> If your potential employer is dehumanizing you before you’re on the payroll, how will they treat you once hired?
For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.
I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.)
I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?
This is more or less the go-to standard in the usa. One property manager handles possibly hundreds in an association, or dozens of townhomes, and will refuse to speak to you directly, except through a maintenance request system. Its incredibly depressing
To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.
Applicants are using AI too. I've heard from people who hire/post jobs that they gets hundreds to low thousands of applications, and maybe 5% of them have any relevant experience. The problem is the breakdown of trust is costing all of us.
I hate the take homes because companies seem happy to send them out to people who have literally no chance. Sent after they already have a candidate in mind, sent before the resume has been reviewed, sent before the company has invested even a minute talking to you.
So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
I got dinged on my Netflix take home 10 years ago because I used the DOM to store state instead of implementing a shadow DOM. Sure, let me just whip that right up.
I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that
Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
Often times people ding you for doing anything different than they're used to, or what they see as "the standard".
The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
And why would this be the case? Maybe the solution is to ban AI from the hiring process. This seems like companies being hoisted by their own petard. This is because they are the ones who drove the hiring market to be this way. They are the ones who started using AI in the hiring process. They are the ones who decided to make applying so much work driving applicants to use AI to survive.
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
> Getting a lot of applications that don't meet your standard doesn't force you to raise you[r] bar. You still just need someone who meets your standard.
I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:
What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
Arbitrary filtering of candidates doesn't reduce the effort that it takes. Let's say 1 out of 1000 of the candidates you see is what you need. The total amount of effort to find the right candidate is still the same. But throwing out half the resumes just doubles the amount of time until you find the candidate you need (you just spread lower effort over a longer time).
On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double.
EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
I wasn't suggesting arbitrarily removing candidates was a good idea, but simply responding to their specific devils advocate example of applying "cargo cult screens", which would presumably be arbitrary.
… needing to pay for postage hardly stops the spam I receive in my own mail. Even the most trivially absurd stuff, like "install rooftop solar" — I don't own a roof.
All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.
You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
Lots of people get through engineering school but are terrible engineers. Interviews are important (and difficult... Not many people are good interviewers!)
Professional certifications have a terrible reputation for good reason. You are perhaps too young to know why this is a silly idea. But its been tried and it failed spectacularly.
In the end companies don't need to hook up to the sewer pipe that floods applications. What worked in past was (heaven forbid) technical hiring manager looking at resumes, etc and reaching out to clearly qualified candidates. Not hr 20-somethings with humanities degrees. Sorry
I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.
I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.
Small companies are an obvious 3rd place to escape to and there should be a good number of them given all the big companies behave as you indicate.. unless it really hard to start a new business in India. Do you know if this is the case or why else wouldn't you consider small businesses as a alternative?
I'm hiring at a small company and it's a nightmare. 1,000+ applicants for a software engineering position and we have essentially no help from recruiting. I'm filtering based on keywords, giving each resume a max of 90 seconds, and anything that even slightly seems off gets rejected.
I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.
just thinking about this, if you had the latitude to explain it more or less exactly as you have here, in human language, and frame it as a screen stage of the application and not an interview, and add: 'hey, I know this is really far from ideal but if you're legitimately interested this probably works in your favour', good people might not mind it.
I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual
experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.
Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to ensure that all other problems remain?
> Resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.
That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct.
There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to try and encourage creation of a large amount of stuff to a large number of people. It isn't arbitrary; there are a lot of allocation schemes that lead to mass starvation and poverty. The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources; pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.
I hear and understand your point.
It is not purely a social construct.
But how much available farmland to allocate to grow food from the available farmland becomes a political issue. Pricing, distribution... same deal.
And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.
And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.
It's interesting that both the USA and China found that the prosperity maximum happened when capitalism was kept in line with a firm hand, even though China approached from the left and the USA approached from the right and later departed back to the right.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.
> That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit.
Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.
Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> There is a large social element involved
There is only the human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity in the sky waving a magic wand or a group of space aliens from Xylos IV deciding who gets what. Resources are allocated only by how people, and people alone, decide they want to allocate them.
