I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution.
Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times - the simple ones that candidates can do in reasonable time is too easy for AI, and if we do realistic system, it's too hard for honest candidates.
> Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times
Take-home projects were never meant to be evaluated in isolation.
It was common for candidates to have their friends review the take-home or even do it for them.
You had to structure the take-home so the candidate could then explain their choices to you and walk you through their thought process. When you got a candidate who couldn't answer questions about their own submission, you thanked them for their time and sent the rejection later that evening.
The difference is that AI can now feed them explanations as well. Their friends (who IME were usually also mediocre coders: everyone I've seen who actually did well on a take-home actually was that good) didn't have the patience to sit around and help them memorize a bunch of extra nonsense.
At some point it feels like it would be easier to just get good at programming, and yet...
IMO take home projects still have value, provided you do a comprehensive follow-up interview with their project (which is the _actual_ interview, I feel). Those who just used AI on it are far less likely to talk about any tradeoffs, do deep dives, or even simple extensions of the project in the follow-up interview.
I think take home still has value, if it's of any size and they just vibe code it'll be full of long messy methods, unused variables, and lack of any thoughtful design.
They are, if anything, a more-accurate example now of the kind of code a candidate is going to produce on the job.
If we expect people to use AI, and it is available in most companies now, then being able to appropriately refactor, test, and sense-make of AI-generated code is even more important. The key is raising the bar on quality beyond mediocre, and not relying on those take homes to test skills they are no longer testing.
I've had situations where I submitted a take-home exercise, only for me to get feedback that it didn't match their required level.
After some back & forth I was able to (politely) prove their feedback was not correct, which actually granted me a follow-up interview.
Unfortunately, this was a unicorn, most companies don't give feedback, let alone admit they were wrong.
But, take-home is preferred, I want to use my IDE, with my keyboard shortcuts etc.
Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.
Next to that they don't allow you to work in an environment you're comfortable in. No debugger, etc. When an HVAC company hires a new tech, do they tell him/her to do a 1.5 hour repair with only a hammer and a lighter to diagnose and fix an issue? No, it's stupid. Why do developers have to do this then?
And the same applies to live coding exercises. While there is an opportunity to explain yourself, you're still in an extremely uncomfortable environment. Why is there such an emphasis to put people in an environment where they are not set up to succeed?
HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.
I think in part, the difference in what I mean about certification (perhaps licensure is better word here) is an industry body - accepted and respected generally by the businesses within our industry - that will demonstrate some form of competence
If we can divide the industry into many small subindustries, each with their own licensing, maybe. If we want to treat it as the one big industry like we do right now, no chance. We won't even be able to find agreement on surface level things, never mind the nitty gritty.
I would love to see a trade union-style group, where you are sponsored to join by an existing member and expected to do some work along side existing members before being certified as journey-level and recommended to employers.
It would require that group to agree on what being a "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one and if you don't agree with this one you could form your own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write testable code and be able to label design patterns, and another expects pure functional programming, and another expects deep security expertise, and companies could know which of those they are looking for and inquire appropriately.
We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you can be sure that if someone spent five years there they know their stuff. But we could have a version where workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than relying on a specific for-profit company.
It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the least-competent person who holds it. But the informal versions of this are pretty powerful.
I'd rather it be like passing the bar, accounting exams (CPA etc) or actuarial exams. They test very relevant deep knowledge and act as a proof of fundamentals - and software engineer does have technical fundamentals that could just as well be tested for in a meaningful way.
In regular systems administration, having certs kinda suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job without a cert. Even people who had them would only include them on the resume when they were explicitly called for in a job description.
With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS cert is just testing if you know the six different names Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually understand LDAP or DNS.
If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe certs will finally become useful for developers too.
We have some certs. The problem is that software development is about thirty different skills in a trench coat, and half of them we don't know how to evaluate (like slicing, or abstraction.)
What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia.
It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.
People do take university courses in doing creative stuff, a fair number of sucessful novelists seem to have done one, RPG proposed that we could have something similar for software [1].
It would be nice if there was at least a bare bones certificate that guaranteed the candidate knows at least some absolutely minimal baseline, like what a for loop and if statement is. You’d still have to interview the candidate but you wouldn’t have to start at Hello World or FizzBuzz.
I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.
> We should strongly consider this in our industry.
These were very hot for system admins in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Is it still a thing today? Do high quality employers still care about these certs in 2025? I doubt it.
> Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.
This does not mirror my experience. Many times that I have interviewed with hackerrank/leetcode questions, I wasn't able to get all of the test cases to pass. After time was up, I explained my solution to the interviewer and talked about the failing test cases. Sometimes I passed the interview; and other times not. It was not binary: Imperfect means 100% fail.
I would never spend time doing a take home test. The best paying companies never require it, so why would I jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation on the other side?
If they do it properly and walk through it with you afterwards, it can be a good opportunity for you to assess cultural fit as well based on the conversation that you have; are they hypercritical of unimportant details? Do they acknowledge good design and decisions? Do they offer their own insights, and if so, what do you think of those insights?
Also, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position of looking to find a job without already having one; many people find that a compelling reason to "jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation"
The best-paying companies jerk you around for months with hours and hours of in-person quizzes and expect you to memorize a bunch of trivia you will never use day-to-day so they can use their MIT intern interviews for everyone.
Take-homes are a much more reasonable expectation than memorizing how to implement quick-sort on a white board.
Given a choice between studying for admittedly meaningless leetCode style interviews and making $250k+ as a mid level developer at a BigTech or adjacent company and working really hard and slowly doing the corp dev grind for years to become a senior doing enterprise dev making $160K, why wouldn’t anyone who is young and unencumbered with kids not try to do the former instead of dismissing those types of interviews?
The $160K-$180k is about the median for a senior dev in most non tech companies in most cities not on the west coast. You can verify this on salary.com.
Yes I know most of the 2.8 million devs in the US are on the enterprise dev side and that’s where you will end up. But why not shoot for the moon?
For context, I am 50. Spent all of my career until 2020 on the “enterprise dev” side of compensation until a pivot and a position at BigTech in the consulting division fell into my lap (full time direct hire with cash + RSUs like any other employee).
But I tell every new grad to do whatever it takes to get on to the public tech company gravy train if possible.
That being said, at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech again. I’m good with where I am working for a smaller company.
I think the better/mature response to this cultural change is to design takehomes anticipating the use of AI and then seeing where the canddiate got lost in the weeds or gets lost when cross questoined about it
Don't see the point of these "take home projects". Just ask them what's the most difficult technical thing they had to do before, and have them walk you through it, probe, ask questions. If you don't like the one they talked about, ask about another one, or another one. You can generally weed out the bullshitters, they talk alot about "we" and hardly ever use "I" meaning they didn't do anything.
Well I find conversations with people in interviews to be less of a game than giving them “homework” to do, given that unless they’re totally green with no work experience, I’d assume they would actually have some stuff they’ve worked on and would like to talk about.
It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.
It's a constant tug of war between standards and expectations.
I personally prefer hypotheticals, or some variant on live pair programming. Also, as someone with enough free time to do take-homes, I also prefer code reviews over that one-off code which then becomes a case of 100% "I did this and here's why".
Even with that last example I would say, "well to optimize, etc., we could do this".
I've seen it more with candidates in Asia. And they claim to be based in the US :) A few even used digital face transplants, stuck in the uncanny valley, to hide it. I imagine it will be hard to tell in a few years.
It says "Prepared with AI" in the title, but the article is about someone who blatantly lied about their past experience in the interview.
The AI was used as a tool to generate false stories, but that's not what I assumed when I read the title. It's common for people to "prepare" with LLMs by having them review resumes and suggest changes, but asking an LLM to wholesale fabricate things for you is something else entirely.
I do think this experience will become more common, though. There's an attitude out there that cheating on interviews is fair or warranted as retaliation for companies being bad at interviewing. In my experience, the people who embrace cheating (with or without LLMs) either end up flaming out of interview processes or get disappointed when they land a job and realize the company that couldn't catch their lies was also not great at running a business.
I had interpreted it as some of the answers being given during the interview had been generated by an LLM, which then choked when it was met with a more sophisticated query of how several of the answers connected together. Was this not the case?
I don't know how this is something related to AI - you could polish and embellish your resume before LLMs too, I'm fairly sure. I guess this gets the clicks.
Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on to another topic.
Agreed, the “I used AI” part is just the 2025 version of “I did my research on your company and then lied about my experience to make me sound like a better fit”.
The twist on “I used AI” to this though is that everyone comes out looking the same. They all have the same resume format, made by the same tool, stuffed with the same keywords.
Fair for the ones who don’t put in any effort, but I don’t buy this generalization for the folks who are real people in the middle between “completely unqualified” and “telling the truth about their experience”.
Any effective screening strategy is going to catch the liars who do it only a little with some probability.
Not least because being willing to be dishonest during an interview is a strong signal the candidate will be dishonest while they are employed as well, and companies want very much to not hire those people.
My memory had held back my career I am sure. I can't regurgitate the minute details of impact I did even 12 months ago, just broad strokes... so I prep as best I can but it probably sounds like I am lying. Now with AI and everyone is suspicious it is worse. Got downleveled to 4yoe level yoe from where I am 20yoe but I needed a job so.
It’s called a career document or a brag document. I update mine every quarter. It’s a detailed summary of the projects I worked on in STAR format including challenges I faced.
I have what probably qualifies as the relatively-recently-named "severely deficient autobiographical memory".
Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.
Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)
I think in this case the candidate didn’t even know enough to embellish the resume unassisted. Their nonsense response on rate limiting showed that they had no idea why you would rate limit or under what circumstances. Ditto for paginating data.
AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.
I recently interviewed an engineer who was somehow using ChatGPT realtime on another laptop beside him. The irony was that the questions were pretty simple overall and our rubric also wasn't very strict, so he likely would have passed if he just used his memory and common sense. Though the answers weren't wrong overall, I still felt cheated because of the deception and had to reject him later.
I rejected an applicant earlier this year who was obviously reading off another screen for every answer (as in, blatant pauses while I could literally see their eyes moving back and forth). I don't understand if they thought I wouldn't notice or what.
This situation terrifies me as an autistic person. I can’t fathom maintaining eye contact while taking the time to think about a response to an interview question, even over a video call.
I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.
Look at the camera, not at the other person’s eyes on your screen. You are not maintaining “eye contact” but the other person will think you are. Genius!
It’s actually fun how in video calls everybody thinks they’re doing eye contact by looking at other people’s faces on screen which in reality makes them look down and not straight at the camera.
Fellow autist here, I don't think you have anything to worry about, the eye movements of someone reading are very different to autistic scanning while thinking. Reading has a rhythmic left right pattern to the eye twitches while scanning (at least for me) tends to either be fixed in place or rolling in a way that is basically impossible to confuse with reading.
Closing your eyes is always an option, if you're trying to think deeply and without distraction. It helps a lot to explain your stream of consciousness as you think, even if it's disorganized, and you're definitely not cheating if your eyes are closed!
That sounds worth trying. And it would definitely be something to practice in advance...
When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet, or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about the immediate problem and related things.
(In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about the job opportunity that's the real point of the exercise.)
I don't understand how that works, but it usually works very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.
If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.
Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview, trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences, disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant, redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but energized and commanding manner. You might get permabanned from that company, for coming across like an aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky interview process. :)
I'm not looking for eye contact, and if that person had been just the same but with their eyes closed I would have thought much better of them. I would have still rejected them anyway, because the whole performance wasn't great, but it obviously wouldn't be any ChatGPT thing.
But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and repeating the same thing for literally every question, even the ones that were intentional freebies based on their resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.
To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up what to say.
If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y and I'm trying to think if I could work around that... okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming from.
I'd be very curious to see exactly what 'fixing' the eye movement actually looks like. Like are they always staring directly into the camera? Or are they sometimes randomly looking around all over the place? Cause that would look totally normal..
I sometimes take notes/talking points about things I want to cover in my interviews and reference those. This could arguably be considered cheating but definitely not as egregious as using ChatGPT but I worry it would almost appear the same to an interviewer (referencing notes vs ChatGPT).
I've had some fun ones, when interviewing folks - back in the days when people where hiring.
* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.
* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.
* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.
* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.
* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.
Potentially important side points, since not everyone knows, and we don't want anyone to learn a mistake by example:
1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.
2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.
If the unredacted parts of the resume were entirely fabricated, what harm is there in having the lies out there? The candidate will be scrubbing from their honest version going forward anyway.
Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.
I'm often surprised when someone will paste a screenshot of a tweet with the name blurred (presumably to protect them from harassment). The contents of the tweet are easily searchable...
Public tweets are a different scenario, they are things that have intentionally been shouted out into the void for anyone to hear. Blurring out names is a courtesy to prevent low-effort harrassment (which is most of it), while using the tweet for its intended purpose (i.e. showing its message to the public).
But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.
This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.
There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.
There’s a few red flags here on the hiring side too.
I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.
Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.
OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.
OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.
(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)
If you’re really good at what you do, there’s no need to embellish. Company is looking for five years of experience in something that’s only been available for four years? Screw ‘em, you don’t want to work at such a stupid place anyway. Good employers know how to find good employees.
When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.
For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:
SELECT id, start_date FROM employees;
(EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER BY id;)
I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.
You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.
Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.
I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.
You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.
I was sharing this story and responding to various comments (here) in my conversations elsewhere on the Internet, and as part of my statements I questioned about quoting/paraphrasing the "word gets around" to determine if this is best way to reference the point, and thought I may as well share it here too. https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_c0378709-b716-48af-8996-a0e4...
On 2, I was surprised the author included the screenshot in their write up so I did some very pointed searches on some of the strings, and was surprised to see just how many profiles on LinkedIn were sourced for this farce. Good work LLMs
> I ended by saying that the software community is smaller than it seems, and integrity and reputation goes a long way.
