should have used a more clear way to condone this candidates preparation.

[apwell23]

> Interviewing is not a presentation, it's a conversation, and having a simulated other side can be helpful.

i got a high paying job at meta once i started see it as 'presentation' and not a 'conversation' .

I play this stupid ass game to make money