You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe. It is simply something people made up at random and decided to run with it. People could, in theory, change their mind on a whim such that suddenly you could become able to afford something.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Now you're finally starting to get on-topic. So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment? Not going to happen. The harsh reality is that creating problems is human nature.
There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).
Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
Listen it does suck, but I dont think this is really true. A lot of the best places to work treat candidates like subhumans before they are welcomed into the fold and then suddenly you're making 300k+ doing interesting work with incredible people and treated great, (until they're done with you at some point)
I have a junior position open and got 1,300 applicants in 1 week before we took it down. Many of the candidates with strong resumes are just lying and doing so well enough to pass HR screens.
I doubt any sort of AI screen would help though as many of the lying candidates are already using AI assist tools making it just a cat and mouse race...
I don't know a good solution to give everyone a fair chance.
> when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward
Except they're not. A significant fraction of applicants are people you would not want in your company. You find out when you are on the hiring end and you can see the raw applications without any filters. The question is are you going to reject them based on whatever information you can glean without a call or interview, or are you going to give them a chance? A looser screen is more democratic, but it calls for scalable solutions like this. Perhaps a middle ground is to triage and screen the weaker candidates with AI.
Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."
A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)
It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
Right, how it works in Europe is there are just no jobs or economic growth at all. Works great for those late in their career who have jobs and basically can't be fired. Not so much for anyone younger though. Better hope your employer doesn't go out of business before you retire. Better hope your government doesn't go bankrupt before you die.
Stop injecting politics into a non-political discussion that had nothing to do with Trump or politics at all. Especially since Europe's situation doesn't exactly shine by comparison.
Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.
That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.
> But as we’ve covered again and again, a bias-free AI system is an impossible-to-achieve standard, since models are trained on large swaths of the internet, which contain sexism, racism, and other biases.
Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?
A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.
The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".
Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.
Perfectly encapsulates the state of the job market. Interviewing is genuinely a hellscape at this point and I've experienced many interviews where there was a complete breakdown of etiquette/guidelines and good faith.
Geez. Good one. Was in something similar lately. 10 weeks wasted and a shittiest feedback ever. These companies should be legally required to pay candidates for gauntlets they put them through.
The lack of feedback is the worst part and is increasingly more common. Zero respect for the candidates time investment and propagates a terrible culture.
Most of big-CO legal teams do not allow for feedback to be communicated to the candidates. They are afraid the candidates will sue base on that. That is not new.
Our entire system is getting so bogged down by things like this that it is ceasing to function. Lots of things that make sense individually but are breaking the previous social contract, or removing the grease that made things work.
I'm sorry you had such a bad interviewing experience. You asked for feedback in your blog post, and since your blog doesn't allow comments, I hope you won't mind my responding here.
You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:
> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.
I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.
What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.
> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?
Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
And you got asked about those signals:
> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"
You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:
That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.
Or:
That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.
> Should I nuke my blog?
I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.
That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.
> mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews
I definitely agree and it is not a mental model that I carry into any interview, I have good intentions and I'm super friendly! This was only a tiny (disillusioned) post-interview reflection. I would say most interviews especially with engineers have gone well but there has absolutely been a vibe shift in the past year.
You can tell teams are a lot more risk averse when it comes to hiring. The promise of a fabled 10x engineer on the horizon paired with SWE automation devaluing existing talent has meant they will make you jump through 10 more loops and even then the decision is scrutinised. Understandably hiring is an expensive process (both successful and unsuccessful).
> Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for.
This is also a reflection of the job market. If it was balanced this notion would not exist. It's become a game of numbers, automated screening + AI has meant candidates need to send out 100s of application often with automation on their end too. On the other side every job likely receives 1000s of applications especially with stupid things like "L*nkedIn Easy Apply". Me personally, I would not apply for a role I am not committed to taking and I especially would not have gone through FOUR stages for fun, the first interview should be plenty screening for both parties!!! Alas.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond and thank you for your well wishes!
> Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
This is kind of absurd. Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?
"What do you mean you don't write about dressing wounds in your spare time? How much could you really know about it then?"
"Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about? I'll have you know most of the patients htat you would be dealing with at this long term care facility have T2D. I'm skeptical that you'd be able to care for them."
Why do we allow this kind of BS in the tech industry? Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?
There are a number of similarities between applying for a job and looking for a partner (typically through online dating). In both cases, the process is impersonal, rife with rejection, and heartless.
The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
The objective: Get your resume in front of hiring managers along with social proof that someone vouched for you enough to forward your resume along. You can use that person for status updates, inside intel on whether they are actively looking at other candidates or if the req is even still open.
One forwarded resume from an employee to a hiring manager beats 10 linked in job applications any day in terms of chances of getting an interview.
>The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.
I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
Meetups for special interests / tech adjacent fields.
Go to more company events for the tech you use.
The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area.
You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.
Join clubs / sign up for recurring things* that interest you and keep showing up.
Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.
Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.
*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.
The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.
I encountered two of these in a recent search, and they put me off so badly that I started ignoring subsequent opportunities that started off like this.
I don't mind written Q&A as part of a screening, but AI interactions, via voice or text, seem very unsuitable for the task of identifying candidates. The questions were non-specific, I was cut off mid sentence (voice prompts), and although the systems were supposed to be interactive my asks for clarification were ignored or returned unhelpful answers. I have never felt like I presented myself so poorly.
As long as I have money in the bank, I won't take any company that uses this approach seriously.
Your loss. Potentially. I wouldn't judge a company by the HR department. Unless you are applying for an HR job, naturally.
I'd see this as something you can hack to get to level 2. Assuming you are interested in the company. I wouldn't let this sort of thing put me off of something I wanted.
Six years ago, I applied for a job that made me record ten five-minute videos answering their questions.
It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".
They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).
Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
Yeah, I wasted probably 40 hours of my life on Canonical's interview process and never even got to talk to a person. They wanted to know my high school GPA and ACT score.
They wanted to know my high school grades and ACT, and they also made me write a nine page essay about skills that have been impactful to me.
Then they made me take some weird IQ test thing, and then they wanted me to take another one. I was genuinely starting to get kind of worried that they were going to make me talk about my astrology sign, so I eventually just emailed them saying that this is all stupid and I don't want to continue.
The solution to this seems pretty clear. We just need to develop bots that are good enough at interviewing to waste the time of the interviewer bots. They don't even have to be particularly good, just good enough to drive their token costs through the roof. Make it too expensive to use.
I've done several of these. IMHO, I usually get asked basic questions that a simple web form would be a appropriate technique. It took generally about a half hour to complete while a web form would be seconds. I think it's the wrong tool for the job.
so was I then I got the job... i think it's innovative because bots are just filling these out anyway, being mad at a tech company for building tech, that's like calling the kettle well a kettle.
I watched about 20 seconds of the video before seeing all I needed. Coincidentally that’s how long I’d stay on the call if I was ever interviewed like this.
It seems like some companies may be unaware that not only are they interviewing prospective employees, but candidates are interviewing prospective employers.
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.
How long till you can rent a bot do it for you and take you to the stage that you deal with humans? I find this type of AI bot interview disrespectful of candidates’s time.
Bring on the AI interviews. I can memorize all the trivia they want. At least then I have a fighting chance, otherwise it's no interview with no reason given. More productive to sweet talk clankers.
has anyone actually gotten hired through one of these ai interviews? curious if companies even review the recordings or if it's just a filter to reduce applicant volume
This would take the dodgy fake jobs/"pipeline building" to a whole new unethical level.
Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
The obvious solution is to use "AI" to do these interviews for you. If the company doesn't want a human to represent them, why should the candidate?
I can see how "AI" applications can be annoying for companies as well, but this knife cuts both ways. An interview is a meeting to determine if there's mutual interest, not a one-sided conversation.
Reminds me of a video I saw where there were 2 AI bots meant to interview a candidate, then at one point the AI bots started interviewing each other. It ended with both AI's stuck in a loop of saying 'Have a great day' to each other.
About 9 months ago I was working on building an Icecast server from scratch, with the gimmick being that between songs there would be AI-generated DJs that would give the normal corny banter you hear on the regular radio. I was initially using OpenAI for everything, but TTS from OpenAI ended up being kind of pricey.
