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Comment by zemo | Hacker News Reader

> The issue is lying about your experiences

I think the point is that LLMs makes it easier and cheaper to produce a large volume of convincing lies. The candidate likely would not have been able to produce convincing-enough lies to get through the resume screen without LLMs.

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That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.

Or you can open any good C book and review that way. Not to bash on the use of AI, but there's a lot of alternative ways that for me is more reliable to get knowledge from.

How do you reconcile that opinion with the fact that LLMs trained on programming concepts generally give incorrect answers about 50% of the time?

Is it actually more useful than Googling, or is it just so convenient that you let it convince you that it was useful? Or, depressingly, is Google just becoming so useless that something wrong a solid half of the time is still better?

> if you want to prepare for a C dev interview

Spend an hour reading a book about C?

I have a young colleague who wanted a job at a FAANG company, and asked for advice. I said spend a couple weeks studying the leetcode books - it will be the best value for time spent you'll ever get.

He did, and got a $300,000 offer.

I'm not sure that it's a good thing if "ability to produce convincing lies" is something that a company requires in a job candidate. People getting into jobs who aren't exceptional liars when they couldn't have otherwise seems like win to me.

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