I almost completely disagree with this post. The only thing I can consider that you should probably avoid embarrassing names.
A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.
The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.
And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!
You know, my honest but also meta answer is that I don't know the answer to your question.
There's a lot to unpack here and I don't know you well enough to give personalized advice. But this problem kinda requires personalized advice.
> in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I can’t be trusted that I know what I’m doing.
Why do you feel this way? I can think of several possibilities:
1.) You really really want the ability to know the answer instantly. While your mind know that's not reasonable, your heart is disappointed. As a result, your body language sends the message you don't know what you're doing.
2.) Verbal interactions are tough and you're looking for the right canned phrase that will give you time to think. However, that canned phrase sounds practiced, and people mistake it for a canned i-dont-care response.
3.) You want to people to understand why you don't instantly have an answer. As a result, you provide far too much justification, which winds up sounding guilty.
Personally, I have had great success with encounters where I absolutely don't know the answer, and I barely know where to start. Charlie asks me a question. I reply "I don't know, but Bob might know!" We ask Bob, and he doesn't want to be bothered, but he does know that Fred should know the answer. We then go to Fred, and I pay attention as the other two talk. I learn about Fred, a new topic, and Charlie winds up thanking me the most. In the future, Charlie comes to me first instead of Bob or Fred, and I wind up learning more than Bob and Fred put together.
It wasn't about how I said it, it was about putting in the effort to be present.
And then people remembered I'd actually put the effort in.
I know this puzzle as "Star Battle" where I play it here: https://www.puzzle-star-battle.com where my favorite difficulty for a nice medium difficulty is "Normal 10x10 2 stars"
The LinkedIn Queens seems to be a much easier version of this puzzle.
I wish they hadn't used "physics-defying" in their press release because I'm certain this is an important discovery for water condensers, but claiming it doesn't need an external energy source is massively negligent.
People love to claim there's no external energy source, but then when you look closely, you'll find a hot-cold differential, and then you need external energy to maintain that differential. I'd put a large sum of money that either the material is colder than the ambient environment or the incoming moisture is warmer than the ambient environment. It might even be a differential within their material, and the lab lights are warming one side! There's a lot of passive devices that rely on the hot-cold cycle of day and night, that still counts as energy input from the sun.
The article even mentions they tried to rule out a thermal gradient by increasing the thickness of the material, I'm not sure I understand why that would rule it out... the gradient would still exist.
I hate this, because if they aren't intentionally supplying energy, it's probably really efficient (assuming they aren't taking samples out of the freezer or something) so it's still a big deal and important but apparently we have to claim something is a perpetual motion machine to get attention among the public.
Yeah I understand the need for an university to make the news once in a while, and the fact that this made the front page here proves the effectiveness of the method, but the terms "Passively Harvest" and "Defies Physics" should be used very carefully in the context of a scientific publication, even though it's only a blog post so we don't expect peer-reviewed journal levels of rigor.
I feel that it disserves science in the end, the belief that some magic material is going to break the second law of thermodynamics is closer to alchemy than chemistry.
PET is a decent insulator, and they seem to be trying to ensure it wasn’t the temperature difference causing condensation, but the nano structure itself. I’m assuming they were controlling temperature and humidity, so it would mean the material must get hotter, but that seems like it can also be passively solved with a radiator. What they are describing would be a pretty big deal and seems plausible.
> The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.
God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first.
A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common
I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...
> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.
This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.
Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
> So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)
I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.
For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.
I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"
The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.
So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."
We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".
Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.
Not sure how the dialog went irl, but if the conversation was that adversarial and with as little diplomacy applied, I'd not hire the person nor accept the role if I was on either side of it...
I think people are just upset when they submit a resume, or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all .. I don't think most people care about feedback - they just want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.
Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super excited since I actually cared about their products. I spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was crushed!
Not the person you're responding to, but if you give any kind of specific feedback, then you're effectively saying "Reason X is why I didn't hire you".
Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.
Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.
That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.
I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of interviewing/hiring for 13 years.
I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.
For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than usual.
We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.
Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants dropped and the process felt more normal.
