Comment by runamuck

Just this week I interviewed a candidate for a Data Engineering role. I gave him four simple SQL statements and he got it instantly. He read the instructions out loud and typed the solutions immediately with no hesitation, perfect syntax. The last one increased the difficulty slightly and he hit a snag. I asked him to "check his work" and he got baffled and defensive and kept repeating "what?" I said "check the table" and he repeated "What?" I finally said "just dump the first five lines of your table" and he couldn't. He then started yammering and giving excuses. Then he pasted some SQL that included [redacted].ai in the output. I suspect he read the instructions into an AI for the first problems. When I asked him to "show the work" he did not understand how to prompt the AI to do that. I'm so glad I gave him that tech challenge, otherwise I would not have caught the cheating.