Well who are they? How would the next member of the community know this is a fake candidate. I like the idea in general of finding a way to eliminate these time-wasters but how would that work? The candidate can adjust a bit and improve the AI "foo" to come up with online answers for them.
edit: I'm talking about egregious cases where the name, location, picture, and work history are false, not the exaggerations you mention. The profiles have few connections since they do get flagged and recreated with a new false identity...
> If you feel that a profile may be fake or that it is inappropriate, you can report it. A profile may be fake if it appears empty or if it contains profanity, fake names, or impersonates public figures
They may use a real name and they may have worked some of those companies just lie about their technical level, experience, what part of the projects they worked on, etc. Those may not be covered by the reporting guidelines.
Oddly one impact on me from reading this is that Kapwing seems like probably a nice place to apply for a job -- simple enough application process, human review, sane and respectful take-home and no live pressure coding. I'm not affiliated in any way nor am I a FT software developer, but this seemed like a pretty sane process (which sadly the article reveals may not be sufficient to properly vet candidates).
I think this was the whole point of the blog post. As someone else mentioned, this didn't have much to do with AI so referencing AI seems purely like an attempt to capture some eyes for publicity.
I'd actually say that _not_ using AI to prepare for an interview is mistake, putting you at a major disadvantage (and there are plenty of honest ways to use it).
As an interviewer, I'm not testing for things AI is likely to help you with. I want to know how you are going to do the job, and experience first-hand how you collaborate in our shared profession.
You can practice with AI if you want, but it is definitely not necessary. I would much rather have someone say "I don't know that one" (and have hired many people who did), rather than have someone provide some content ChatGPT gave them the day before.
You may want to reconsider. They have written an article criticizing the applicant while posting half of the applicant's resume online. The only hope for Kapwing is if this story turns out to be fabricated.
Had an interesting live coding screen where the candidate was coding a solution, dropped from the call and screenshare for 20 minutes, showed back up with a full solution different from what they had before dropping and carried on as if nothing happened.
Has someone who’s interviewed candidates that do this, I like to think it’s fairly obvious when the candidate doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.
I've seen this and it is always super-obvious when they are reading instead of having a conversation. I wish candidates would just stop: some of them we might have otherwise have hired, but instead it becomes a waste of time for us and them.
It doesn't matter because I can always pry past the candidate's work in front of me to see if there is anything behind the facade. Usually there isn't even if their take-home assignment is done perfectly with of LLMs but there is no understanding behind the work being showcased.
Somewhat less but if you are having them do a monorepo with the latest major releases of the frameworks involved, AI will mess it up because there is a 4-6 month knowledge gap
I don’t think take homes should really be about the code, but about the developer being able to reason about why that was the code they wrote.
Asking developers to explain why they wrote that code mitigates against using LLM coding tools - if the candidate can’t back it up then they’ll do poorly in it.
I recently had a candidate submit an otherwise average exercise that was a big mish-mash of coding styles (inconsistently using var/let/const in js, for example). When asked about it, they weren’t able to explain their choice at all and just stumbled through it.
I agree that live coding is very hard on a lot of candidates. How do you feel about asking candidates to read code and explain it? I had that only once and I thought it was genuinely innovative. Even if I couldn't understand all of it, we can discuss various points about it.
Incidentally, I really-really like that they asked questions based on the person's resume.
That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money.
(And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been institutionalized.)
You can ask questions based on a resume without them disclosing IP, nor the appearance of it.
That resume-based questions thwarted a cheater in this case was a bonus.
The CV is a starting point for conversations. On topics other than whether the person happened to memorize whatever Leetcode question was rolled on the dice. And it can more closely approximate actual work.
Regarding cheating, and the widespread organized sharing of "which questions did this company ask, and what are the answers", the conversation isn't so vulnerable to that.
At the company I work for, we are forbidden to ask questions based on resume, as it introduces biases. Reduction of bias means "ask same questions of every candidate".
The problem with modern hiring practices is that they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hiring based on past experience is biased and often can lead to either subpar candidates (lemons) or overpaying. You're either left with the people who didn't succeed at their previous job (but are good talkers) or people who have a brand name college/company but aren't really exceptional. On the other hand, trying to completely ignore past experience means you're left asking questions completely unrelated to real world work.
I had a conversation with someone from a well known startup. He was complaining how in the last year he has noticed the trend of unqualified individuals passing HR screens and some even passed technical interviews (they are uncovered when they can’t even commit code). Their whole background is a lie. They would also send connection requests to people at the companies listed so recruiters don’t question it.
He proudly said they don’t ask questions based on resume, because they don’t care where you worked or where you went to school…as long as you know your stuff. In fact he only looks at the resume after the interview.
I wonder how long they will stick to this stubbornness.
That’s mental. Why have a resume in the first place then? Any info in the resume introduces “bias”. Well, actually, even wanting to hire the best candidate for a job is already a bias of its own.
So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process?
Are you doing technical interviews, or manager-conversation-type interviews? This makes sense for the former (whether someone was a Senior Whatever in Googlebook or wrote CRUD apps for a bank is irrelevant if you're just seeing whether they can find a bug in a library or whatever, but it may influence the interviewer's _perception_ of their performance, thus it is strictly better than the interview doesn't know), but seems quite impractical for the latter.
Anyone that’s been on the market lately know that some companies encourage AI use in various ways
so all I can say is fix your assessments because this whole “they cheated” idea isnt universal, and more likely matches what people do on your job already
but for anyone that didnt read this article yet, this one is just about embellished experience custom tailored to get the interview, and there was no technical assessment
Plenty of candidates are willing to lie and as we see here AI has made lying much cheaper. There is nothing you can put on your resume that AI couldn't have put there for anyone. But AI can't yet fake a network.
Personally, I'll put in second-degree referrals to my company: if someone I have worked with has worked with the person and is willing to personally vouch for them, I'll put their resume in and ping the recruiter (yes, it's gotten so bad even internal referrals don't break through the slush pile without a specific ping.) But I get the recruiter's attention because I only recommend people I have reason to think are actually good.
I have a footnote at the end of my resume about my interests -- it's short, authentic, and more of a way to showcase my personality than my actual interests. It's always been a point of contact during the interview process. If an organization thinks that's stupid or a human isn't reading it in the first place it's not somewhere I want to work anyway.
This and many other cases are literally burning remote interviewing and offshore candidates. Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references. I guess this is your point.
>Soon, you will be able to find anything only thru local on-site interview or strong references.
Anyone paying attention has started planning accordingly for this over the last couple years. The remote work revolution has resolutely failed, and it's clear in retrospect it never had a chance.
This is very much not true: there are extremely-well-compensated roles still available in remote companies.
It does require knowing how to collaborate remotely and being an already-skilled developer, but just because the bar is higher (and many people seem uninterested in meeting it) doesn't mean it has "failed".
I keep coming back to this phrase used in this post: "it was scary".
Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.
The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.
- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.
> Companies just need to fork the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.
There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.
IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.
I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that.
They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.
One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.
You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?
If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw.
The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.
It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.
There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time". The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move onto somewhere less cut-throat.
That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.
Cortisol has never improved a line of code.
Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.
This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear:
1. We fire fast.
2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed.
3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.)
4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.
Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.
If I'm not that interested in a company, I won't waste my time to contact them (or pay attention to their efforts to contact me). Having interest in them does not imply that I have an interest in travel, however. If I had an interest in travel, I'd have become an airline pilot or something like that instead.
But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.
It’s fine to have quirks. And yes that is largely a quirk. And it’s fine for others to decide that’s it’s more trouble than they want to deal with. I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.
What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is not the barrier it was five years ago.
Mostly the latter but still. What some people on this thread don’t get is that unless you’re a known industry luminary, companies are not going to accommodate odd preferences without a legit reason like a physical disability. The resume probably won’t even make it out of HR. One key is both the company and candidate making requirements like travel clear up front. Saves everyone a lot of time.
> The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI
I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.
Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.
There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.
With all the unemployed tech workers, would it just make sense to hire someone who knows their salt to do recruiting and interviews? Recruiters always seem to have a blast moving between random high-level companies and ghosting people over text, socials and the phone. If they lack both the social skills and the technical knowledge, I don't know what their value proposition is, but compared to chronic underemployment after actually learning Java, C, C++, they're clearly winning.
The problem is "knowing their salt to do recruiting" is very hard. In all places I've been, the kinds of interview we are talking about here (technical problems, etc...) are delegated to regular engineers. So those technical interviewers are likely great at reading and writing the code, but they many not be the best at spotting fake AI.
(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)
Interviewing has also become harder too. You try to search the net during the interview, because you forgot the name of a thing, and the interviewer will assume you are running with an AI chat, and are cheating the interview.
Its not about transparency, it about what the interviewer assumes about you, first hand. Just like you assuming that whoever is looking up things must be doing it in secret, with the intention of cheating.
It depends - I'm conducting interviews now and I'm totally ok with people screen sharing and showing me their internet searches and AI prompts as part of the interview. Part of the skills I'm hiring for is "can you find the docs/information you need to solve this", so knowing how to use whatever tools you prefer in order to do that is important.
People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions.
People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that.
People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.
I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.
I interviewed every single candidate for development positions in a 300-400 company for the last three years and I saw some incredibly crazy stuff.
- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.
- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.
- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.
- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
> I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I would tell the interviewee that I want to continue the interview with the other person since their answers indicate they’d be a good fit for the position.
I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way, then ask HR to reject the candidate.
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
Years back, I had someone interviewing in person for a low-level, bit-twiddling, C++ role without knowing what hexadecimal is (no clue how they got that far; the external recruiter was given "feedback"). Pretty much lied about everything, tried to bullshit his way through questions. I have no idea how they thought they'd manage the job.
Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
>There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent
i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think its fair game to use their words to lie.
screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be used to lie.
most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI, just certain uses of it.
Because it's a nonsensical reduction and false equivalence.
It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.
That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.
>It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store.
That's a false equivalence on your part. Real equivalence would be to find out that the store decided to keep zero tills manned and forced you to do the work yourself and go the self checkout. You go do the self checkout and keep a few items extra as a form of payment for the work you did. This would be the real equivalence
My personal theory is less that it's reducing the guilt of lying if the machine fabricates it but rather more that the average person has historically been not so good at fabricating a fib (and they now have instant access to plausible-sounding lies)
I've conducted interviews where the candidate asked if he could use google to try to get an answer. I often say "sure". If a guy can read an explanation out of context, understand it in a way he can explain it using his own words, and reason about corner cases in a couple of minutes, he's hired. The same goes with AI; canned responses work when you ask canned questions, not so much on open-ended ones.
That's missing the point. The goal is to have a level playing field for the interview.
If your interview format allows people to use outside help but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness to ask. In most interview formats it would not be acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.
If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret for people to discover.
The questions dont require google; but what do you do when you don't know a specific thing? You search for it.
The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?
and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.
In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?
And people may lean on their networks more (though they already do).
I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.
If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)
Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.
> But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them
Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.
Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.
Seems pretty alien to my experience. A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway. I’ve certainly always interviewed in person and would probably turn down any company that didn’t offer as an option aside from COVID. But maybe there were a lot of companies that were willing to compromise on face to face so they could get any supposed talent to sign on the dotted line. Of course, they didn’t have much choice for a time even if they subsequently laid people off and/or largely froze hiring.
> A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway.
Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps. Otherwise no – senior talent time is way too valuable to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.
The interview is the time to discuss if there is any benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are past interview territory at that point.
They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview is deemed important.
No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.
You assume we aren't going to end up wearing them daily in order to get promotions. The same elitist power trip that drove RTO is also likely to produce the "dress like us & be rewarded" dynamics that push for conformity.
In more detail, in a glutted market with an unknown percentage of fakers, companies look for costly signals they can use to sort.
This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.
If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.
> The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews.
this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be right, but it's just sad.
personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look for suits like quants at an investment bank.
You are right about hiring not being that much different but your prognostications are way off IMO.
> - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.
> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.
> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.
My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.
No, but ignoring their disabilities and saying to just learn to do better is not good enough. It is no different from telling a deaf person to learn to hear with their other sense, it doesn't make sense as their disability is what prevents it. People do need to be able to interact with other people, it just doesn't work like it does with non-neurodivergent people. It takes an effort on both sides. Quit putting it all on the person who cannot do what you want. That is the bigotry.
Sorry for the offense, it is hard coming up with analogies that don't offend someone. Should probably just have left it out.
But neurodivergense is not just a lack of social skills. Painting it this way is one of the reasons people don't understand it and act with bias against those suffering from it. It is a disability and is recognized by the ADA.
I think the tension comes from the fact that the term "neurodivergent" doesn't have a specific clinical definition, it's a catch all term that is often used in a colloquial manner that lacks a meaningful diagnosis behind it.
Typically, in a context where practical accomodations are being discussed one would want to address specific needs. A person with dyslexia isn't going to need the same accomodations as someone with ADHD, for example
Accommodations usually (but not always) require diagnosis or confirmation by a doctor or other medical professional, and the law affords companies this discretion before granting one, whereas nonspecific 'neurodivergence' is often self-diagnosed.
All this aside, if you have e.g. crippling anxiety such that you can't make it through an interview unaided, you probably won't be successful in that job, whatever it is. Whereas a deaf person or someone in a wheelchair would have no long-term problem.
Social anxiety can be quite specific; fine with small groups but terrified of public speaking, or terrified of new people but fine once you get to know people, or fine with speaking in front of thousands of people but not with the Uber ride to the convention center. I can very easily imagine someone who would do very well on a team of eight people and no client contact but would find the interview itself impossible.
The way I see it, Autism is more a kin to color-blindness, while crippling anxiety is na actual illness/disorder that should be addressed with therapy.
And while someone on the autism spectrum is born that way, anxiety is inflicted. Of course, Genetic temperament plays a role in one's predisposition to anxiety, just like with many physiological illnesses.
In a nutshell, Autism is neither an illness or disorder, but merely a "different order", while crippling anxiety is actually a disorder.