So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.
I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly
DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"
DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"
DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"
DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"
And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
If they can't even be bothered to interview and do the due diligence themselves, perhaps they can just hire an AI bot to do the job as well, and add more AI slop to their work
If it was a phone call would you know for sure if it wasn't disclosed? I won't do pre-recorded videos and I won't knowingly interview with an AI ... I don't think, but maybe they'd have more clues about the difference between java and javascript, compatible skillsets for competing technologies etc.
I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.
Sharing a real example I am going through ->
* A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example).
* There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them.
* A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).
The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.
Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.
Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.
Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.
All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.
For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.
....Right???????
So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.
I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that
Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive
The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.
I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective.
No, I don't know how to fix it.
Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.
PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.
Yeah, I don't see anyone lining up to game that system. Maybe you ought to think about that a little longer than 30 seconds.
It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.
I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:
What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?
On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double.
EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.
If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.
All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.
You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience
Professional certifications are different
I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.
I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.
I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.
However, having been unemployed for over a year with a family to feed, I learned a little about what I'd put up with to get a job.
Writing it like you did implies that a magical solution exists and we are all maliciously withholding it from you. It does not and we are not.
Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to ensure that all other problems remain?
That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct.
There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to try and encourage creation of a large amount of stuff to a large number of people. It isn't arbitrary; there are a lot of allocation schemes that lead to mass starvation and poverty. The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources; pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.
And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.
And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.
The mean American has a net worth of $620k. The median American net worth is $192k.
The global mean net worth is $95k. The median is $9k.
Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.
Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.
Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.
> There is a large social element involved
There is only the human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity in the sky waving a magic wand or a group of space aliens from Xylos IV deciding who gets what. Resources are allocated only by how people, and people alone, decide they want to allocate them.
You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe. It is simply something people made up at random and decided to run with it. People could, in theory, change their mind on a whim such that suddenly you could become able to afford something.
> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources
Now you're finally starting to get on-topic. So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment? Not going to happen. The harsh reality is that creating problems is human nature.
Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.
I doubt any sort of AI screen would help though as many of the lying candidates are already using AI assist tools making it just a cat and mouse race...
I don't know a good solution to give everyone a fair chance.
Except they're not. A significant fraction of applicants are people you would not want in your company. You find out when you are on the hiring end and you can see the raw applications without any filters. The question is are you going to reject them based on whatever information you can glean without a call or interview, or are you going to give them a chance? A looser screen is more democratic, but it calls for scalable solutions like this. Perhaps a middle ground is to triage and screen the weaker candidates with AI.
A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)
It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.
Right, how it works in Europe is there are just no jobs or economic growth at all. Works great for those late in their career who have jobs and basically can't be fired. Not so much for anyone younger though. Better hope your employer doesn't go out of business before you retire. Better hope your government doesn't go bankrupt before you die.
Stop injecting politics into a non-political discussion that had nothing to do with Trump or politics at all. Especially since Europe's situation doesn't exactly shine by comparison.
That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.
LLM trained on texts from before 1913 (Source: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms):
Q. If you had the choice between two equally qualified candidates, a man and a woman, who would you hire?
A. I should prefer a man of good character and education to a woman. A woman is apt to be less capable, less reliable, and less well trained. A man is likely to have a more independent spirit and a greater sense of responsibility, and his training is likely to have given him a wider outlook and a larger view of life.
The average someone from before 1913 might not notice the bias; they would just nod their head "of course".
Just like Joe A. Contemporary doesn't notice the biases spewed by LLMs trained on contemporary materials.
Unfortunately, the message will not sink in because it is unpleasant. Almost ll of us want to think we're fair and unbiased.
One was so bad I had to write about it: https://ossama.is/writing/betrayed
You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:
> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.
I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.
What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.
> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?
Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.
And you got asked about those signals:
> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"
You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:
That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.
Or:
That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.
> Should I nuke my blog?
I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.
That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.
Best wishes on your job hunt.