I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to enforcing on-site for my group.
> I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely.
Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions:
Tell the applicant that there “might be” an in person technical assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote.
The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing there’s the possibility that they will be required to be somewhere in person.
Another trick I’ve used is saying “Oh, you live in Flint Michigan?? We happen to have an employee 20 minutes away, would you be open to meeting them?” And then suddenly they drop out of the interview process.
There are a lot of foreign scammers exploiting the WFH trend in the US to the point where it drowns out real candidates. It’s really bad.
In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job.
If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you dodged a bullet.
Because you can't possibly mean you think candidates are going to fly out for an interview at their own expense.
Traditionally (i.e. pre-Covid) flying out a senior candidate was the standard signal that both sides were taking the process seriously. And for competitive hires, the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for dinner were all very important indicators.
I've been working remote since 2009 but I kinda miss the old ways.
> the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for dinner were all very important indicators.
I maybe once misinterpreted this. I was flattered to be having dinner with the well-regarded co-founder and two other highly-ranked people, but I thought the nice hotel and the fancy restaurant was just their everyday extravagant lifestyle.
Despite being obviously unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the affluent lifestyle conventions, I did get the offer. Had I known that the nice restaurant and VIPs might be specifically to say that they valued me, I would've been more likely to accept the offer.
Speaking from the point of view of an interviewee rather than an interviewer... I would pay for flying out to someplace for an in-person interview on my own dime, if I thought I would get a reasonable return on investment.
If the interviewer _expected_ that I would pay for a cross-country (or cross-border) flight myself, that would cast a shadow on the opportunity for me.
I live in Europe and work for a company based in the USA.
I probably wouldn’t have had this job if the job listing had said that in-person interviews might be required, because if I read that back then I probably would have thought:
1. Flying all the way to the USA is expensive.
2. It takes a lot of time.
3. I’ll be exhausted from the flight when I arrive.
4. There’s probably a bunch of other people applying for this job. What’s the point in flying all that way for a job I don’t even know if I’ll get hired for.
In reality of course, there are other people working for that same company that live in Europe, including people in managerial roles, so if they had been the type of company to ask for an in-person interview they probably would have asked that I meet in a neighboring country. Not that I fly all the way to the USA for an interview.
Luckily for me, the job listing never said anything about any in-person interviews so I never started thinking about what it would mean to maybe have to fly to the USA and therefore I happily proceeded to apply for the job and after a take-home assignment and a few remote interviews I got hired :)
And now in present day, if I were to apply to a job in the current market I would probably apply even if the company was far away and mentioned that in-person interviews might be required. After all, it might not necessarily mean that long of a flight even. They could also have people working in countries near to you. And if the in-person interview does turn out to be too far away well you can always say no at that point. And in order to not waste too much of your own time you can keep applying and interviewing for other jobs in the meantime also, all the way up to when you finally get hired and have a contract for work signed.
You're saying that if an employer expected you to pay for the flight for an interview, that would be a red flag.
But then you say that as an interviewer, you would be willing to pay for the flight for an interview (if you thought it would be reasonable ROI).
The situation where you would be willing to pay for the flight implies that the employer would not pay for the flight (or else why would you pay for the flight?). So according to your own logic, that would raise a red flag (because the employer won't pay for the flight and expects you to). Then why would you be willing to pay for the flight to interview at an employer that is raising a red flag for you? Makes no sense at all.
I have no idea _why_ they wrote that up, but the points do separately make sense. They're willing to pay for a flight in the abstract, just not in the current timeline where employers know they're supposed to pay for it.
Just to counter your anecdote with another of equal value, the only time I’ve ever traveled for an interview was for my first software dev job when I had zero experience. Flight and hotel was paid for by the company. I’ve never heard of anyone other than an employer paying for interview travel expenses.
I have 15 YOE and I am a very qualified senior candidate, at least IMO.
There is no world where I would take an interview that I had to fly out and stay at a hotel on my own dime. That would 100% sound like some sort of scam job to me.
But positions that I'm applying to? I'm senior enough now that if I can't negotiate a paid-travel interview, clearly I either don't care enough and should cross that opportunity off my list, or it's tempting enough that I don't care.