At some point on the spectrum it is a seriously crippling disability. Where I live there are supervised residances for severly Autistic people and the people living there cannot function on their own without supervision. The "monchénou" network of residances saves them from homeless or institutionalization.
The kind of autism discussed here is, trivialize their experiences and challenges. It's borderline insulting to those for witch it is a disorder.
I'm deaf and rely on real-time captions for calls. In an in-person interview scenario, I'm at a huge disadvantage and not able to perform at my best. In a video call, I'm on equal ground.
It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."
Nearly every large company I've interviewed with would comply with a reasonable accommodation request for a legitimate disability e.g. providing a deaf person the interview questions on paper or even having an ASL interpreter present.
In fact many mention it up front on the screening call before any questions are asked.
> so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able to function well around other humans is a job requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why do you think behavioral questions are often asked during interviews?
For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of any accommodation provided.
Yeah but software / digital is a great equalizer, where all kinds of people can contribute even with disabilities or neurodivergence. The whataboutism doesn't really work.
Sure.
But if you are unable to really explain yourself and your thought process in the hiring process, they might feel like you are unfit for the interview.
they are way more likely to pick a guy who might be a little worse than you in coding but they actually liked him in the interview.
I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?
The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.
As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.
I am pretty sure my current employer could make an exception if you can show proof of your condition (which would benefit you either way in Germany). But we also like to see collegues in person, as this is what the interaction for many positions might look like anyways.
“Prove you’re deaf” would be a pretty rude thing to say, but you also don’t want to hire someone who’s lying about a disability. Presumably you’d do some kind of vetting before an in-person interview, and certainly before a hire.
Anyway in Germany I bet there’s a Taubenausweis (Gehöhrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of official status marker, and the employer would expect you to show it to HR.
I've worked under communist regime. A real one, a few decades ago, and let me tell you, they also demanded proof of disability. Did you have different experience?
I wasn't trying to claim that only capitalists dehumanize people. But that's what we mostly see today because that's the majority of our society.
When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of organisation that treats employees as "resources" will work in a decent way.
What's wrong with asking people to prove they're disabled? There definitely exist people that lie about being disabled too. Many places have a persons with disability certificate given by the government, so "proving", just means entering the ID of that certificate in a form.
> What's wrong with asking people to prove they're disabled
It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually ends up having people trivialise the problem a person might suffer from.
As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a position behind "you need to be able to function in society" is an indecent request to people that have difficulties doing so.
And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I for one would like my manager and my employer to understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.
How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
> As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations [...]
That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for accommodations.
> And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well. Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.
> How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often come with suggestions tailored to your specific disability.
> How do you propose I demonstrate...heart rate...bugs per feature...
Just a doctor's note/certificate actually.
> Fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy needed to get a government approved certificate is a chore
Well that is a separate problem. Yes, bureaucracy causes a lot of problems(even renewing your driver's license is a pain), but that doesn't mean the entire basis of needing to prove you are disabled should be thrown away. Everyone in their life faces shit bureaucracy, it's not news.
I'm not sure what kind of authority you have or in which jurisdiction you are to be able to say with such confidence that you need "just a doctor's note", but I was speaking from personal experience where a doctor's note was rejected as it wasn't specific enough to warrant an exception to the RTO mandate. And the doctor is not allowed to put the exact diagnosis in writing for the company. So currently it's a stale mate while everyone is trying to find an acceptable formula for what said doctor's note should say to satisfy the (in)human resources drones and their capitalist overlords.
I had an interview cut short early once because the interviewer said “I have to make sure we’re allowed to hire you.”
This was in Germany.
Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.
So fly them to multiple destinations? I was hired 1 year ago and interviewed with ~14 people all living in different locations. That could be paired down, but it won't ever reach the single destination that the OP is referring to.
Yes but it only one face to face meeting is needed in the process to see if someone is using AI to answer interview. The 13 other interviews can then be online.
Nobody is seriously suggesting you perform every interview step in person. The suggestion is to consider doing the last interview in person. It could even be with one other person.
Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
> If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?
> This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?
That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company and project has its own requirements.
This does not reject the value of soft skills and being able to interact with other people.
You can also frame this from another perspective. How far should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber have the right to advance in hiring processes just because others found him unpleasant to work with?
Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional.
> Sitting in a conference room under pressure after potentially flying out possibly hundreds of miles doesn't test your soft skills in actual day to day work. I've known many excellent engineers that buckle under that conditional.
You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.
Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.
Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this. No one else expects senior people to perform “work samples” under pressure, they just talk to them and dig into past work.
All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.
Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.
I’ve always wondered: is there a LeetCode equivalent for doctors? When a hospital interviews a surgeon, do they roll out a cadaver and ask them to remove the gall bladder in 15 minutes while the interviewer scrutinizes how they hold the scalpel?
It’s because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked credentialism, is closer to traditional craftsmanship and the progression of apprentice-journeyman-master than the “every hacker for themselves” world of modern tech.
Well, it'd be nice if they reintroduced proper training of new tech workers, rather than outsourcing it to universities ("not supposed to be trade schools") or relying on internships/co-ops which these days are often nearly as competitive to be hired for as actual jobs. Formalized apprenticeships could help with that, as well as impart a proper culture of craftsmanship.
And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?
We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.
> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.
> It’s because medicine, with its residencies and HN-mocked credentialism,(...)
The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.
In the US, candidates to become physicians go through a 5-7 year residency which has low pay, dangerously long hours, and has a supervisor watching over them who can flunk them for failing to meet their standards. That's _after_ a normal bachelors degree and then medical school. Does that sound like something anyone would like to go through to become a software developer just to avoid technical interviews?
It’s not just medicine. No other job does solve this question on a whiteboard style interviews for anyone other than new grads.
The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.
Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.
Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
I remember reading an article linked here (which I can't find anymore) about a lawyer who converted to software engineering. He was contrasting tech interviews, with 3, 4, 6 rounds* and live coding and high-pressure testing with the exactly one deep chat for a lawyer about to handle multi-hundred-million dollars lawsuits. Insanity.
> Literally no other industry except for the performing arts interviews like this.
No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.
Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.
Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?
You’re comment was talking about performing under pressure and failing to perform with people watching them.
In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.
If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
> If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.
And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.
1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.
2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.
I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”
If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.
>expected to showcase your skills
Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.
> Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.
I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.
> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure?
Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
I asked you, specifically. I'll bite anyways, but I'll expect an actual answer from you.
> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure
No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.
> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.
> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth?
All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.
> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?
> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
> Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
Apply that same logic to someone with one of those conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.
> Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an hour is not a good employee where that is required. What makes the last one special compared to others? They can be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session musician/mover, I just don't see controversy
A physically impaired person can be a good yoga instructor: they'll suggest alternatives, different/better cues, or provide more accessible classes such as yin or seated yoga.
Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't mean they were before, and an instructor won't necessarily move through the poses with the class since they can have 2-3 classes per day.
Where did I mention being an amazing programmer? If that's the requirement then why not. The comment was replying specifically about environment where you gotta sit through hour long meetings and that is what I wrote about
maybe there is a company where being an amazing programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries the project and interacts nicely with customers when needed. The last one was probably the most valuable
If you are an amazing programmer but can't function in the 1 hour sitdown meeting which is part of your job activities then you are de facto worse candidate than the next amazing programmer who can, that's just how it is.
I'm curious about this. When I've hired, I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them.
People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.
I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.
I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
I like this idea of making the soft skills explicit. Both to the interviewers and the candidate (i.e. in the job posting itself). This would save everyone involved a lot of time, too!
As somebody with autism, one thing I'd say from my experience (I don't know how many people will agree) is that interviewing has felt like a much more severe stress test of my soft skills than anything I've had to do while actually being employed. While employed, the vast majority of my social interactions are oriented around some technical task that I need to work on with other people, and conveying information effectively so as to bring about the completion of this task. This is precisely the kind of social interaction that I feel most competent in--I feel like I'm pretty good at it, actually! What I struggle with are social interactions that are more open-ended, that are more about emotional connections and getting people to like you, and I feel like interviewing is an interaction of the latter type.
In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode. LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business requirements are both "coding" but they're quite different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the former is probably good evidence they can do the latter, but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter without being able to do the former. So it is, in my view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on the job.
> I've always wondered how I can actually tell (a) what soft skills are required for the role and (b) whether a candidate has them.
Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.
Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.
> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.
The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.
It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.
there is a world of difference between interacting with three people you don't know for an hour for the explicit purpose of stress testing your experience and knowledge and interacting with three people that you talk to every day talking about a project that is well familiar to you.
There is a big difference between being in a conference room for an interview where you are judged, and on a regular work day. There is for me, and I'm old and have done dozens and dozens of interviews, largely successfully. Don't summarily judge people, especially if they're not neurotypical, as often happens in software.
> Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore
While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.
> Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.
I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.
You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.
If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.
Adding to your point. Why arent we saying that the "noraml" people are the ones bad at interacting with neurodivergents. Their supposed social skills are so limited that they can only work with people who act and behave like them.
That’s an uncharitable interpretation. But if that is what it ends up meaning then i do agree, that’s bigotry.
A more charitable interpretation might mean “the candidate is able to clearly explain (through some medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and why they picked that solution. They were also able to correctly answer follow up questions”. If _that_ is what is meant, then that’s not bigotry IMO.
I wouldn't say uncharitable, just that the best-intentioned version is pretty naïve, especially in the current political climate where every effort to bring that kind of inclusivity and open-mindedness to the table is being actively regressed.
For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
> If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.
It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.
That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills. Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers filter them out. Problem averted.
If you have a really desirable job I wouldn't think twice about a few hours long drive/flight but eventually creativity wins the game for the hiring side. E.g. No offices, no problem: Either you recruit where you already have people or find trustees. I'd be happy to hold remote interview assist in the Colorado Springs (pot. Denver) area in my small 3ppl office if anyone from a remote-only corp doesn't have anyone on-site and wants to give it a shot...
> Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.
Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.
Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)
Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.
The general rule seems to be if you’re not customer-facing, then no suit is needed. Just wear clean, neat clothes and that’s usually enough. If a suit or uniform is needed, that would be noted up front.
The general rule is to dress one step up from those in the role. Everyone in hoodie and shorts? Wear pants. Everyone in collared polos? Go business casual with maybe a blazer. Showing up a level lower makes you look unprepared. Showing up some levels higher, like in a suit to a hoodie shop, shows lack of research and reading a room.
In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot impression wise.
That's the point. One of my first interviews in tech was with a CEO who dressed with an Iron Maiden t-shirt. That settled to me the question about whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office! :)
whether I would need to worry too much about looks at the office
'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.
Tech uniforms: instead of spending $2500 on four Brooks Brothers suits (seasonal sales), spend $2500 on fancy Nordic hiking clothes that you'll mostly wear sitting at a desk, as if an Arctic expedition might suddenly break out at the office and you'll need to at least have your base and mid layers ready.
Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.
The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)
Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.
Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will raise more questions about your sanity than score any points on preparedness.
What is wrong with the advice? You are saying nobody was wearing a suit. I said dress a step up (for the interview). Sr. Management in graphic tees? Wear a polo shirt. Or sport your best conversation-starter graphic tee. And if the CEO wears a tee-shirt and all the rest are in some other category of dress, base your interview attire based on everyone else.
Mmm... because I'd prefer the approach of Donald Knuth: wear dashiki to special events (like interviews)? I don't mean I endorse West-African style literally. Just either wear something that says something about you, if you are into that, or be neutral and approachable. No need to plus one anyone.
A few months ago, the 60-year-old CEO of the previous company I worked for, employing 100,000 people, showed up at our satellite office with other senior executives and EVPs for an official visit.
He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.
In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
I wouldn't take that advice seriously. Suit in tech would be awkward (even for most mgmt roles). Tech pioneered the concept that you don't need a suit to get the pay of a suit. You can be yourself.
As I learned, you can also be yourself, never wear a suit on the job and still wear one for the interview. First impressions count. Once people know I can wear a suit they just don't seem to mind me in shorts anymore.. So I might have a social skill after all :D
I'd want to see some actual hard evidence before I believed that. The usual way social cues work is they are devastatingly effective even if people claim they are not. Much like how most interviewers are honestly convinced that their approach is unbiased but in practice they tend to hire people who are like themselves.
My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-skill roles but I'd assume still present.
Wearing a suit to a tech interview in silicon valley would without a doubt send the signal that either (a) they have absolutely no clue about SV work culture, or (b) they’re a “look at me” guy who dresses odd on purpose
If they're young it can also be because that's what they've been told to do, if they're from a different culture (even an American one) it may be shockingly weird not to wear a suit to an interview, and there are even people who wear suits all the time because a well-made suit is very comfortable, with no more showing off involved than dressing up any other way. An interview is not a regular work day, best not to summarily judge people like that.
My point is that even knowing the work culture of SV does not mean that people necessarily believe it applies to interviews too, or that a suit will be a negative point, rather than good or neutral. There is a strong culture of looking smart at interviews that overrides knowledge of day-to-day attire. If you really care about people being in casual clothes, mention it in the invite, rather than looking down on them for doing what has been ingrained to be appropriate.
I agree, but I suspect that you’d have much better luck if you wore something that was superficially similar to the kinds of things other people wore, but was much better fitted and higher quality. For instance, if you showed up in a nice pair of chinos and a tailored buttoned shirt (of appropriate formality), that might come across as being really put together rather than ignoring subtle social cues by dressing in something that stands out by not fitting in.
I don't know where you live but for most tech jobs here even outside of sv its almost as bad as putting your photo on a resume. Even for very senior non-technical roles you're better off showing up in slacks and a blazer than the whole enchilada
First impressions do count but I think the above poster has a point, a suit can actually harm your chances in an environment where no one wears suits.
There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good, and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard time seeing how it will count against you.
With reference to the GP about awkward people, if an adult hiring manager is intimidated by an professional applicant wearing a suit to an interview in good faith (after all, it's widely seen as mark of taking the interview seriously), I think it is perhaps not the applicant who need to learn the social skills.
