Discussion

Ask HN: Physical whiteboard interviews coming back due to ChatGPT/Copilot/LLM?

During the COVID pandemic, all the tech company coding interviews switched from physical whiteboarding to coderpad interviews, where you typed code (and in many cases, ran it in the coderpad as well). This was probably a primary contribution to the Great Resignation and accompanying sharp increases in FAANG hiring and salaries during the pandemic.

However, with ChatGPT, Copilot, and other LLMs, it becomes much easier to cheat on these interviews. No longer does a potential cheater have to find a ghost-coder to provide answers live - they just need to type in answers into a LLM and wait for it to generate some plausible code. While LLMs will probably not let someone pass who can't code at all (unless they just use straight LeetCode, in which case those interviewers get what they deserve), it will make it much easier to come up with a first draft and iterate, and therefore make the interview much easier, even for experienced interviewees.

I wonder if, as a result, companies will start requiring in-person interviews for the final interview round again. I've already heard suggestions that college classes that want to test the essay-writing abilities of their students move back to bluebooks in a proctored exam hall, rather than allowing students to take tests remotely. To be clear, I haven't heard of tech companies moving away from pure-remote interviews, but perhaps with the hiring rate slowing down, the vulnerability of remote interviews to cheating via LLMs will cause them to be deprecated.

7 points telotortium 3 years ago 7 comments

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton