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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>A truthful, nuanced, well reasoned answer will be well received by an employer with a culture you want to work in.

If you're into long shot betting AND your savings aren't running out while waiting to land a new job, that might be a good strategy

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I don’t see why “truthful, nuanced, well reasoned” is the long-shot vs cagey and evasive.

Obviously because the latter lands more jobs.

Have you seen the job market lately?

You call the response "cagey and evasive", but that is for an objectively a bad interview question, one wrung below "How many years experience do you have prompting Anthropic Opus? We are an Opus shop." People are not locked into their current way of using AI and it is trivial to match how one works with AI to match employers requirements. It's a question that deserves an idealized non-answer

In what way is “How are you using AI?” an objectively bad question?

Remember the context - this is while solving a whiteboard problem. Its bad in the same way asking candidate what their birthstone is - because any answer offer little or no signal about the odds of a candidates success at the company.

I'm curious to know why you think asking about AI usage is a good interview question.

If you're going to have people use AI regularly, it's worth asking so that you can get a sense of their interest/willingness, experience level, and training needs. That said, more specific questions are typically more revealing. Personally I'm fond of "If you could give Claude only 1 instruction, what would it be?"

You're fond of asking candidates an unrealistic hypothetical and you think that's revealing?

Yep. I sure do.

as a rule the interviewee should be assessing for goodness of fit, as well as the interviewer. If my simplified nuanced answer to why I limit my usage of LLMs was poorly received, I wouldn't want to take a job somewhere likely to make me miserable.

Correct. Me either.

Unless I'm looking after about 6 months and my savings isn't as healthy as it once was. Or one of my kids is sick. Or pretty much anything happens costing money.

Then I'll be miserable for a little while as I continue my job search.

Practicality, sometimes, is more important than ethics when other people rely on you.

"Unless I was really excited for flipping burgers, the menu options, the new McKidney, non-working ice-cream machines, and the legacy of Ronald McDonald, I wouldn't want to take a job somewhere likely to make me miserable".

A lot of jobs don't work based on those criteria. In a bad job market, IT jobs don't either. Especially if it's your 20th application with no response.

If you're outright lying to yourself to land a job to make rent, fine, but for god's sake internalize it as a temporary stepping stone and immediately start looking for a better fit.

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