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.
If there is a de facto dress code and you knowingly go against it, even if you look good in whatever you do wear, it makes you look like you don't understand the prevailing norms. This could lead to worries you might not align with other team norms either.
If it's so important, the interview invite should mention that casual wear is expected. Like it or not, most people take interviews seriously, and have been taught that you show you take the interview seriously by wearing a suit.
Tbh, people who blindly accept what they've been taught without considering the situation at hand don't make good engineers anyway (software or otherwise). It's not like programmers not wearing suits is some well-kept secret only accessible to the inner circle. Quite the opposite I'd say.
It's well known that programmers don't wear suits in the office in the SV. It's less obvious they shouldn't wear one in the interview either, because that's not a regular work day. It's not obvious at all to someone from a formal-dress culture like France (Italy? India?). Google's own AI recommends erring on the side of caution and wearing a suit for an SV interview. Yes, people should look up the specific company they're interviewing for... if it even comes to their mind, it's that obvious interviews require suits in some cultures.
If you forgive me the analogy, and assuming you're American, would you think of checking the etiquette of entering into a shop? In the US, the concept itself is weird, you go in, buy stuff, and leave. In France, you must greet the shopkeeper right as you go in through the door. In Hungary, you must wish the shopkeeper a good day in reply to their greeting. It's simple... if you know it's even a thing you should check.
Which is funny, because weren't we in tech the people who aspired to “think different”? But then it didn't become think-different for the individual but for the tech in-group against the "square", boring, formality-driven out-group. And since the world is becoming increasingly informal and any group worth its salt needs to differentiate itself, tech people might be the first to return to wearing suits and ties (or dresses) to work. I'd love that.
"Think different" was a marketing slogan used for Apple products from 1997 to 2002, back when Apple was aimed chiefly at video editing professionals. It was never aimed at techies.
As long as suits and ties remain the uniform of politicians and managers, I don't think techies will ever willingly adopt it for themselves as well.
Wearing a suit to a technical interview is an immediate red flag. Everybody knows you don't wear suits in this industry, so what's your motive? Your ability to wear a suit is irrelevant for the job, so what weaknesses that are relevant are you rather clumsily trying to hide?
I would go as far as to say being this hyper-focused on clothes rather than if the person is sociable and competent is a red flag itself. It is rather superficial. Vague platitudes about "culture" might get thrown out, but are we engineering and building things or are we putting on a fashion show?
Calling it a red flag may have been too harsh. It's certainly not an immediate no.
However, like it or not, it is a signal because it means you deviate significantly from the mode of the distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests that if anything, all else equal that signal is a negative one.
I've gotten a job offer from every technical interview I ever took in a suit, so it Worked For Me. And none of the jobs that I took I ever wore a suit to again (except for conferences or trade shows, and occasionally when I was going out after work to somewhere posh, which did provoke fun "Omg are you interviewing" questions!) Which I actually have found a bit of a shame because I do quite like a chance to wear a suit, though I'm also grateful not to have to iron infinite shirts.
Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!
An interview is not a regular work day. If only things relevant to the job were required in an interview, no one would be talking about whiteboard exercises.
can you just ask them before the interview? "is it okay to wear a suit, or do you guys have a stick up your..."?
I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.
Seeing someone wearing a suit for a dev interview would make me think one of the following:
(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.
(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?
(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.
(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.
That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.
You probably wear suits that fit and the confidence probably shows through. Not to stereotype, but I suspect a large number of developers have one or two suits they wear for job interviews, weddings and funerals, and they bought them long enough ago that they are too loose or too snug by now, and consequently feel uncomfortable when wearing them. At least this used to be me.
Personally, I feel uncomfortable in any suit, not because of size or fit, but because I must be wary not to make it dirty at all, otherwise cleaning is a pita. Say you want to go for lunch with coworkers and someone orders spaghetti/pasta. Great ... I rather wear something simple, so there is no problem, if something unfortunate happens.
This feels like such a narrow view of the world. Not necessarily discriminatory, but on the path to get there.
So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.
> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.
I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
Wearing jeans and a T-shirt doesn’t make anyone a slob. Also, there’s ways you can be a slob even in a suit.
I’d suggest you reacquaint yourself with the comment guidelines, as this just is a simple ad hominem attack on me, despite not even making any claims as to what I wear to work.
You do see how discriminatory your statement is right?
Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.
As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.
> I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I'm not saying you immediately throw a candidate out for wearing a suit. It's entirely possible I'm wrong and my mind can be changed by their performance, but it is something that would make me take a closer look.
I'll give you another example I experienced recently: a candidate who would not stop drumming their fingers on the table throughout the interview. Is that specifically related to their performance? No, not really. Is it annoying, a bit disrespectful, and shows a lack of restraint? Yeah, it is. This candidate had other flaws that made them disqualifying, but their finger drumming didn't help them at all.
I understand and respect your decision to moderate my comment, and I’ll be more careful going forward.
But I would like to point out that a rule that allows someone to openly state they discriminate during interviews but forbids a strong reaction to that statement might require some examination.
Respectfully, what I’m describing is not discrimination in the hiring sense. Discrimination is unfair treatment related to immutable characteristics about a person such as race, age, gender, etc.
You could just as easily argue that people “discriminate” against candidates by making them do leetcode, when leetcode is unrelated to performance at the job. Leetcode is a performance some people look at during interviews, just like how you socially meld in an interview is a performance people look at during interviews.
You’re welcome to disagree with people and present your opposing view, but we just need you to do so without escalating into hostility and personal insults. This site exists to be a place of curious conversation, not a battleground.
> So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.
> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.
Reverse snobbery is like slave morality. It transmutes a high standard into a perverse mirror image consisting of intolerant, intentional, celebrated mediocrity.
At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.
In human dynamics, very little is based on “first principles”. Some words are considered vulgar and others are not. Why? Aren't they just a sequence of letters? They certainly are, but those sequences have been assigned a meaning that does not derive from any “first principle”.
In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
I absolutely agree, humans are creatures of context, that's why GPs opinion that not wearing a suit is a "perverse mirror image" and "mediocrity" is out of touch.
> In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men.
Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.
> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.
Firstly, what we call a suit is a highly varied outfit of clothes that are designed to look good on a male silhouette. Deriving from that, yes, the suit is aesthetically better- to disagree is to discount both the entire field of custom tailoring and also the rest of wider society surrounding tech.
Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.
To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.
You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
Most of the popular outfits are "designed to look good" to a high degree, and then humans are quite bad at fitting the garments on average. Poorly fit suits that don't look good on a male silhouette are absolutely a thing, and I'd posit that an unkempt male wearing a poorly fitting cheap suit looks "lower status" than a fit and well groomed male wearing a stylish t-shirt/jeans combo.
So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
100% agreed. I’ve seen way more than enough people in poorly-fitting expensive suits to last me a lifetime, and it is just painful to watch.
The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.
For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.
Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
Hehe explain aesthetics from first principles sounds like demanding the equation that proves Mona Lisa is a good painting.
I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).
It's just a different set of in group // out group signals, not some sort of moral failing. You're well within your rights to not like the signals though.
Too real. I once got turned down by the Apple Store for a retail position because I wore a collared shirt to the interview (after being told in advance not to wear anything formal). Interviewer let me know I came off as too formally dressed to get their vibe. The discrimination/bias was real.
I mean, if they said not to wear something formal, that doesn't really seem like bias as much as just not following instructions. If I showed up to an interview where they said to wear a suit and I was in jeans and a polo, I'd expect to get turned down too.
I'd mostly agree, but with them specifically calling out "not anything formal" as part of the expectations for interview attire wouldn't be the time I'd want to be riding the line of "is this too close to formal". This isn't a job at a tailor or stylist. You're not being tested on your understanding of the roles of various garments in different levels of fashion over time.
Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.
We might be getting a but pedantic about what “formal” meant at the time, but you would have had to be in that Apple culture circle to consider a button down formal. Seems normal today, but it was not back then in most parts of the world. Today I would agree that folks would already know the expectation.
A button up shirt without a jacket, at the time, was business casual at most. What they wanted was a t-shirt and jeans. Even Walmart, when I’d worked as a teen, expected a collar and appreciated a sports coat for interviewing. Different times for sure.
Sure, but t-shirt and jeans is also what everyone working at an Apple Store wears. It'd be one thing if they didn't say what to wear - then I'd totally understand going a bit above, but if they specifically put in "not formal", then it seems reasonable to assume they mean "match the uniform generally".
They didn’t say what to wear, they said a vague what not to wear. Almost all interviews at that point in time expected attire a step above your intended position. I personally think it was just a silly test of whether you already know what they expect. “You are a great hire but you dressed too nicely for the interview” is certainly a thing that I chuckle at.
I didn't wear a suit, but in 2012 I wore slacks, tucked in collared shirt, and a tie, and got the same response from Microsoft. It was for an internship which is hilarious.
I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)
The only programmers I've ever seen wearing a suit to work were the ones working in a bank. Not sure if that was a requirement or just a local tradition. Just saying that it happens, but seems very rare.
I've made it a point to always ask beforehand: "what is the dress code expectation? I've seen everything from t-shirts to suits in the tech industry and I'd like show up dressed appropriately."
I was told by a recruiter to "suit up" for an engineering position 15 years ago. I was met by the VP of engineering wearing cutoff jeans. I never listen recruiter sartorial advice.
To be fair, "suit up" usually means to put on a uniform rather than to wear a suit. The phrase seems to have originated in sports. T-shirts and hoodies are the uniform of tech.
But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where it only works where there already is a shared understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of the comments on HN are from actors having different understandings for technical jargon and talking past each other because they aren't even talking about the same thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.
> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again
It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.
It's not expectation of sameness, it's that they will be working with 'normal' people and need to meet some standard to not be a net negative for any team they're in.
My advice is to ask to hiring manager who invites you to come in about the dress code expectation / norms, and try to be on the higher end of the range they give, without going over.
I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.
At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.
Perhaps the suit wasn't the one level up that people are talking about? If you accidentally go 3 levels too formal, you've definitely ruined the initial impression.
Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.
The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.
Pressing an edged tip into damp clay to write a complaint or ledger is almost as fast as quill and ink writing, the clay takes longer to dry solid than ink though.
it is very easy to understand if someone is saying useless ai soup or he knows what he is talking about if you are good in your field. At least in software it is.
I get where you're coming from, especially on the cost of bad hires: it really is one of the riskiest bets a company makes. But I'm not convinced going back to the "fly them out and grill them on a whiteboard" era is the right answer either.
There's an opportunity for wework for hiring - rent out a conference room for a couple hours and have a third party be present during the interview. The first one to figure this out and not go bankrupt a year or two later wins. Probably not a unicorn business, though.
In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason. It is not an expensive as people think to fire someone who deceived your hiring process. However, institution inertia is real.
That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.
> In most highly developed countries, there is a probation period for 90+ days for new hires. During this period, you can be fired for any reason.
In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.
Every big tech company in the US has their version of PIP, to protect them from potential law suits as I understand, that lead to a situation that low performers might occupy their positions for months and years.
Unfortunately, in very large organizations the onboarding process can take a while. It can be months before you have credentials to the repository. By then, full benefits will kick in, worker protections, etc.
And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.
The industry is probably going to have to consider the concept of a "qualification", that is a test you take once and then present to employers rather than have each employer make up a different one.
I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.
Did you ever work with developers? Maybe if you hire for consultants in some industries some of this is relevant (I doubt it), but with social skills + suit part alone will make sure you miss out on a significant pool of talent.
I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.
I knew some colleagues who were alright as developers (maybe over-eager, e.g. building a microservices architecture by themselves when that didn't actually solve the real problems the company had) who had a suit phase for some reason.
In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.
I'm inclined to agree, but at the same time, I've worked with people who proved themselves in the industry already. My senior developer at the time, had 15 years experience but no formal relevant education.
Except you can use AI (against the rules, but there is 0% chance they’re catching everyone) for a degree.
The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”
Id say it depends on the specifics of the job role; In most cases, "the fundamentals" arent relevant at all; they are items on the runtime library of a given high level language of choice. There are exceptions, obviously, but you do not need to be a rocket scientist to maintain an ERP or an e-commerce application; on the other hand, there are plenty of "hard problems" where computer science is also mostly useless, because the steepness of it is advanced math, not algorithm design.
This is insane to read. You don't get brownie points for what you're wearing, but deducting points for someone trying to impress folks by dressing more formally than what you're typically used to?
Yes. I deduct points for people who can't into social cues and context. Such is life, we are social animals. I'd deduct points if a candidate showed up in beach shorts too. (A suit is as wildly inappropriate in this context as beach shorts.)
In most countries, you have trial periods where you can terminate without too much hassle. Here in Germany, that's usually six months and I know of people in pretty senior positions that got screwed over and terminated towards the end of that period.
The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.
And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.
I've been on both sides of the table.
My process for hiring is:
- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.
- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).
- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.
- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.
Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.
A lot of people look down on companies that solve 'boring' problems with 'boring' technologies. I guess it's an open question if having been writing in-house CRUD apps using a 10 year old tech stack for several years is a proxy for lack of competence.
I've seen a "senior" developer who didn't recognize what VSCode was. Like, not that they hadn't heard of the specific program—they didn't recognize the sort of program it was.
Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.
The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.
A company pretending to be some fancy place that everyone wants to work that just isn't that great. The whole A's hire A's and B's hire C's but are pretending to be A's kind of thing. Let's just say that not every company is like Google in the early days (free 3 star restaurant food, clean t-shirts, slides in the office, and all the rest). Even Google is not like that anymore.
There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.
Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
AI has definitely changed the dynamic; more people think they can get away with lying without getting caught. They trust the AI’s ability to lie more than their own.
I’ve literally never, in almost 20 years in the industry, been asked to or expected to wear a suit. I’ve never ever had anyone say anything to me about my clothes period. It’s simply not a consideration in my experience. In fact the one time I worked for a place that had a dress code, it specifically exempted my department (software engineering) from the policy - and if that hadn’t been the case I wouldn’t have taken that job.
