| HN Mirror

We've recently come under new management, and the interview process for ICs has changed about a week ago and is similarly absurd to me.

For the frontend role, we have candidates awkwardly read through an AI-generated document that is split up extremely awkwardly and in general has that AI tone to it which makes it hard to read through because it's extremely generic, non-specific and devoid of any useful details or indeed thought put into it. The new head of engineering also wants to be a part of every single one of these, and also wants FOUR OTHER PEOPLE in the interview alongside him. Did I mention already that they have to read through a 6-page document that they have never seen or been informed about live in front of 5 people, including their future manager?

In the interview itself, the head of engineering then asks the candidates to use Cursor (and yes, specifically cursor and only cursor, the guy is fucking obsessed with cursor to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if he's somehow getting paid to shove it everywhere) as much as they possibly can. He refuses to answer their questions should they have any, and tells them to direct all questions to Cursor instead.

There was one person who realized very early on that what we're basically asking for is about as simple of a thing as you can possibly imagine, basically a textarea, a button and a list that is dynamically generated (just phrased in the most obtuse possible way, for some reason). He completed this task manually with no Cursor in maybe 5 minutes, 15 if you count the 10 minutes to read through the monstrosity of an AI-generated task. He got points docked by our head of engineering for "Not using AI properly and inefficiently spending time manually coding" which is hilarious because literally nobody who relied on Cursor during the interview got even close to where this guy got.

It has so far been a very predictable disaster, with some extremely talented and promising people sending us emails afterwards to the effect of "This has been the worst interview experience of my life, and I don't care how I did, I'm withdrawing my candidacy. As an official GDPR request, please delete everything and anything you might have on me". Head of engineering is steadfast though, and has called pretty much everyone we've interviewed so far "A bad apple, not a great culture fit because of lack of enthusiasm for AI tooling".

There is absolutely no logic to anything currently happening. It is simply one of the most massive hype bubbles in human history, and VCs, C-levels, middle and upper management are DESPERATE for the marketing hype to be seen as the reality and for the untold billions poured into these systems to be the successes they were initially sold as. There's no humility here, there's no thought being put into any of it, it's extremely cult-like and people are just trying any random idiotic idea that crosses their mind because they have a sycophantic black box that will shower them in infinite praise for every idea they lazily shit out onto the text input area of their favorite LLM tool. They are DESPERATE to fire the expensive, cocky engineers who think they're irreplaceable, and god damn it if they won't burn the entire world down for the chance to be proven right.