Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

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ChatGPT voice interface plugged into the audio stream, with the prompt:

- I need you to assist me during a programming interview, you will be listening to two people, the interviewer and me. When the interviewer asks a question, I'd like you to feed me lines that seem realistic for an interview where I'm nervous, don't give me a full blown answer right away. Be very succinct. If I think you misunderstood something, I will mention the key phrase "I'm nervous today and had too much coffee". In this situation, remember I'm the one that will say the phrase, and it might be because you've mistaken me by the interviewer and I want you to "reset". If I want you to dig deeper than what you've provided me with, I'll say the key phrase "Let's dig deeper now". If I think you've hallucinated and want you to try again, I'll say "This might be wrong, let me think for just a minute please". Remember, other than these key phrases, I'll only be talking to the interviewer, not you.

On a second screen of some sort. Other than that, interviewers will just have to accept that nobody will be doing the job without these sort of assistants from now on anyway. As an interviewer I let candidates consult online docs for specific things already because they'll have access to Google during the job, this is just an extension of that.

I recently interviewed a number of people about their SQL skills. The format I used was to share two queries with them a couple days ahead of time in a google doc, and tell them I will ask them questions about those queries during the interview.

Out of maybe twenty people I interviewed this way, only three of them pointed out that one of the queries had a failing error in it. It was something any LLM would immediately point out.

Beyond that: the first question I asked was: "What does this query do, what does it return?" I got responses ranging from people who literally read the query back to me word by word, giving the most shallow and direct explanation of what each bit did step-by-step, to people who clearly summarized what the query did in high-level, abstract terms, as you might describe what you want to accomplish before you write the query.

I don't think anyone did something with ChatGPT live, but maybe?

This made me laugh. I can't deny it isn't already happening. But wow people work so hard to avoid working hard.

And I wrote this as a knee-jerk reaction after reading the parent, I imagine people will be putting way more effort if it can get them a great job. And to be honest, if they can fool you, they can most likely do the job as well. Most of the industry tests at a higher skill level than what they actually require on the day to day anyway.

It's almost inspiring, isn't it?

It's not about avoiding hard work - the audience on HN skews wealthy due to heavy representation of skilled devs in their 30s+, but the average person does not earn anything close to FAANG salaries. Even most devs in general don't earn like that. The interview process being fairly well understood in general, any advantage that can possibly get a person from $60k/year to generationally-life-changing $300k/year will be used eventually.

I think the point is to avoid pointless hard work.

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