The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.
A more motivated candidate might have had an LLM ideate potential follow up questions for their resume and then think about the answers themselves. I’ve done this live with ChatGPT voice mode, it’s quite nice for practicing.
I suspect that's what the candidate did! It's just that the AI didn't anticipate the question.
The thing with interviewing is that ultimately the questions are fundamentally unpredictable. No coach, or AI, can truly anticipate what the questions will be.
I've interviewed some candidates (more senior than TFA) and I agree with OP that it is a uniquely uncomfortable experience.
Candidates who rely on AI seem to just be totally turning their brains off. At least a candidate who was embellishing in the old days would try to BS if they were caught. They could try and fill in the blanks. These candidates give plausible-sounding answers and then truly just give up and say "ummm" when you reach the end of their preparation.
I've been interviewing for 10+ years across multiple startups and this was never a problem before. Even when candidates didn't have a lot of relevant experience we could have a conversation and they could demonstrate their knowledge and problem-solving skills. I've had some long, painful sessions with a candidate who was completely lost but they never just gave up completely.
Developers I've worked with and interviewed who rely on AI daily are just completely helpless without it. It's amazing how some senior+ engineers have just lost their ability to reason or talk about code.
I suspect we are seeing the first wave of programmers who got a promotion to "senior" on the basis of being an early AI adopter at a place that valued lines of code written or tickets closed or other similarly-game-able metrics.
Alternatively, there are people who haven't been promoted but think their AI-fu is so good they obviously should have been, without realizing that "senior" is actually a different role, with additional responsibilities.
I've found asking about their pedagogy when coaching junior engineers is a great sorting strategy right now. It isn't something a lot of people have written about so ChatGPT's answers are full of useless platitudes, and mid-level engineers often don't even know that it is part of the job.
This has nothing to do with AI. They lied in an interview like you could have done in 1980. You can prepare with AI and lie and you can prepare with AI and not lie. I have done the latter.
As someone who has conducted interviews with candidates almost certainly using AI in both the phone screen and coding portion. The biggest giveaway is the inability to explain the why of things. Even some of the simple things like "why did you initialize that class member in this method rather than in the constructor?"
I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.
Yep, it's less about if you're using AI and more about how you're integrating it into your workflow. At this point, using AI tools is becoming a baseline expectation in many roles, not a red flag. But yeah, the moment someone can't explain the rationale behind a decision (especially in their own code) that's a huge issue.
That way we can spend massive piles of money on cloud compute, monitoring, documentation, not to mention the constant maintenance to mitigate the security issues in the multiple layers of libraries we depended on.
The title seems to say that it's a bad thing to use AI to prepare for an interview, when in fact it can be quite useful to use AI (and before AI there were dozens of "Preparing for the technical interview" books). The real issue is that the candidate lied about their experience, not that they used AI to prep. They could just as easily have lied about their experience without using AI to prep.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 659 ms ] threadI've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution.
Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times - the simple ones that candidates can do in reasonable time is too easy for AI, and if we do realistic system, it's too hard for honest candidates.
Take-home projects were never meant to be evaluated in isolation.
It was common for candidates to have their friends review the take-home or even do it for them.
You had to structure the take-home so the candidate could then explain their choices to you and walk you through their thought process. When you got a candidate who couldn't answer questions about their own submission, you thanked them for their time and sent the rejection later that evening.
At some point it feels like it would be easier to just get good at programming, and yet...
If we expect people to use AI, and it is available in most companies now, then being able to appropriately refactor, test, and sense-make of AI-generated code is even more important. The key is raising the bar on quality beyond mediocre, and not relying on those take homes to test skills they are no longer testing.
After some back & forth I was able to (politely) prove their feedback was not correct, which actually granted me a follow-up interview.
Unfortunately, this was a unicorn, most companies don't give feedback, let alone admit they were wrong.
But, take-home is preferred, I want to use my IDE, with my keyboard shortcuts etc.
Then there are take-home timed challenges on systems like hackerrank / leetcode etc, which are horrible in terms of accessibility and access. Not to mention that they are a pass/fail, and focus purely on speed, not quality.
Next to that they don't allow you to work in an environment you're comfortable in. No debugger, etc. When an HVAC company hires a new tech, do they tell him/her to do a 1.5 hour repair with only a hammer and a lighter to diagnose and fix an issue? No, it's stupid. Why do developers have to do this then?
And the same applies to live coding exercises. While there is an opportunity to explain yourself, you're still in an extremely uncomfortable environment. Why is there such an emphasis to put people in an environment where they are not set up to succeed?
“If you can do the job under these constraints, imagine what you can do under optimal, normal conditions!! Hired!”
HVAC has certifications you can get. We should strongly consider this in our industry. I don't think its an unreasonable compromise, especially now with the advent of LLMs.
IIUC, network engineering in particular is an area where vendor certs play a big role (mainly Cisco).
AWS, Azure and GCP all have certs. There are certs for Windows and Linux administration. Java has certs.
(I don’t know if anyone cares about the Java certs, but they do exist.)
It would require that group to agree on what being a "good" developer meant, but there could be more than one and if you don't agree with this one you could form your own. Maybe one requires people to be able to write testable code and be able to label design patterns, and another expects pure functional programming, and another expects deep security expertise, and companies could know which of those they are looking for and inquire appropriately.
We have this a little bit with employers like Pivotal or ThoughtWorks, that have such strong learning cultures you can be sure that if someone spent five years there they know their stuff. But we could have a version where workers were willing to endorse each other, rather than relying on a specific for-profit company.
It is, like all certifications, only as valuable as the least-competent person who holds it. But the informal versions of this are pretty powerful.
In regular systems administration, having certs kinda suggested that you didn't have the chops to get a job without a cert. Even people who had them would only include them on the resume when they were explicitly called for in a job description.
With the rise of "DevOps" and throwing half your raise at Amazon, the job moved away from being able to build and run networks of computers. Now it is mostly about configuring off-the-shelf tools in "the cloud". In that world, certs became way more meaningful. Sure, the AWS cert is just testing if you know the six different names Amazon has given one feature, but it is potentially more helpful to know that trivia than it is to actually understand LDAP or DNS.
If AI successfully de-skills software development, maybe certs will finally become useful for developers too.
The clients in some consulting projects definitely do.
What ends up happening is that our certs end up being a bunch of multiple-choice questions that check people's ability to memorize trivia.
It is more like having a Certified Novel Writer or Certified Mural Painter or Certified Graphic Designer certificate than it is like HVAC or welding.
[1] https://dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html
I have interviewed at least one self-described Senior Software Engineer who didn’t know how to write a function that takes an integer parameter and then prints every integer from 0 to the argument passed.
Just have a 1 hour or 2 hour call with candidate where you guys go through the project.
Also, you might find yourself in the unfortunate position of looking to find a job without already having one; many people find that a compelling reason to "jump through hoops for nothing but middling compensation"
Take-homes are a much more reasonable expectation than memorizing how to implement quick-sort on a white board.
The $160K-$180k is about the median for a senior dev in most non tech companies in most cities not on the west coast. You can verify this on salary.com.
Yes I know most of the 2.8 million devs in the US are on the enterprise dev side and that’s where you will end up. But why not shoot for the moon?
For context, I am 50. Spent all of my career until 2020 on the “enterprise dev” side of compensation until a pivot and a position at BigTech in the consulting division fell into my lap (full time direct hire with cash + RSUs like any other employee).
But I tell every new grad to do whatever it takes to get on to the public tech company gravy train if possible.
That being said, at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech again. I’m good with where I am working for a smaller company.
What compels you to play lingual games with peoples' livelihoods?
It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.
I personally prefer hypotheticals, or some variant on live pair programming. Also, as someone with enough free time to do take-homes, I also prefer code reviews over that one-off code which then becomes a case of 100% "I did this and here's why".
Even with that last example I would say, "well to optimize, etc., we could do this".
The AI was used as a tool to generate false stories, but that's not what I assumed when I read the title. It's common for people to "prepare" with LLMs by having them review resumes and suggest changes, but asking an LLM to wholesale fabricate things for you is something else entirely.
I do think this experience will become more common, though. There's an attitude out there that cheating on interviews is fair or warranted as retaliation for companies being bad at interviewing. In my experience, the people who embrace cheating (with or without LLMs) either end up flaming out of interview processes or get disappointed when they land a job and realize the company that couldn't catch their lies was also not great at running a business.
Not being to remember small details about certain projects is also perfectly fine for people who have worked for more than a couple of years. Unless you can discover a pattern of lying like the author supposedly did then I would just be perfectly fine moving on to another topic.
Not least because being willing to be dishonest during an interview is a strong signal the candidate will be dishonest while they are employed as well, and companies want very much to not hire those people.
* Generate/improve this resume to appear very experienced.
* Generate/improve this resume to be a good candidate for this job description.
* Ask typical interview questions about this resume, and provide good answers.
Notes, notes, notes. Then review them before an interview. Not bullet-point notes of things that happened (that's fine too, but not just that) but make stories when they're very fresh, like, right after they happen. You won't be able to turn raw bullet points into a story later, you'll forget too much.
Then take some time to match stories to common interview questions. That's your prep document. Feel absolutely free to fill in gaps where needed, most folks' "real" memories of these things are half wrong anyway, and there may be times you literally couldn't have an acceptable answer to a common question without making some of it up, because you didn't take useful-enough notes. What are you going to do, fail every interview that asks that question forever? No, just make the story you need, connect it to reality as much as possible, and move on. But do it ahead of time. And you only need to do this once per such question. Perhaps you'll even manage to take notes on a less-invented story later (I've found that nearly all of these stories need a little invention, though, even if you have perfect notes, to fit into the acceptable range of responses)
AI allowed them to add plausible work to their resume that they couldn’t have come up with on their own.
I at least look up toward the ceiling while thinking so maybe that’s sufficient to not give off cheating vibes.
It’s actually fun how in video calls everybody thinks they’re doing eye contact by looking at other people’s faces on screen which in reality makes them look down and not straight at the camera.
The weird thing is, it looks like I’m looking at the off-screen when I’m actually watching the video, and vice verse.
When I've been aware of some of my hard-focused thinking behavior (am not autistic, AFAIK), sometimes I found I automatically tend to look away, at slightly interesting things (e.g., lines at the edge of a door or wall outlet, or some simple physical mechanism), and then sometimes it seems like 1% of my cycles are contemplating that. While the rest seems to be reasoning in all sorts of ways about the immediate problem and related things.
(In an interview, this is balanced with my awareness of the interviewer's mental model, and also thinking about the job opportunity that's the real point of the exercise.)
I don't understand how that works, but it usually works very well for problem-solving outside of interviews.
If I tried to switch up that automatic process, by closing eyes, I don't know whether the habit of visually contemplating something in parallel is a Chesterson's Fence, and then the magic wouldn't work.
Though, would be funny, if you were in an interview, trying this eye-closing tactic for a hard-thinking problem for the first time, just so you wouldn't look like a cheater, and you find this puts you in some other mental mode. Combat Mode, for example, where maybe you're suddenly finishing the interviewer's sentences, disregarding things they say you think are irrelevant, redirecting and cutting to the chase, with a calm but energized and commanding manner. You might get permabanned from that company, for coming across like an aggressive jerk, but they started it by creating a jerky interview process. :)
But this was a case of someone staring at a specific place off-camera while "thinking" while their eyes very visibly went rapidly left and right for 20-30 seconds, and repeating the same thing for literally every question, even the ones that were intentional freebies based on their resume that they should have been able to instantly answer.
To me, it's actually the lack of any indication that work is happening that gives of cheating vibes. If someone sits their glassy-eyed for twenty seconds, and then starts speaking in complete sentences, it is going to come across as though they are reading. Not to mention that people's intonation is often different if they aren't thinking up what to say.
If you do get stuck, you can avoid ambiguity by sharing some meta-commentary on what you are thinking and why. "I know that library uses X, but I'm not sure if it can do Y and I'm trying to think if I could work around that... okay, so what I would do is..." Something like that, so that the interviewer knows where your ideas are coming from.
I enjoy remote work but I wouldn't want to start working for a company where I had never met anyone. It seems like a great way to get scammed.
One real-life interview would surely be beneficial for both sides.
https://twitter.com/1030/status/1615342312296534017
* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.
* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.
* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.
* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.
* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.
1. Don't use blur to redact documents. Whatever blur was used can probably be reversed.
2. Don't try to hide the identity of someone you're talking about by redacting a few details on their resume. With the prevalence of public and private resume databases, that's probably easy to match up with a name.
Agreed on the blur thing, though. Blur tools should come with warnings.
I just got mosquito noise when I sharpened. Are you confusing blurring with pixelating?
As long as the blur is strong enough, there's no way to get the text back.
But a deconvolution filter will. You can't do it in Photoshop but you can with a dedicated tool that tries different deconvolution kernels until it finds one that matches the exact original blur function.
This is how you can remove motion blur from a photo due to camera movement, for example. It's wild how much information is still there, in the exact precise levels and shape of the blur.
There are limits of course, but they're much further than you might expect.
That's a bit rude to be making demands when I was just trying to provide some helpful info.
If you want to learn more, you can google it. I'm not the person who invented deconvolution. It's not secret knowledge.
There are several papers on the topic if you're that interested.
I’ve given a lot of interviews, candidates will always try to come up with the best story as an answer to your question because “I can’t think of an example” is not an acceptable answer. It’s a demand you’re placing on them.
Also having experience puffed up on a resume happens around 100% of the time. The point of the interview is to figure out how much real relevant experience the candidate has.
OP was right to end the interview as they were an unprepared candidate and a bad fit, but low-key threatening someone with “word gets around” who’s trying to find a job and probably starting to panic about not having one doesn’t make him the good guy in this story that he thinks it does.