1 paycheck of just a few thousand dollars USD is a lot of money in other countries.
The scam is hold on to the job for at least 1 paycheck. It’s a expensive for companies to (legally) fire people, so if you get hired you typically can get at least a few grand even if you do zero work.
Due to the wealth disparities involved, a month’s Silicon Valley money is a years income for a scammer in a poor country.
So just produce LLM-level code, make excuses, say you’re learning the code base, get lots of help from colleagues, turn in mediocre work, and if you can hang on for three months before they fire you - that’s decent money!
I’ve flown myself out for interviews at companies that were dream jobs. Think: sports industries, not insurance companies. They tended to be small and didn’t have the resources to put together reservations (and would have taken months to figure out budgeting situations)
Yes, I wanted to work for them so badly it was well worth the risk. Sometimes you see opportunities and want to pay for them.
>They tended to be small and didn’t have the resources to put together reservations (and would have taken months to figure out budgeting situations)
This makes no sense. If they can't afford a one-off line item like travel arrangements, how can they possibly make payroll reliably? You're describing either a company with no financial buffer, or one that's asking prospective applicants to subsidize them.
This is a completely separate problem. Not as bad as in the U.K. but you still have the situation where wages low down in many industries are so poor you can’t afford to take the job unless your parents subsidise you (either they live close enough to give you free housing or they pay your rent for the first 5 years)
Once you “make it” then you have your six figure salary and are good to go.
This is by design to ensure the right people get the jobs.
I don’t have a generalized answer, but they have been making it, I guess is the answer? It’s been over 6 years since I interviewed, but talking with friends they haven’t missed a payroll. Sometimes smoke indicates a fire, sometimes it indicates bbq I guess.
Wait, is this another norm that corporate America broke in the last couple of decades? Do people now expect to pay to fly to interviews? When did this happen?
There's already industries that think you should pay them for the honor to work for them. (at least companies within said industries i worked for, in gaming, luxury, sports... it's not uncommon). I'm surprised they didn't charge for applications but they'll definitely pay lower wages because the rest is paid for by having their name on your resume.
i saw a tiktok where the guy had his phone propped up but not in view of his webcam, and basically the interviewer's mic was going through his phone on some llm and the llm was spitting out responses for him to reply to the soft questions his interviewer was asking. the interviewer also made him "quickly" turn on his screen sharing so he could see that his computer didn't have anything assisting him.
i haven't done an interview in a while, it's kinda crazy all the things people are pulling now for interviews on both sides. the process feels really broken.
But like.. what happens after this supposed trick? I don’t understand how they wouldn’t just be fired after the first week if they can’t actually do the job?
Is it that they are applying to places where you don’t pair program?
Get hired. Go through onboarding. Collect your hiring bonus. Get a few weeks for your first project and fail at it. It gets written off as "they're just new here". Use some "unlimited" vacation time. Get more projects and keep failing at them. Get put on a new team because the eng director wants to give you another chance, and repeat the whole process. Eventually get put on a PIP. Show no improvement at the end of it. Accept a severance in exchange for "resigning" and signing an NDA/liability waiver.
At a large company it is possible for this entire process to draw out for 3-6 months, and you collecting >$100K in in that period.
Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions, and I've never heard of someone getting severance from being fired for cause (performance). The only way I can see your scenario playing out is if the employee has some kind of real leverage over the company (e.g., family connections, political backing, etc.).
> Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions
Written on a piece of paper, yes, but no company is actually going to sue you in court to recover it. It will cost them more than the value of the bonus to do so. And they know you have already spent the money.
> I've never heard of someone getting severance from being fired for cause (performance)
At large tech companies it is standard for people going through the PIP process to get the option of taking a severance and walking away (and waiving their right to sue the company) instead of waiting for their manager and HR to draw up the paperwork to fire them.
In most cases in corporations you are not interviewed by people you will be working with. Interview stage is a generic assessment by random people. Yo simply need to pass them. Also they are usually asking questions not related to the real job.