I definitely agree and it is not a mental model that I carry into any interview, I have good intentions and I'm super friendly! This was only a tiny (disillusioned) post-interview reflection. I would say most interviews especially with engineers have gone well but there has absolutely been a vibe shift in the past year.
You can tell teams are a lot more risk averse when it comes to hiring. The promise of a fabled 10x engineer on the horizon paired with SWE automation devaluing existing talent has meant they will make you jump through 10 more loops and even then the decision is scrutinised. Understandably hiring is an expensive process (both successful and unsuccessful).
> Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for.
This is also a reflection of the job market. If it was balanced this notion would not exist. It's become a game of numbers, automated screening + AI has meant candidates need to send out 100s of application often with automation on their end too. On the other side every job likely receives 1000s of applications especially with stupid things like "L*nkedIn Easy Apply". Me personally, I would not apply for a role I am not committed to taking and I especially would not have gone through FOUR stages for fun, the first interview should be plenty screening for both parties!!! Alas.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond and thank you for your well wishes!
This is kind of absurd. Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?
"What do you mean you don't write about dressing wounds in your spare time? How much could you really know about it then?"
"Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about? I'll have you know most of the patients htat you would be dealing with at this long term care facility have T2D. I'm skeptical that you'd be able to care for them."
Why do we allow this kind of BS in the tech industry? Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?
The best tactic is to avoid the formal process, whether it's applying via the company website, or swiping right on a profile. Instead use an inside source, an employee you know at the company you are interested in, or a mutual friend who can play matchmaker in dating.
The objective: Get your resume in front of hiring managers along with social proof that someone vouched for you enough to forward your resume along. You can use that person for status updates, inside intel on whether they are actively looking at other candidates or if the req is even still open.
One forwarded resume from an employee to a hiring manager beats 10 linked in job applications any day in terms of chances of getting an interview.
As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.
I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.
The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area. You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.
Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.
Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.
*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo
I don't mind written Q&A as part of a screening, but AI interactions, via voice or text, seem very unsuitable for the task of identifying candidates. The questions were non-specific, I was cut off mid sentence (voice prompts), and although the systems were supposed to be interactive my asks for clarification were ignored or returned unhelpful answers. I have never felt like I presented myself so poorly.
As long as I have money in the bank, I won't take any company that uses this approach seriously.
I'd see this as something you can hack to get to level 2. Assuming you are interested in the company. I wouldn't let this sort of thing put me off of something I wanted.
It was a colossal pain in the ass, and I wasn't allowed to go back and retake. I'm not actually talking to a human, so my rambling nature kind of took over, and don't know if I really ever answered the questions because I didn't have any ways of clarifying the questions and "course correcting".
They never got back to me, so maybe they're still considering me :).
Though that's not nearly as bad as Canonical's awful process.
Then they made me take some weird IQ test thing, and then they wanted me to take another one. I was genuinely starting to get kind of worried that they were going to make me talk about my astrology sign, so I eventually just emailed them saying that this is all stupid and I don't want to continue.
https://www.theverge.com/featured-video/892850/i-was-intervi...
Edit: I see why now. Wish this kind of stuff was pinned at the top. /shrug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341763
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIUQhb2h3A
I guess if your goal is just to hire desperate people who currently have no better choice (and who will leave as soon as they do), then you can flaunt how little you care about the candidates or the process. But if you're hoping for something better than that, I wouldn't run off as many candidates as possible.
I mean, this is probably a time-saving way to filter out a flood of poor candidates, but you're going to also be filtering out good candidates at a very high rate.
https://youtu.be/mtIUQhb2h3A?is=0uwTOJdsHmCq69Ai
Not only do they have the resume and a cover letter that took time, but they also wasted your time on a fake interview with a bot. All without disclosing anything.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
I can see how "AI" applications can be annoying for companies as well, but this knife cuts both ways. An interview is a meeting to determine if there's mutual interest, not a one-sided conversation.
So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.
I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly
DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"
DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"
DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"
DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"
And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.
“Abundance” they told us.
Submitters, please always submit the most original source for a story.
Sharing a real example I am going through -> * A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example). * There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them. * A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).
The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.
Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.
Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.