We have been interviewing people who are obviously using covert AI helper tools. Ask them a question and they respond with coherent response, but they are just reading off of a window we can't see.

In some cases it is obvious they are blathering a stream of words they don't understand. But others are able to hold something resembling a coherent conversation. We also have to allow for the fact that most people we interview aren't native English speakers, and are talking over Teams. It can be very hard to tell if they are cheating.

Asking questions to probe their technical skills is essential, otherwise you are just selecting for people who are good at talking and self promotion. We aren't just asking trivia questions.

We also give a simple code challenge, nothing difficult. If they have a working knowledge of the language, they should be able to work through the problem in 30 minutes, and we let them use an IDE and google for things like regex syntax.

Some of them are obviously using an AI, since they just start typing in a working solution. But in theory they could be a Scala expert who remembers how to use map plus a simple regex...

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed at a place where I had to do a take-home exercise. It's fine, I don't mind. No Leetcode. Just my own IDE, my own shortcuts, and write a piece code that solves a problem.

I was asked whether I used AI/LLM for the solution. I didn't. I felt like using an LLM to solve the problem for me wasn't the right way of showcasing knowledge. The role was for some form of 'come in with knowledge and help us'.

The response to that was basically: everybody here uses AI.

I declined the follow-up interview, as I felt that if all you have is the speed of AI to be ahead of your competitors, you're not really building the kind of things that I want to be a part of. It basically implies that the role is up in the air as soon as the AI gets better.

That link doesn't work for me.