If it’s remote, sometimes they’ll pay someone else to do the work and pocket the difference. And/or the job may just be a ruse to get credentials in the org because it’s an espionage target or to use as a launch point to go after an espionage target.
Generally that's why the soft skills questions generally want a response in a STAR (situation, task, action, result) format. It's a lot harder to lie about a story and keep yourself consistent through a back and forth.
As someone looking for remote work atm, can confirm this sounds fair to me: if the employer looks legit and would fly me out (like my current employer did), I'd be totally willing to do an onsite interview.
Right now my approach has been focused less on proving my skills, and more on proving I'm a real person. Hah.
People who are serious about doing remote work are going to pass on anything that indicates hybrid. The simplest screening technique is to give instructions within the job post to submit via email rather than the job board form. Even before LLM slop became the norm people were spamming their resumes with Easy Apply.
Speaking as a contractor since 2017, I have given up using recruitment agencies in the UK to find work.
I am likely the number one expert, in my field, globally. I apply for roles which specifically ask for an SME in my field. There is no question here of skills, and it is as certain as it can be without actually knowing that I am a light year ahead of all other applicants (because there is practically no one else actually qualified in my field). I'm not flapping my ego, this is how things look to actually be.
I find now I never get even contacted by agencies.
I think they are not reading my CV/application, and I think this is happening because they are flooded - hundreds of applications in the first hour. They take the first person who looks good enough (and they're not good - there are practically no people in this field who actually have skills and experience, as opposed to just "I've worked with") and run with that, and then turn to filling the next contract.
The upshot of this is that it doesn't matter how good you are, because your CV isn't going to be seen, not unless you apply in the first ten minutes or so.
You have to play that game, and automate your applications, to be seen.
So the question is, if you don't want to play that game, how now do you find companies who need skills?
I got made redundant back in March, applied for a bunch of stuff I matched profile for and maybe got 5-6 interviews off the back of it.
The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.
> The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job to fall through because the client apparently never got budget signed off for the position.
I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.
I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.
I've also had on three occasions agents call up after a day or two and tell "something about the budget, so the rate is now less than expected".
In two cases I came to know the agency was simply lying, and was keeping the difference for itself, and I expect it to be true also in the third.
> I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.
> I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I do hear it.
Maybe but it sounded plausible, this would have been a 3 month contract with Moodys in Canary Wharf so not some rinkydink outfit. I could just be gullible but they gained nothing from stringing me along
I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.
One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.
When folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical' attempts to interact with it.
You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result.
It's a quintessential arms race. For what it's worth, I appreciate that you're trying hard to keep your hiring process broad and to mitigate your potential blind spots. That's refreshing to hear from a hiring manager.
Yep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the funnel for real jobs. So now it’s a matter of sheer application volume for candidate employees more than ever, who after all are in a rather more desperate position than potential employers will ever be.
Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that it’s completely normal these days to use so called “hiring” more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal to investors rather than to indicate you are actually hiring.
I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and similarly for the time involved. And this happens without the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The only people that win here are the staffing platforms like indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal
I think there is a sort of just world fallacy employed here. It seems more like that there opportunists everywhere, and always have been. LLMs have amplified their destructive potential.
Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment.
We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now.
It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.
Latest rebranding of “sysadmin”, which became “devops engineer” or SRE a decade ago. It’s the people who shove kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.
Platform Engineers are operationally focused software engineers who focus on enablement of other software engineering groups through building self-service tooling and create unified platform for app deployment.
The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams through self service, whereas DevOps is more about reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).
Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.
Platforms are often large scale distributed systems, dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed to solve this problem.
This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on all deployments and work well" - it's just something sysadmins do amirite?
Remember - the vast majority of candidates who take the time to do right by your process get zero reward for their effort. You get a reward in the end, so it feels imbalanced. This is true for VERY good candidates, as well.
