[ActorNightly]

Yes and no.

I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.

For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.

[dabockster]

> Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.

I see this a lot in the private sector too here in Seattle. It's hurting us badly.

[ActorNightly]

Im all for it. Software job markets are inflated. Id be 100% willing to take a lower salary if that meant a reduction of all salaries across the board. Younger people need to be going into things like EE or MechE instead of CS in hopes of getting a six figure job out of college, living in downtown highrises, while working on something that is essentially funded by ads.

[baobun]

> Im all for it

All for what? Lack of initiative and independent thinking? Did you intend this to be a reply to a different comment?

[redbluered]

> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).

Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?

[volkl48]

I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.

Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.

[r_lee]

I've heard of a case like that where they started fights in the workplace over their views and trying to sabotage others...

[Larrikin]

You're assuming everyone is one side or the other and there aren't people who think both sides are awful and they love making their problems with each other the world's problems.

[ActorNightly]

I think it would be best to work with people that I could trust to be civil and not to scream at or enact physical violence on another person, while wearing the hoodie with my companies name on it.

Or at the least, I don't want to have to wonder if I hire a Jewish coworker if there are gonna be any issues.

[mixmastamyk]

If you're asking candidates to write threaded code in an interview, you are doing it wrong.

[ActorNightly]

Lol?

Even before LLMs, most coding problems really are a test of efficient pointer manipulation. You either move a pointer to character in words, pointer to data in array, or traverse n-node linked lists.

This level of pointer manipulation is rarely ever needed these days, as things like sorting, searching, and parsing are all handled by functions. An LRU cache is literally a function decorator in Python.

What I care more is if someone can understand that network calls take time, that data processing is fast, and how to optimize that pipeline. Threading is not a requirement, they can do it with async as well, or even without async with just smart scheduling.

The core of the problem that makes it LLM proof is that the problem doesn't disclose anything about network latencies or data structure. So standard iterative solutions from LLM usually end up taking longer because they get stuck waiting on a single network response. And so you can clearly tell who understand the core operations at hand, versus someone who just memorized a bunch of patterns and/or using LLMs.