OP could have just told them not to use AI in future, but even that’s unnecessary as the lesson’s already been learned.
(I’ve also noticed that towards the end of the post OP mentions this, but it doesn’t line up with the actual call as described unfortunately)
Maybe I am the rounding error. I have zero puffery, exaggerations, embellishments, stolen credit, or lies on my resume.
But, sadly, OP is right.
When doing a technical screen I'll sometimes pick a skill the person claims to have, and ask them the simplest possible non-trivial question I can ask.
For example, let's say you list 'SQL' as one of the skills on your CV. I might show you a SQL statement like:
(EDIT: I meant SELECT id, start_date FROM employees ORDER BY id;)I'll tell you id is an auto-increment field, and ask whether the result would show the newest employee at the top or the bottom.
You have a 50/50 chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, I'll tell you the answer. Getting it wrong wouldn't disqualify you.
Then I'll ask you how to get it in the opposite order.
I am expecting you to immediately say 'add DESC'. If you can't answer that question in under 2 seconds, you probably haven't written enough SQL to justify listing it as a skill on your CV.
You would be surprised at how many people fail simple tests just like this one.
(I won't use this particular one again.)
What is the right answer? Doesn't it depend on the DB? Postgres at least shows rows ordered by last updated time (simplified, I know).
I would be fine if it was "... near the top or bottom" though.
(Or maybe this comment is the correct answer?)
I can’t edit it now, so will leave this here to say that it’s not a direct quote.
Well who are they? How would the next member of the community know this is a fake candidate. I like the idea in general of finding a way to eliminate these time-wasters but how would that work? The candidate can adjust a bit and improve the AI "foo" to come up with online answers for them.
edit: I'm talking about egregious cases where the name, location, picture, and work history are false, not the exaggerations you mention. The profiles have few connections since they do get flagged and recreated with a new false identity...
> If you feel that a profile may be fake or that it is inappropriate, you can report it. A profile may be fake if it appears empty or if it contains profanity, fake names, or impersonates public figures
They may use a real name and they may have worked some of those companies just lie about their technical level, experience, what part of the projects they worked on, etc. Those may not be covered by the reporting guidelines.
I'd actually say that _not_ using AI to prepare for an interview is mistake, putting you at a major disadvantage (and there are plenty of honest ways to use it).
You can practice with AI if you want, but it is definitely not necessary. I would much rather have someone say "I don't know that one" (and have hired many people who did), rather than have someone provide some content ChatGPT gave them the day before.
Not my favorite AI driven change as I think live coding is so high pressure it can give wrong signals.
Asking developers to explain why they wrote that code mitigates against using LLM coding tools - if the candidate can’t back it up then they’ll do poorly in it.
I recently had a candidate submit an otherwise average exercise that was a big mish-mash of coding styles (inconsistently using var/let/const in js, for example). When asked about it, they weren’t able to explain their choice at all and just stumbled through it.
That was typical before some students got handed a lot of dotcom boom money.
(And then somehow most interviews throughout the industry became based on what a CS student with no experience thought professional software development was about. Then it became about everyone playing to the bad metrics and rituals that had been institutionalized.)
You can ask questions based on a resume without them disclosing IP, nor the appearance of it.
That resume-based questions thwarted a cheater in this case was a bonus.
Regarding cheating, and the widespread organized sharing of "which questions did this company ask, and what are the answers", the conversation isn't so vulnerable to that.
* they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or
* they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or
* DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or
* some other HR theory?
He proudly said they don’t ask questions based on resume, because they don’t care where you worked or where you went to school…as long as you know your stuff. In fact he only looks at the resume after the interview.
I wonder how long they will stick to this stubbornness.
So why not just have a lottery instead of a hiring process?
/s But only slightly.
so all I can say is fix your assessments because this whole “they cheated” idea isnt universal, and more likely matches what people do on your job already
but for anyone that didnt read this article yet, this one is just about embellished experience custom tailored to get the interview, and there was no technical assessment
Plenty of candidates are willing to lie and as we see here AI has made lying much cheaper. There is nothing you can put on your resume that AI couldn't have put there for anyone. But AI can't yet fake a network.
Personally, I'll put in second-degree referrals to my company: if someone I have worked with has worked with the person and is willing to personally vouch for them, I'll put their resume in and ping the recruiter (yes, it's gotten so bad even internal referrals don't break through the slush pile without a specific ping.) But I get the recruiter's attention because I only recommend people I have reason to think are actually good.
Anyone paying attention has started planning accordingly for this over the last couple years. The remote work revolution has resolutely failed, and it's clear in retrospect it never had a chance.
It does require knowing how to collaborate remotely and being an already-skilled developer, but just because the bar is higher (and many people seem uninterested in meeting it) doesn't mean it has "failed".
There always have been. Companies have made remote exceptions for decades.
What we lost was the chance to normalize it for everyone. The bosses put that delusion to bed real quick.
Yeah, hiring is scary. Hiring is insanely expensive on all fronts. Firing people is difficult, it's expensive and legally exposing. Hiring the wrong person, allowing them access your systems and potentially exfiltrate your IP to them is a hazardous but necessary venture.
The thing is, none of these things really changed with AI. People have been lying about their experience for literally centuries. IMO the advent of AI-laden candidates is going to nudge the hiring process back to how we did it 10 years ago, with a good old fashioned face-to-face interview and whiteboard questions. This means a lot of things that we've grown accustomed to in the past 5 years is going to have to melt.
- people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
- awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
- And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Companies should consider reverting to forking the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.
There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.
IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.
They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.
One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.
The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.
> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
In the real world, they don't.
If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.
It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.
There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)
Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.
Cortisol has never improved a line of code.
Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.
So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.
Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.
Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make.
> I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.
Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.
You’re absolutely right this would filter out candidates like me.
I agree that lying was possible before AI, but something about AI has emboldened a lot more people to try to lie.
Something about having the machine fabricate the lie for you seems to lessen the guilt of lying.
There's also a growing sentiment online that using AI to cheat/lie is "fair" because they think companies are using AI to screen candidates. It's not logically consistent, but it appeals to people who approach these problems as class warfare.
(The recruiters only come in for non-technical parts like resume filtering, general information and benefits. Sometimes there is non-technical "culture fit" interview, that is usually some sort of middle manager from the department doing the hiring)
People taking minute-long pauses before answering questions. People confidently saying things that are factually incorrect and not being able to explain why they would say that. People submitting code they don't understand & getting mad when asked why they wrote something that way.
I get that candidates are desperate for jobs, because a bunch of tech companies have given up on building useful software and are betting their entire business on these spam bots instead, but these techniques _do not help_. They just make the interview a waste of time for the candidate and the interviewer alike.
- A candidate who wore glasses and I could faintly see the reflection of ChatGPT.
- A candidate that would pause and look in a different specific direction and think for about 20, 30 seconds whenever I asked something a bit difficult. It was always the same direction, so it could have been a second monitor.
- Someone who provided us with a Resumé that said 25 years of experience but the text was 100% early ChatGPT, full of superlatives. I forgot to open the CV before the interview, but this was SO BAD that I ended in about 20 minutes.
- Also, few months before ChatGPT I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
Our freelance recruiter said that people who aren't super social are getting the short end of the stick. Some haven't worked for one, two years. It's rough.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
Just like with semi-personalized phishing/spam, it's not that these things didn't happen already, it's that people are empowered and emboldened to cheat by it becoming easier. The difference is in quantitative not qualitative.
How is it not logically consistent?
i used my words to speak to the candidate, so they think its fair game to use their words to lie.
screening using AI could be a totally legitimate usage of AI depending on how its done. cheating/lying has no chance of being legitimate. just like speaking can potentially be used to lie.
most people here arent straight up vilifying the use of AI, just certain uses of it.
But not using it for creating lies and pretending you're skilled in areas where you're not.
Or would you say that if HR uses humans to screen CVs, you can cheat by using a friend's CV instead (using a human, like HR)
It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.
That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.
That's a false equivalence on your part. Real equivalence would be to find out that the store decided to keep zero tills manned and forced you to do the work yourself and go the self checkout. You go do the self checkout and keep a few items extra as a form of payment for the work you did. This would be the real equivalence
If your interview format allows people to use outside help but only if they think to ask, that's hardly a level playing field. You're testing the candidate's willingness to ask. In most interview formats it would not be acceptable to Google the answer, so most people won't ask.
If you have an interview format that allows Googling, you should mention that at the start. Not leave it as a secret for people to discover.
The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?
and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.
In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?
I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.
If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)
Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.
Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.
Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.
Where there was clear benefit to the trip, perhaps. Otherwise no – senior talent time is way too valuable to be jetting around the world on wild goose chases.
The interview is the time to discuss if there is any benefit to be had. Maybe you'd consider the trip after everyone is generally happy, offers are on the table, and you feel the need for final due diligence. But you are past interview territory at that point.
They'll come to you if face-to-face during the interview is deemed important.
No. Those are costumes that benefit no one but the seller of the costume. They wear the costume precisely once and never put it on again. It's an old classist ritual that forces people to spend money on clothes they dont want or need.
This particular signal also indicates a willingness to set aside one's individual ego in order to assimilate in the workplace, which is especially valuable to the companies demanding developers abandon good sense in order to push AI adoption.
If we want that signals to not be "a suit", it will need to be something else. But one advantage suits have is that they have served as that signal for so long that they are extremely accessible: just go to the thrift store, take what you find to a tailor and you are good to go. It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
The highest-paying developer jobs have always expected programmers to wear suits to the interviews: in a recession those things previously only top payers could demand cascade down market. I don't love it, but I don't think this prediction is wrong.
> It is very easy to look up what is expected, and there are a variety of ways to trade money for effort or vice versa.
This confuses me. Am I doing manual work for my tailor? Am I tailoring my own suit?
this is the inverse of the hacker aesthetic. you might be right, but it's just sad.
personally, I'd assume the candidates that look the most non-conforming would be more talented and creative - more likely to love the work than the paycheck - but maybe it's no surprise that the highest-paying positions look for suits like quants at an investment bank.
I am FAANG/FAANG adjacent. People making 400-700k/yr. I only see suits at holiday parties.
No, business casual is just fine. Who wants to try to do a grueling technical interview in a suit? No thanks. I sweat enough as it is in interviews.
> - people are probably going to have to fly out for interviews, again.
Fly where? Many companies don't have offices anymore.
> - awkward and/or neurodivergent people are going to have to learn social skills again.
Ahh... the age old, "just do better" position for neurodivergent people. Classic bigotry.
> - And yeah, you guys, it's time to buy a suit.
Suits were out in tech 30 years ago when I first interviewed. They have only gone more out of style. Fashion doesn't work the way you think it works.
My guess is that we'll see more contract-to-hire positions and "talking through code" style interviews. Though I think we'll see lots of things tried which will be a general improvement over what much of the industry was doing before.
But neurodivergense is not just a lack of social skills. Painting it this way is one of the reasons people don't understand it and act with bias against those suffering from it. It is a disability and is recognized by the ADA.
Typically, in a context where practical accomodations are being discussed one would want to address specific needs. A person with dyslexia isn't going to need the same accomodations as someone with ADHD, for example
All this aside, if you have e.g. crippling anxiety such that you can't make it through an interview unaided, you probably won't be successful in that job, whatever it is. Whereas a deaf person or someone in a wheelchair would have no long-term problem.
And while someone on the autism spectrum is born that way, anxiety is inflicted. Of course, Genetic temperament plays a role in one's predisposition to anxiety, just like with many physiological illnesses.
In a nutshell, Autism is neither an illness or disorder, but merely a "different order", while crippling anxiety is actually a disorder.
The kind of autism discussed here is, trivialize their experiences and challenges. It's borderline insulting to those for witch it is a disorder.
It's not as simple as "requiring people to be able to interact with other people."
In fact many mention it up front on the screening call before any questions are asked.
so neuro divergence isn't a legitimate disability?
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reas...
It doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, if being able to function well around other humans is a job requirement, as it often is in technical occupations. Why do you think behavioral questions are often asked during interviews?
For the same reason someone who requires a wheelchair could not reasonably be expected to be a firefighter, or a blind person be a pilot or bus driver, regardless of any accommodation provided.
I mean, this comment is literally an emotion. It's not a fact, and even if it was, well it's changing thanks to AI and all the people who promote AI, and AI isn't going anywhere, so neurodivergent people really I think might have to disclose it/ Maybe if they can truly prove that they are neurodivergent, companies can go back to remote interviews?
The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.
As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.
Anyway in Germany I bet there’s a Taubenausweis (Gehöhrlosigkeitsbescheinigung?) or other form of official status marker, and the employer would expect you to show it to HR.
When it comes to the types of disabilities that are being discussed in this thread and that I was referring to - to say varied types of autism - I doubt any type of organisation that treats employees as "resources" will work in a decent way.
It's dehumanizing, it's lacking empathy, and it usually ends up having people trivialise the problem a person might suffer from.
As long as the disability doesn't prevent a person from executing their contractual obligations, gatekeeping a position behind "you need to be able to function in society" is an indecent request to people that have difficulties doing so.
And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I for one would like my manager and my employer to understand when I tell them I have trouble in loud open spaces with many people and disruptions, and I would prefer to do my job at home in a comfortable environment.
How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
That's exactly the context. In the US, if you're being asked to prove a disability, it's part of a request for accommodations.
> And from personal experience, once you're in the second half of your life, looking for an autism diagnosis and then using that to fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy required to get a government approved "stigma certificate" is a chore that really eats into one's provision of spoons.
I'm in my 30s, but that's been my experience as well. Unfortunately, from personal experience as well, finding a new job after being fired with cause due to failing to obtain ADA protections really eats into one's spoons too.
> How do you propose I demonstrate to you that being in an office severely impairs my ability to reason about problems and write code? Is heart rate enough? Are higher bugs per feature enough? Is being an asshole to people enough?
Why guess? A diagnosis per the DSM by a qualified professional is how you demonstrate impairment. It's also how you guarantee accommodations. As a bonus, it often come with suggestions tailored to your specific disability.