Precisely my problem. I only apply if I know I’m a good fit and have the required experience. I spent countless hours manually adjusting my resume and writing cover letter out of my heart. Just got the usual cold rejection from a no-reply address. I know do the same with ChatGPT. I also get rejections, but at least I waste little time and can therefore submit many more applications - so my odds are higher
In our remote interviews, I've started pasting the question into meeting chat that I've already fed into ChatGPT. Mainly because some candidates do actually do better with reading and thinking but it's also just pure bait to paste into their open ChatGPT window. Since I've already got input on my side, if they start reading off ChatGPT output, they get a strike, two strikes and interview is ended.
However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but finance obviously screams about cost.
I discovered a new tactic where you ask a vaguely worded question on a niche subject, such that any seemingly off the cuff comprehensive answer must be ChatGPT. Asking something outside the candidate’s declared experience or following up on experience with tech they spoke well to will also reveal discrepancies.
I'm pretty sure the temperature of even GPT4o-mini is not 0 so how would you know it is the something like you have. It would be hard to be reading an answer, it would feel awkward and probably obvious it itself. But I'm just saying that some people would have memorized answers to some standard questions (they apply to many places as you might know).
it is surprising there isn’t some
SaaS bullshit company that solves this problem. we have shit like Pearsons and whatnots when taking exams, I took few certification exams and it was like
- install this thing that takes over my machine
- 360 camera around to show my surroundings
- no phone/watch/…
One would think by now there’d be two Stanford grads with a SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr
Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating. Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call :)
a company would run this… Not your company taking over candidate’s computer, an intermediary that candidate and potential employer are using.
candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/… now they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in 2025, some stanfords are on the case
If you (the company) send me a company laptop to use for that shit, sure, we can interview that way. It is the same deal with Teams and Zoom. None of that shit is touching my personal devices, it is strictly limited to the work machine.
you might be slightly more receptive to this idea if you have, the company administering the exam needs to ensure no cheating is happening so app starts, all your other apps are shutdown, you get a call through the app to show your surroundings with the camera on your laptop etc before exam begins. at no point in time did I find any of it intrusive or strange, I wanted to get the exam done remotely, they need to ensure that I wasn’t cheating
I assume this "app" is not open source, correct? Is is compatible with Linux systems? Can it run on non-FHS distribution?
> all your other apps are shutdown
I admit I am curious about this bit. Does it just start killing all other processes belonging to the same user ID? Or of all users (since you could get "assist" from process owned by an another user)? At least PID 1 needs to survive the slaughter, but it can be used to run arbitrary code to assist with the cheating. So how does it tell what is "an app" it needs to stop?
How is it too expensive? It takes the same amount of time for the interview, and you presumably have a room available in the office to book for the occasional interview.
And it instantly filters out all the spam applicants and chat GPT cheaters.
too expensive mate… we live in year our Lord 2024 - no one is building 2000 buildings that will be vacant as everyone is working from home (or India…) :)
this requires a simple saas solution - someone’s working on this for sure already as it is already a big issue
I hear you, and yes old school solution sounds absurd, but I suspect interview cheating will be on par with game cheating. Even if you install kernel level cheat protection systems the game cheater's still find ways around them.
These guys already developed an invisible desktop app to help everyone cheat on remote interviews.
no question there will be cat&mouse here but even more incentive for some stanford grads to charge premium for “unbreakable quantum-proof interview experience” :)
I don't believe one needs a startup to solve that problem - there are already a bazillion certification paths for a bazillion tech stacks. The(?) problem is one of trust from the hiring org that the certs mean anything, and that's where the whole discussion devolves into one of (gatekeeping|but muh leetcode|our business problem is special|$other)
I meant a startup that provides onsite screening / verification of candidates for companies. Only pre-verifed candidates can apply to company jobs. If the candidate is not local, the company can use the test center to do a remote screen in an environment where candidate cannot cheat. Etc.
I just brought up certs because back in the day you could not take those test online due to cheating.
Now in the age of AI you can't do any type of testing remote, imo.
I half-way suspected that's what you were going for (testing-as-a-service) but my point still stands: it is a web-of-trust bootstrapping problem. For example, Otherbranch[1] exists, is a startup, and is trying to handle pre-screening candidates, but they seem to have very few companies that are currently using them. One would assume if they were solving a real problem then companies would be beating down their door to get real, verified, actual people and yet.
this ain’t about pre-screening at all, it is about solving a different kind of problem. if you have experienced it already, you haven’t interviewed anyone recently.
