Using AI for what and is it bad or good?

At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively.

So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).

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hansvm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's been a year since I've actively given out take-homes for hiring, but I'm not sure I agree that everyone will use AI. I designed half the questions to be impossible for current-gen AI to answer without the candidate actually knowing what's going on [0], and only ~1% of candidates who responded did poorly on that half and not the other half (and, if we're worried about LLMs being better than I think, not all that many candidates passed most questions either).

[0] The most reliable strategy I've found for that is choosing questions where the wrong answer is the right answer for some much more common question. Actually spending a few seconds and solving the problem easily lets a human pass, but an LLM with insufficient weights or training data (all of them) doesn't stand a chance.

	▲	seer 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thanks for clarifying - I kinda get the idea but would love to see an example for this. I’ve mostly given up on all of the standard techniques for interviewing sadly, just because “using ai” makes a lot of them trivial, and have resorted to the good old fashioned interview, where I screen for drive, values and root cause seeking, and let people learn tech/frameworks/etc themselves. But I was wondering, isn’t a take home question still good, if you give a more open ended and ambitious task, and let people vibe code the solution, review the result but ask for the prompt/session as well? People will be doing that during normal work anyway, so why not test that directly?
	▲	vaginaphobic 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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JoshTriplett 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI.

You can likely control for that, if you either interview in person or via screen sharing. (Yes, it could be faked, but that's harder.)