Just a doctor's note/certificate actually.
> Fight the gauntlet of bureaucracy needed to get a government approved certificate is a chore
Well that is a separate problem. Yes, bureaucracy causes a lot of problems(even renewing your driver's license is a pain), but that doesn't mean the entire basis of needing to prove you are disabled should be thrown away. Everyone in their life faces shit bureaucracy, it's not news.
This was in Germany.
Ultimately, accommodations help but they don’t place me on even ground: they still single me out and make people consider whether I’m capable based on accessibility, not skill.
Presumably to meet the boss. And maybe the key people on the team.
Hiring is all about finding the best candidate. If you find you cannot function sitting in conference room with three other people for an hour, there is a 100% chance there is a better candidate suited for the role, even if his/her technical skills are less than yours.
Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
This assumes that was the job? What if the job never talks or sits in a room with anyone?
> Hiring is all about finding the best candidate.
Then what is leet code about?
That's perfectly fine. Some coding jobs also don't require deep knowledge on data structures. Each company and project has its own requirements.
This does not reject the value of soft skills and being able to interact with other people.
You can also frame this from another perspective. How far should a hiring manager go to accommodate antisocial and straight out toxic people? Does an eggregious backstabber have the right to advance in hiring processes just because others found him unpleasant to work with?
You're complaining about the hypothetical effectiveness of concrete hiring practices. You are not rejecting the value and importance of soft skills.
Also, the ability to work under pressure is valuable skill. If you have a candidate that fails to perform when being in a room with someone else, I doubt you can argue that that's your hiring decision when other candidates are able to perform in similar circumstances.
All of the really damaging hires, I’ve seen in the last couple decades have been engineers with high negative productivity who were great at passing high pressure technical interviews.
Also in a couple decades working everywhere from startups to big tech companies in staff+ roles, I have never experienced anything even remotely similar to a performative technical interview. Even when everything is on fire, it’s not even close to the same thing.
Let's fix the real problem then? Why can't tech be like this?
Why should it? What problems would they solve? Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
And as far as certs go, just having a simple one for algorithms/data structures can seriously fix the issue of having to go through the Leetcode gauntlet at every single place one interviews at. A certificate for that class of questions would go a long way towards smoothing the existing interview process. DRY, anyone?
We clearly do have a problem. No 1 learns from past mistakes. We keep reinventing the wheel e.g. the land of NodeJs, Javascript, etc. Even within companies there's no learnings passed down. Each new hire thinks they're the best and tries to redo it all.
> Are you so afraid of competing with those who might not get a certiciation?
I rather compete on certification than compete on leet code. Do you miss the point that the whole leet code system has nothing to do with any job? At least certification might be slightly be relevant.
The whole point of credentials is that they are designed to be revoked. That's their whole point. If your credentials are pulled, you lose your ability to practice. That's by design. They are not gate-keeping tools. They are "this guy killed patients, so let's keep him far away from them" tools.
The closest thing you’ll find is actors and musicians auditioning. But performing is an actually a part of their job.
Nurses only have 4 years of school and they don’t have whiteboard interview equivalents. Medical technicians don’t either and they don’t even have degrees in most cases.
Also one minor correction most residencies are 3 years, although some are longer.
* special demerits to Canonical
No, not really. Take for example FANGs. Their hiring process is notorious for culminating with an on-site interview, where 4 or more interviewers grill you on all topics they find relevant.
Some FANGs are also very clear that their hiring process focuses particularly on soft-skills.
Where in the world do hope to find an engineering job where you are not evaluated on soft skills and cultural fit?
In this context when you say perform I assumed (as would most people) that you’re talking about technical/work sample interviews not culture fit tell me about a time you did x interviews.
If you’re talking about those, then yes every job in every industry does that. If you’re talking about stand at this white board and solve a problem that I know the answer to to while I watch.
No one outside of software engineering does this for anyone but new grads.
I think you're failing to understand what actually happens in hiring rounds. You stand in front of a whiteboard to showcase your knowledge on abstract topics like systems architecture. This is exactly what happens in the real world in design rounds. I lost count of the amount of time I spent in front of a whiteboard this year alone. Perhaps you don't work with systems architecture, but if you are applying for a position where in the very least you are expected to have a cursory understanding of systems architecture, you are obviously expected to showcase your skills to help hiring managers compare you with other applicants.
And no. The point of whiteboards is not to solve problems. Their point is to help you present and clarify your thoughts in a dialogue with people in the room. It's a communication tool.
1. No other industry makes senior people perform “work sample” tests in interviews with the exceptions I mentioned above.
2. There is absolutely no comparison between whiteboard sessions in interviews and in reality.
I have never once had a whiteboard session where someone says “I’m going to give you a system to design. I have built 100 of these systems before, so I have fairly specific things I’m gonna to look for. But I’m not going to tell you exactly what those are. You have 45 minutes in which to do it. No you can’t think about it over lunch. No you can’t spend 30 minutes reading up on it. No we can’t do another session tomorrow.”
If you think this is anything remotely like designing a system in real life, I definitely don’t want to work anywhere you have.
>expected to showcase your skills
Yeah that’s my point. Other industries don’t do this for senior people because they realized it’s not actually predictive enough to be worth it.
EVERY job in EVERY industry???
Well apparently the penguins have to pay tariffs. Do you know what industry they are in and how they do interviews?
I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure? Like, 'do this thing now or you're fired/the company goes under' and so forth? The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
I haven't been under significant pressure in the past 10 or so years of software engineering. Not when on live ops diagnosing why our server is failing to work in prod, not when identifying critical client crashes.
Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.
Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/
> Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure
No, it's not. I've had to work weekends before. We had a live ops rotation that would occur roughly once every eight weeks or so for me. The times I've had to work on the weekend were due to needing to solve some prod bug that was causing relatively minor headaches but they wanted some triage and solutions in earlier as possible. This was not a 'you are fired if you fail to solve the bug issue' or a thing where management is breathing down my neck to fix it because they're all busy sleeping on the weekend while I'm tanking the call.
It's often the result of either shitty management or people that cannot log off.
> No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".
Crunch time is a vastly different kind of pressure. I would know, I've worked in professional game development. And again, it's often the result of shitty management. If a game is going to fail and management is forcing you to work long hours in order to fix it then it's time to walk away.
All the time. Depends on where you work. It happens in startups, small companies and many others. Even in large organizations with stack ranking for example.
> The kind of snap pressure that interviews can push on you.
Not even close to the same. How do you equate pressure? Someone can fear spiders more than jumping off a cliff. Crunch time for them can be less than interviews. Point being?
At FAANG and friends? Discouraging job hopping to slow wage growth.
Elsewhere? "FAANG does it and they're rich, so if we want to become rich we should also do it".
> Jobs have soft skill requirements, and there is nothing bigoted about that.
Everything you just said also applies to someone who's deaf, blind, or physically impaired.
Apply that same logic to someone with one of those conditions, and enjoy losing the discrimination lawsuit.
A blind person is not a good bus driver. A physically impaired person is not a good mover or yoga teacher. A deaf person is not a good session musician. A person who cannot function sitting in a meeting with 3 people for an hour is not a good employee where that is required. What makes the last one special compared to others? They can be a great yoga teacher/bus driver/session musician/mover, I just don't see controversy
Just because they are physically impaired now doesn't mean they were before, and an instructor won't necessarily move through the poses with the class since they can have 2-3 classes per day.
Edit: replaced "triggered" with "don't like"
Simple accommodations can be made if needed and then there's no need to exclude people on old-fashioned prejudice.
maybe there is a company where being an amazing programmer is enough. I worked with capable depressed programmer who never delivers and is too shy to delegate anything, capable psycho programmer who no one wants to work with, bad programmer who works crazy hours, carries the project and interacts nicely with customers when needed. The last one was probably the most valuable
I mean... that's what the title and context of the discussion thread is all about?
People sometimes think that's a silly thing to ponder: it's obviously obvious! But at most places I've worked, we spend lots of time defining the technical skills required for a job and handwave the rest.
I guess people assume "they'll know it when they see it". But there's a lot of ambiguity. Parent comment suggests that being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement. I've worked at places where the important thing was being able to go away and make progress on something for a few weeks.
I suspect there are people with autism reading these threads and feeling disheartened. It would be easy to leave with the impression that neurotypical people expect you to make all the effort and they won't try to meet you half way. Some workplaces are like that. But in all the talk about neurotypical vs neurodivergent, it's easy to forget that neurotypical people are a varied lot, just like neurodivergent people. Workplaces are a varied lot too.
In this respect interviewing is a bit like LeetCode. LeetCode problems and writing code to satisfy business requirements are both "coding" but they're quite different kinds of coding; someone being able to do the former is probably good evidence they can do the latter, but there are also plenty of people who can do the latter without being able to do the former. So it is, in my view, with interviewing vs. interacting with people on the job.
Being able to communicate clearly and interact with coworkers is the most basic soft skill required for most jobs.
Communicating clearly with coworkers is foundational to interviews because you have to communicate as part of the interview. Don't overthink it into something more complicated.
> being comfortable sitting in a conference room for an hour is an important part of their job. In some workplaces that would be an odd requirement.
I think you're taking it too literally. Being able to converse with coworkers in a conference room is an interview proxy for being able to communicate with coworkers on the job. You're not literally testing their ability to sit in a conference room, you just happen to be in a conference room because that's where the interview takes place.
The internet is always full of arguments that some people might be really bad at interviewing but great at the job. That's true to some degree, but in my experience a lot of the difficult behaviors that show up in the interview (poor communication, uncomfortable talking to coworkers, or even if someone is difficult to work with) don't disappear after those candidates are hired. People are usually trying their hardest during the interview to look good, so often those characteristics become worse, not better, once they're hired.
It's tough to discuss online because nobody likes to think about rejecting people for soft skills. We want to maintain this Platonic ideal of a programmer who creates brilliant code in a vacuum and nothing else matters, but in real jobs clear communication is really important.
While i dont agree with the idea we'll be flying anywhere for interviews, havent most companies gone back on remote work. "hybrid" is a benefit now and being in the office is the expectation.
I think you're too eager to throw personal attacks on those who raise valid points that are you feel are uncomfortable to address.
You should be aware that engineering is a social activity that requires hard skills. In any project that employs more than one person, you need to be able to interact with others. This means being able to effectively address and interact with others around you.
If you give anyone a choice, anyone at all, on who they work with, they will of course favor those who they are able to effectively interact with.
This is not bigotry, is it?
If "those who they are able to effectively interact with" ends up meaning only people who look, act, or believe like them, then yes it absolutely is.
A more charitable interpretation might mean “the candidate is able to clearly explain (through some medium: orally, typing, etc) how their code works, and why they picked that solution. They were also able to correctly answer follow up questions”. If _that_ is what is meant, then that’s not bigotry IMO.
For everyone here who appreciates the effort to remove unconscious bias from these decisions as much as possible, because they genuinely want to find the most capable person for the job regardless of their personal preferences, there's still a whole world out there where that bias is not only desirable but celebrated.
It's everyone. You don't get to cherry pick.
That's why hiring managers should focus on soft skills. Their job is to hire the guy that fits in your organization and everyone in it is able to effortlessly work with. When hiring managers do their job, you don't need to go way out of your way to suffer toxic people who are utterly unpleasant to work with. Hiring managers filter them out. Problem averted.
Or maybe it works exactly the way they think? Suits are so out, that wearing one is a strong signal of "different thinking" in a way that being casual once was. A colleague of mind would wear a three-piece on "casual Friday", and always showed up to the nines for interviews. Never harmed him, just reinforced his "think different" bona fides.
Others have already commented on this, but do you work in tech? IME getting interviewed by directors and even VPs in t-shirts is the norm. I’ve worn jeans to work my whole career. If anything, I think people in tech have a strong prejudice against people in suits (ie “obviously this person isn’t a real software engineer, they’re wearing a suit.”)
Anyway, probably not good career advice to wear a suit unless dress codes at tech companies are suddenly subject to drastic changes.
In start ups, I have seen candidates nearly rejected just on a suit alone. Def started them on the wrong foot impression wise.
'Uniforms' can go both ways. Would a person who only owns white Oxford shirts and monochrome dress pants have to go out and buy a new wardrobe he would feel very uncomfortable in if he wanted to work there? People who wear 20 year old band t-shirts can be every bit as judgemental about looks as people who wear tailored Italian suits.
Hipster/lumberjack can also work. Make sure the jeans are $400 Japanese raw selvedge to really get it right.
The highest ranking person I ever shook hands with was the GP Morgan head of futures department. He came to talk to the whole company to prep for acquisition. So, it wasn't a super official "ceremony", but it was in front of some fifty men, including senior management of the said company. He was wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. I don't know if this is how he'd show up to his office in the bank. Likely not (but who knows?)
Also, nobody in that room was wearing a suit.
Maybe your advise works for other places. For vast majority of programming jobs showing up overdressed will raise more questions about your sanity than score any points on preparedness.
I recommend a t-shirt with a tuxedo design printed on the front. The very definition of smart casual.
He was wearing some sort of jeans and polo shirt combination (the same as the other executives) and it looked terrible to me (the proportions were wrong, the jeans were too long--he looked like a clown) and I thought his attire was disrespectful. The people there, who cared about looking presentable given the importance of the event for the 200-person satellite office, looked much better than the power-ups.
In my opinion, this doesn't show that he only cares about the work and not silly, old-fashioned dress codes, but that he's too good for us to take the time to look good.
In case you mean JP Morgan, here's the CEO, Jamie Dimon, on cover of annual shareholder letter, back in ... 2015:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jamie-dimons-style-telling-jp...
My expectation is that turning up in a suit would get better results. The effect is probably smaller in hard-skill roles but I'd assume still present.
These are just instances of my point (a): not having a clue about SV work culture.
> there are even people who wear suits all the time
Not in silicon valley tech. I mean, sure, maybe there's one guy and the number is not zero.