You are correct, I'm over here stuck on the applicant side, feeling like both sides of this transaction are suffering from the same lack of trust
I therefore fail to see how introducing another party that the hiring managers have to cede their trust to solves our mutual lack of trust
If your company (since your reply implies that you are at least "hiring manager adjacent") merely needs that testing center to start hiring people, I'm totally open to going on Monday and starting a company to provide that service. I even already have a 4k security camera system I can wire up the room to provide DVR access to your interview candidate's session
But my strong suspicion is that such a video camera enabled room for a fee is not, in fact, the obstacle to getting people hired
11 out of last 12 candidates interviewed read their answers from
chatgpt or the like. always same scenario, video call, interviewer never makes an eye contact and obviously is reading answers. last one I gave my cell and told him to call me, no speaker or bluetooth on the phone and hung up Teams meeting - mate never called back :)))
this is a pandemic already and tool is needed to establish that interviewer is not cheating. prior to today’s tools at interviewer’s disposal this was not really a thing - today it is a huge thing
What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews candidates who are not selected get not a single positive feedback and is treated like scrap with a soulless rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don’t care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
I agree with your sentiment. I am curious how this person will fare when they return to the job hunt. Then, they will see how adversarial the process has become, even for highly qualified candidates. Suddenly, AI looks like a good idea to game some of the process.
Since I think I'm the person you're referencing, I really do want to give good feedback, but experience has shown it's really perilous (discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533899)
And I know how adversarial the process has become. I have friends looking for jobs plus I try to get to know my candidates. And I have my recent hires and their stories.
I want to make it a better process but I'm so burnt out figuring out how to make it better. Some people talk about professional 3rd party recruiters but I've been burned by those as well. When it comes to dating and hiring, both can be pretty brutal.
Over Christmas I met up with a friend who teaches part-time at a local college. He said he’s failed more people this year than the cumulative total of his entire past teaching career due to LLM abuse.
He doesn’t use LLM detection tools, but he says it’s easy to identify papers with warning signs of LLM use. For some reason, using ChatGPT for his specific niche topic overuses a few obscure, rarely-used words that most people wouldn’t even recognize. The ChatGPT abusers some times have these words appearing multiple times through their essays.
He’s also caught people who cited a lot of different works and books in their reports that were outside of the assigned reading, or in some cases books that don’t exist at all. Catching them is as simple as asking them about their sources or where they acquired a copy of the text.
I see a lot of parallels in hiring and talking to junior software engineers right now. We had a take-home problem that was well liked that we used for many years, but now it’s obvious that a majority of young applicants are just using LLMs to get an answer. When we want to talk about their solution in the interview, they “can’t remember” how it works or why they picked their method.
It’s really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you, bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare away the LLM cheaters, but it’s expensive and time consuming for everyone involved.
I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us realize we could never work with them. Given how much time they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your resources on hiring.
Firing people isn’t as expensive as people make it out to be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far enough that it costs significant money even more.
Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.
The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still months from the date I choose to hire them.
I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the old job, plus probably some time in between roles before they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and go through the company-wide onboarding and training processes and set up their equipment. Another week.
The first time I actually get to have them do any work is 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual process of firing them is instant once I've decided that it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting from scratch.
I can't believe any company would look at this story (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our candidates."
But we've just established in this thread that even senior people are having difficulty findings jobs. This has nothing to do with desperation. Temp contract works both ways, if an employee doesn't like the company or finds another job within the 2-3 months, they are free to leave. This is more than fair.
Ignoring that this seems like a bad way to start a hopefully long-term relationship, this would largely limit your pool to people who don’t already have a job. If a senior candidate already has a job, why would they give it up for a sketchy 2-3 month contract and the vague promise of full employment?
Relationships between an individual and a corporation are fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal by heavily favouring the single human side.
It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling effect among everyone there.
And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.
Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one month for me to figure out it's not going to work out, then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.
I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time and money to hire and then putting in the time to make sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.