Turning up in formal business wear isn’t going to be a positive social cue if everybody you interact with is dressed casually.
The social cue you’d be giving off is that you stick out like a sore thumb and probably didn’t do your research on the company before you showed up.
Literally no different than turning up to Lloyd’s of London in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts.
So then by your own admission, the best way to come dressed is the same way your interviewer tends to dress.
Which is essentially what most people in this thread are arguing for - dress to match the company's culture.
There are many ways to wear a suit. If you walking in wearing a suit that doesn't fit, doesn't suite (no pun intended) you, and it obviously makes you feel uncomfortable then that could count against you. But you walk in wearing a suit that fits, makes you look good, and that you are comfortable wearing, then I have a hard time seeing how it will count against you.
If an interviewer can't tell the difference between a flex and show of good intent, they probably should go back to jobs where they don't need to make judgements of character.
If you forgive me the analogy, and assuming you're American, would you think of checking the etiquette of entering into a shop? In the US, the concept itself is weird, you go in, buy stuff, and leave. In France, you must greet the shopkeeper right as you go in through the door. In Hungary, you must wish the shopkeeper a good day in reply to their greeting. It's simple... if you know it's even a thing you should check.
As long as suits and ties remain the uniform of politicians and managers, I don't think techies will ever willingly adopt it for themselves as well.
Being hyper judgemental about the clothes people wear isn't productive
However, like it or not, it is a signal because it means you deviate significantly from the mode of the distribution. And a sober application of Bayes suggests that if anything, all else equal that signal is a negative one.
Admittedly I thankfully wasn't in the SV bubble where people are wound this tightly about it!
I personally dress like a hobo when I'm out and about, and wear a uniform of jeans and a blue shirt when I go into the office, so I really don't care about the suit either way. I'm wearing it for your benefit, so if you don't like it, just tell me upfront - don't make me guess if the job isn't about mindreading.
I now have no idea how I am supposed to dress for most things other than formal occasions like wedding, funerals, or formal dinners.
Can't go wrong with “smart casual”
// not sure that helps :)
What if wearing a suit is "being myself"? You'll be penalized in tech for that.
Not everyone views the wearing of suits as some kind of punishment.
(1) This person really really needs the job. Probably is in a bad negotiation position, due to this urgent need.
(2) Are you here to impress people with looks, or with your skills?
(3) They take looks way more serious than they should, maybe not focussing enough on the technical side of things.
(4) Hopefully this is not an "EnTeRpRiSe software" developer, and if they are, hopefully they don't work on my team and if they are, hopefully my next up manager does not get blinded by fancy clothes, instead of technical reasoning.
That said, I would try to keep an open mind about the person, but they would be initially sorted into the category of managerial or close to management, rather than close to the other engineers, which is not a positive signal to send.
So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.
And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
Like it or not, if someone needs to wear a suit to feel confident that says something about them. It may just be a personality quirk of them unrelated to their skills, but it often is not. There’s no reason you need to wear a suit to feel confident.
> You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.
How often does tech discriminate for “culture fit” reasons? Someone’s personality fit is often a huge point of contention, and wearing a suit is part of someone’s personality and choices.
I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I’d suggest you reacquaint yourself with the comment guidelines, as this just is a simple ad hominem attack on me, despite not even making any claims as to what I wear to work.
Replace “wearing a suit” with literally anything else unrelated to programming skills. Wearing a dress. Having a particular speech pattern. Being old.
As soon as you start judging people for anything other than their performance you fucked up. People’s personality comes through in the interview process. By the end of an hour working with someone you should have a pretty good idea of what working with them is like, suit or no suit.
> I’m not advocating for it being an absolute state, but you certainly have to give some consideration to the fact that dressing up far more than is needed implies you don’t culturally understand. It’s as simple as that.
I'm not saying you immediately throw a candidate out for wearing a suit. It's entirely possible I'm wrong and my mind can be changed by their performance, but it is something that would make me take a closer look.
I'll give you another example I experienced recently: a candidate who would not stop drumming their fingers on the table throughout the interview. Is that specifically related to their performance? No, not really. Is it annoying, a bit disrespectful, and shows a lack of restraint? Yeah, it is. This candidate had other flaws that made them disqualifying, but their finger drumming didn't help them at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I would like to point out that a rule that allows someone to openly state they discriminate during interviews but forbids a strong reaction to that statement might require some examination.
You could just as easily argue that people “discriminate” against candidates by making them do leetcode, when leetcode is unrelated to performance at the job. Leetcode is a performance some people look at during interviews, just like how you socially meld in an interview is a performance people look at during interviews.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimming
I have no idea since I wasn’t there when you interviewed that person but it is something that came to mind.
But that is also a narrow view of the world, no? Who says a suit looks good? What if I think pajamas looks good? I am exaggerating of course, but I often think suits don't look particularly better or anything. It is just some random norm, that society has ascribed to that particular piece of clothing. I often find simple, one color only, no writing on it, clothing looking better.
> And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.
I don't, but I do get a sense of them possibly being a bit vain. But more importantly, I think about why I don't wear such a beard. It is annoying when eating, and I don't want my beard in my food. So I will be a little bit baffled by their choice, but it is their choice anyway. I don't have to like it.
Especially if you’re an interviewer.
Great. Fantastic job everyone /S
At least requiring a suit requires something aesthetically better and more worthy of human dignity. Reverse snobbery demands you dress worse and beneath it.
In the Western world, for a long time, at least 100 years, a suit was considered the proper attire for men. Then expectations changed and now some, many even, consider jeans and a t-shirt as aesthetically pleasing as a suit. Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer, who will turn up to an hour-long meeting that you'll pay 500 dollars for in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
Traditionally, it was a suit and hat. Going suit alone was already "dressing down". It is funny that we now consider that to be the paragon of male fashion.
> Maybe in a few years, you'll go and talk to your lawyer [...] in a tracksuit and it'll be perfectly fine, you'll even find the attire aesthetically pleasing.
It seems we'll question why he isn't wearing jeans and a t-shirt like a dignified man.
Most people off the street would agree that a suit is more dignified, and it's not without reason. Wearing a suit indicates a level of discipline, effort, and intention about the way that you look that simply wearing a t shirt with jeans does not.
To contrast, the historical reason for the t shirt / jeans combo is practicality and convenience; tech as an industry got away with it at first, because techies were not interfacing with clients directly or simply because they're working class.
You can argue about the elitism and class differences surrounding suits versus t shirts and jeans, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that suits aren't aesthetically better just because of the media image for hacker types.
So all we have is the tradition that "high status males" in the traditional power roles wear suits when in public, which is true and valid, but it does not translate into the inherent superiority of this garment.
The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.
For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.
Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
I mean you can argue aesthetics, but it’s a fact that in the western world, a suit is considered by everyone, more or less, to be more formal than T-shirt and jeans, and more formal is widely considered to be more dignified than casual wear. The first principles that matter aren’t aesthetics, they are more likely customs and class (socioeconomic status).
Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.
I interviewed elsewhere and one other time I wore an Oxford. I passed the university interview but the hiring manager told me for the on campus interview to not wear that again, or I'll stick out too much. I wore a plain T-shirt and have been happily employed for 10 years here :)
I got the job, but was then told "don't listen to your mother"!
Thanks mom!
I always get a positive response.
But you do highlight the flaw of natural language, where it only works where there already is a shared understanding. When quite often there isn't. Heck, 90% of the comments on HN are from actors having different understandings for technical jargon and talking past each other because they aren't even talking about the same thing. Such is the tragedy of the human existence.
It's not like these are skills that they haven't learned, these are things that they have a hard time with. Expecting them to be 'normal' is like asking a person of medium stature to be taller. They could mask them but ultimately it's not who they are and expecting everyone to be the same is a fools errand.
Basic game theory, really. Business are not charities. Hiring a neurodiverse person is riskier than a neurotypical one.
You sound like a typical classist MBA; don't you have Linkedin posts to make and employees to micromanage?
No company worth working for would refuse to hire someone just because they didn't wear a suit to their interview
Dress nicely, sure. Wear a collar? Yeah probably. A tie? Meh.
Let's get rid of this old fashioned boomer nonsense from hiring please
I agree no one will explicitly decide one way or another based on how you dress. But making everyone in the room feel comfortable with each other will help the whole process.
At my previous employer, I had to convince several people in my team that wearing a suit was NOT a reason to reject a candidate out of hand. It's really difficult to gauge the expected dress code at a company beforehand, but it's not good advice to just blindly dress up.
Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.
The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.
Millenia. Just ask Nanni what happened when he trusted Ea-nāṣir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
That said, I very much agree with your last paragraph. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of hiring was done this way in the US.
In an American context, this is generally true in 49 out of 50 states, except that the probation period covers the entire duration of your employment. The people who say firing is expensive are thinking about something else.
And I’m a hiring manager. I’m trying to slot new hires with the training they will need and give them realistic tasks I know they can accomplish. And it’s not easy. I’m already 30 days in on a new hire that I’ve been able to peer with for 2 days. And I’m constantly apologizing for the lack of time.
I worry about the retreat to networks. I think it's an inevitable response to the rise of machine-generated fakes, that people are going to start strongly preferring to be physically next to someone talking to them simply in order to verify that they're real, not one of the billions of apparitions knocking on their virtual door. But it also pushes back to networks of preferred universities and preferred drinking societies within those universities. All of which have the opportunity to be little discriminatory clubs.
We just need some sort of qualification which tests practical knowledge.
I could even go further and say that NOT hiring anyone who shows up in a suit will give you better results than the other way around. You filter out a lot of career guys who are really poor programmers and will try to end up as mediocre middle management that way.
In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.
The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”
Yeah, no. I'd deduct points if the candidate wears a suit. What a huge red flag, missing all sorts of context and appropriateness cues.
The problem with hiring in IT is that it's a bit of a broken system. On one hand you have companies that are overly picky and are alienating good candidates with their convoluted/mildy unfair hiring processes. Being overly picky when it's hard to get good candidates to show any interest because they are in demand is of course counter productive. This has been the default for the last decades. Lots of demand, not a lot of supply of great candidates.
And then on the other hand you have the recruiter / bodies for hire market with candidates that are maybe not that great being lined up with opportunities that are a bit ambitious for their skills. There you need good filters.
I've been on both sides of the table.
My process for hiring is:
- Pre-screen CVs and look for smells (job hopping, a string of meh employers, poor technical skill match, lack of seniority, etc.). You can read a lot from a CV. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt here. But given 20 CVs, I'm not talking to 20 people.
- Quick phone interview either with myself or somebody I trust to have good judgment. This is a critical call. Mostly this is to confirm the basics line up (availability, expectations, skills).
- Interviews in person (ideally). At this point I either like the person or I really don't. Yes this is subjective. But initial impressions seem to have a strong correlation to long term outcomes. Again benefit of the doubt here. But I'm not going to pretend it's not influencing the outcome.
- Decision to proceed with negotiations or not.
Note I don't do any coding interviews whatsoever. I hate those with a passion. They don't tell me anything. I prefer portfolios (e.g. Github) or having candiates talk about something they did. I'm not going to probe them for encylopedic knowledge of algorithms, doing some shitty IQ test, or whatever.
What's a meh employer?
Not in an interview where maybe they're flustered, this was just an ordinary day on the job. They'd been in strange little enterprise vendor-silo programming environments their entire career. This was accompanied by exactly the sort of lack of understanding of lots of other stuff that you'd expect.
The flip side of this is programmers pushing companies to let them use k8s and Rust and shit when there's not a good business case for it, for fear of having a résumé that eventually starts to look like it could belong to that guy. Not wanting to look like him is a big part of the whole résumé driven development phenomenon.
There's a lot of that going on where companies just don't realize that they aren't just filtering bad candidates out but scaring the best ones away because they approach them wrong. Hiring is as much a sales job as it is a filtering job. After you filter out the bad candidates, how do you make sure you don't lose the good candidates? How do you get them into your hiring funnel to begin with? The assumption that these candidates are going to drop on their knees and beg you to please employ them is just extremely misguided in many cases.
Whenever you hear companies complain that they can't find good people, that's what's going on. Mostly it boils down to the company not being that great and candidates flocking to more interesting opportunities.
Most of your points I agree with, but this? Cmon grandpa
Whatever future interviews look like, I sure as hell hope we don't maintain this ^ attitude.
No man, it's not and never was - unless you are aiming for a "career" at JP Morgan and the likes.
The real answer here is: know the dress expectations of the place you’re applying to, and consider whether you feel comfortable working for a place that won’t pay you the courtesy of letting you dress yourself.
The thing with interviewing is that ultimately the questions are fundamentally unpredictable. No coach, or AI, can truly anticipate what the questions will be.
Candidates who rely on AI seem to just be totally turning their brains off. At least a candidate who was embellishing in the old days would try to BS if they were caught. They could try and fill in the blanks. These candidates give plausible-sounding answers and then truly just give up and say "ummm" when you reach the end of their preparation.
I've been interviewing for 10+ years across multiple startups and this was never a problem before. Even when candidates didn't have a lot of relevant experience we could have a conversation and they could demonstrate their knowledge and problem-solving skills. I've had some long, painful sessions with a candidate who was completely lost but they never just gave up completely.
Developers I've worked with and interviewed who rely on AI daily are just completely helpless without it. It's amazing how some senior+ engineers have just lost their ability to reason or talk about code.
Alternatively, there are people who haven't been promoted but think their AI-fu is so good they obviously should have been, without realizing that "senior" is actually a different role, with additional responsibilities.
I've found asking about their pedagogy when coaching junior engineers is a great sorting strategy right now. It isn't something a lot of people have written about so ChatGPT's answers are full of useless platitudes, and mid-level engineers often don't even know that it is part of the job.
I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.
That way we can spend massive piles of money on cloud compute, monitoring, documentation, not to mention the constant maintenance to mitigate the security issues in the multiple layers of libraries we depended on.