The catch is that even in-person interviews are no panacea. I agree that it's worth the time to filter -- I wasn't really responding to that bit -- but from what I've seen, you have to be a very good interviewer not to get a bad hire every so often.
I often wonder how many hiring managers are actually good interviewers, in-person or not, but I digress...
Seeing the truly bad hires dragged along to the detriment of the rest of the team is a sore spot for me, though. It happens way too often in my experience.
Also imagine you are a company with a reputation for hiring people - inducing them to leave their current job - and then often dismissing them quickly afterwards.
That would give many great prospective employees pause before applying to work there, because you are asking them to give up a good thing and take a chance on your company, without commitment.
There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled.
And that documentation takes time as a manager, which costs money.
But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had to fire anyone yet. I have talked to legal about the process regarding someone not on my team.
What jjav is referring to is "at will" employment - in almost all US states, employees can be fired for almost any reason, with no recourse. So the fact you're saying that firing people is expensive and time-consuming in the US flies in the face of the actual legal environment there compared with most other relevant countries.
>the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination.
Companies develop documentation processes as they get bigger for myriad reasons, but there is very little to worry about in the US in the way of terminating someone.
The only adverse effect most times is increase in unemployment insurance premiums, if you do not have enough documentation to show you terminated for cause.
Otherwise, 99.9% of the time, the terminated person can claim whatever kind of wrongful termination they want, they probably won’t get anywhere via the courts.
> To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination.
Not in the US. All you must do is tell them they're gone, walk them out the door and that's that. You must pay them any worked days not yet paid but that's all.
Company HR departments sometimes establish more elaborate procedures for firing, but none of that is required by law, it's just internal company process.
I'm assuming you're talking about "at-will" states, coming from Canada I've heard there are also sane states. And even some at-will states have powerful unions no doubt.
In most places, even with strong labour laws, you can layoff people for any reason in the first 30/60/90 days. And, the US has extremely weak labour laws. Usually, a month of severance for each year of service is customary, but probably not strictly required.
> When we want to talk about their solution in the interview, they “can’t remember” how it works or why they picked their method.
Sweet! That sounds like perfect signal for "used ChatGPT" to answer this question. So, you can send take home test, candidate sends reply (many from ChatGPT), then you do quick follow-up phone/video call to discuss the code. When you get the "signal" (should be quick!), then you immediately close the interview and move to the next candidate.
>It’s really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you, bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare away the LLM cheaters, but it’s expensive and time consuming for everyone involved.
Technology enables scale and reach, which solves some problems but also creates its own set of issues. I think you're right on with the solution: do things that are anti-scale. If you make things a bit more inconvenient, a bit more costly, and a bit more local, you create an environment where there's space for trust and humanity---values that don't scale.
Overly expressive words like "robust" and words that would appear in the thesaurus for "extremely" seem like tell tale signs in my experience. I've noticed personally that sometimes I have to tell ChatGPT to "sound more human and concise." I'd love to hear if anyone else has had the same experience as me.
Regardless, if ChatGPT is tailored enough, or a custom model is created, I can't think of any way to detect if an LLM has authored something generic. The lazy college student will probably get caught, but the cunning one not so much.
Same experience, we are getting absolutely flooded with hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants who are presumably using some sort of automation/AI to adapt their resumes to the position yet they are very weak when it comes time for a job challenge or tech screening
I had a recruiter basically hold onto me after I passed more than one technical screen, even though I clearly did get all the way through the hiring process at either role. They were maintaining a pool of competent people.
On-site interviews. This is not ideal, but is the way. As long as you're willing to shell out on my flight and cover the expenses, I'll fly anywhere for an interview.
>We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.
I think it's very scary when even manual review is still yielding you results with horrible technical screenings. I wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard or specific (specific makes sense, yo did you you are looking for esoteric), or if it's just truly that polarized a market. Many are laid off and I imagine those qualified with such specialized knowledge and anchoring themselves instead of searching.
>I also switched to only on-site interviews
Kind of crazy. Not that I mind on-sites, but I haven't even heard a mention of on-site in the interview process since COVID. And I'm basically applying to any relevant position, locally or remotely. Just another curiosity.
> I think it's very scary when even manual review is still yielding you results with horrible technical screenings.
It was bad. It was starting to affect my life outside of work.
> I wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard
My technical review is very hard, but it is directly applicable to the work I'm doing. And I've seen some candidates just do outstanding based entirely on their natural curiosity to look a bit deeper. I've been using a form of it for five years, so it's well reviewed.
> Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science.
As someone who graduated in the field of AI (so it's on my resume), and is now working in the Data Science field, often with LLMs, this hurts. Although I'm not sure what role you're hiring for, so perhaps I wouldn't be in the list of candidates anyway.
fwiw the article seems to describe a pretty mild type of automation to deal with tons of job ads and mundane stuff like cover letters that often get completely ignored by all sides, so why not try to automate that in good faith? didn't find anything about fake or cheating or misrepresenting one's skills in there.
> Anyway, drugs authorities have already approved drugs based on software simulations
The simulations you have linked aren't on the same scale. The paper uses the phrase "are powerful tools that COMPLEMENT traditional methods for gathering evidence"
And I'd argue this is more like detailed analysis rather than a simulation. It's like hoping you've found an immersive computer world like The Matrix, but it's a 2D side-scolling video game like Mario Bros.
I'd also question "approved drugs based on..." and instead argue they "didn't reject drugs based on..."
And not just any worm, but a C. elegan, which always grows the exact same way every time. The whole reason those worms are so well understood was due to ease of analysis. Hell, it always has 302 neurons which always wire up in the same way. It couldn't be easier to simulate, and it's really hard to simulate!
Hi! My professional job is to write emulators, my wife is a molecular biologist, and as a kid I had dreams of writing the exact software you are referencing, so I think I have a decent handle on this question.
We are no where close. We are ludicrously far away.
Let's define the exact scenario: we want to replace clinical trials with a software simulation of the human body. If the simulation shows ill side-effects, we can deny approval of a treatment.
1. We can barely emulate other computers. It's tempting to look at something like a Nintendo emulator and think "oh this isn't that hard" but it is. Most video game emulators get about 90% of the emulation right and it's good enough for most games. But a common practice is to carry patches for all the software to patch the software. Hilariously, this is sometimes because the software is working around a hardware quirk or bug, but then it turns out difficult to emulate that quirk or bug, so we patch out the hack. If you want a perfect emulator it's really hard [0] If you're testing for bad drug interactions in a human simulation, it's exactly these quirks/bugs you want to accurately simulate!
2. The software of cells is DNA and the genes contained within. And genes encode for proteins which are amazing at doing a huge amount of varied tasks. But these are the basic building blocks, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. We made huge progress but we barely understand. [1] Imagine trying to work on an emulator of a microchip, but we don't quite understand how transistors work.
3. There's mind-body feedback loop with the endocrine system [2]. On top of everything else, we need to simulate the brain. Sure we can use a simplified model of that, but animal models are also simplification. The whole point was to try to get more accurate, and how accurate do you need to guarantee results? I know this argument is a bit absurd but it's to point out there's no finish-line, only more and more difficultly as higher accuracy is demanded.
4. How would we develop this simulator. Let's suppose I have my initial prototype. I've simulated various known drugs and got results, and I've tuned my parameters. But this is a massive complex system. Once I run a new novel drug, the point is that it's doing something new! So, if I have a bad reaction, is it a bad drug, or a simulation bug? Each scenario is new and poses to surface incorrect modeling between complex subsystems. You can argue that we'd build our confidence over time, but that means we'll see the long path to simulator development. There have been some attempts but they have appeared to not provide predictive results [3]
5. When asked to debate whether or not we could simulate the human body, the pro-simulation side invoked fantasy: "Exascale or quantum computing will enable algorithms that we are yet to conceive of" suggesting that we are very far away if it is possible. [4]
Thanks for your answer, but pharmaceutical companies have used software for decades to describe how a drug behaves in a body and to do toxicology studies.
And there are software approaches for humans like this one:
A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.
The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.
And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!