I had this experience when I was trying to find an apartment - multiple different buildings very clearly had AI-generated responses. (To all you builders out there: quick replies are great. Instant replies are suspicious.) I immediately stopped considering them as options. If you can’t be bothered to have a human respond to my email when I’m trying to give you my money, what level of service can I expect once I’m already obligated to pay rent?

To me the issue isn't seeming inhuman, but cost. Employers often seem happy to impose rediculous time costs on the people they're hiring: take home tests, long series of interviews, etc. What held that back is they also paid a price. Full automation leaves them free to impose infinite cost with no guarantee of anything.

I agree in principle.

However, having been unemployed for over a year with a family to feed, I learned a little about what I'd put up with to get a job.

There is a limited ability to reject work, which is based on the fact that we all need a salary to live (the usual definition of class).

Offer and demand have left most engineers at a level of comfort where we can usually ignore that reality (until we age, become disabled, or go through similar stuff), but we shouldn’t rely only on that to protect people from mistreatment. This should not be legal.

I’ve read many horror stories from Indian developers about how they’re treated. They can’t escape it since almost every company in India will treat them the same. Their only escape is a remote job or to relocate.

I believe we’ll see this play out in a global scale. Once every employer paying a good salary does this, we won’t be able to pick and choose, without forfeiting a huge chunk of income. At that point I’d rather become a baker.

For a first-round interview, it was not uncommon to have a leet-code style automated assignment as early as the mid 2010s. I recall more than a few highly regarded employers that did this in 2014.

Is an AI interview meaningfully different than one of these automated interview systems? A lot of people are assuming that there'd be a human interview absent this AI interview, but it could very easily just be another automated interview - just a less sophisticated one. A company using an AI interview where I'd normally see a Leet-code assignment (e.g a first round coding interview) would not strike me as a bad thing.

Of course if they wanted to the the entire interview loops with AI I'd stay away.

>> For me, this is the key point. If a company can't even be bothered to show up for my interview -- when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward -- that bodes very ill for how I'll be treated if I were to work there.

Was this an initial screener or the final deciding interview? Also curious if you felt the async nature of an AI screener (if it was a screener) might be beneficial to some w/r/t timing (e.g., if I have a job, I wouldnt have time to interview during the day, so i'd prefer an async screener I can do at night or over the weekend.)

Indeed- if they'll hire you via AI, they're likely to fire you via AI, when the time inevitably comes.

Many don't judge a company by their inhuman resources department, but probably should.

I think this is a bit unreasonable. there are a lot of people applying to every job post. if a company can use AI to better filter the candidates, then it is an improvement.

there is issue only if AI is encoded with human bias, but treated as neutral and impartial judge

Philosophically I really like the idea in terms of how I'd like to work. If they are paying for a data processing node then they can have that. It won't stop me from being a human, and it could give me more time to get on with my life.

Dehumanizing customers by making them talk to (or chat with) AI bots is OK and kinda cool.

Dehumanizing [potential] employees by making them talk to (or chat with) AI bots is NOT OK and kinda sucks.

Am I getting it right?

Listen it does suck, but I dont think this is really true. A lot of the best places to work treat candidates like subhumans before they are welcomed into the fold and then suddenly you're making 300k+ doing interesting work with incredible people and treated great, (until they're done with you at some point)

I hate that it's the case, but generally the ones doing the dumb stuff during the hiring process are HR, and you'll not be interacting with them for 99% of the job once hired. Even before LLMs they were using AI and dumber applicant screening, causing people to fill their resumes with keywords.

IBM and the government often asks for recorded answers to questions for interviews now

I have a junior position open and got 1,300 applicants in 1 week before we took it down. Many of the candidates with strong resumes are just lying and doing so well enough to pass HR screens.

I doubt any sort of AI screen would help though as many of the lying candidates are already using AI assist tools making it just a cat and mouse race...

I don't know a good solution to give everyone a fair chance.

I once worked at a company that received 1500 SWE applications per day.

There simply wasn't enough people around to give everyone the personal treatment they may think they deserved. Taking this as a personal insult is not a great sign that I'd want to work with you...

> when everyone is trying to put their best foot forward

Except they're not. A significant fraction of applicants are people you would not want in your company. Outright frauds. You find out when you are on the hiring end and you can see the raw applications without any filters. The question is are you going to reject them based on whatever information you can glean without a call or interview, or are you going to give them a chance? A looser screen is more democratic, but it calls for scalable solutions like this. Perhaps a middle ground is to screen only the suspect candidates with AI.

Need to say versions of this more often, "That is not how it works here."

A very powerful and clarifying comment made by a European reporter, to a US Envoy of the Trump administration, during the first Presidency. (January 2018 press conference involving Pete Hoekstra)

It was in response to the Envoy bullshit and lie about how he didn't say some anti-Islam thing (claiming that the Islamic movement had brought "chaos" to the Netherlands and that there were "no-go zones" where politicians were being burned). Then one reporter -- Roel Geeraedts, stated: "This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions." And finally another reporter followed up with the top quote.

Poorly, which is how a huge fraction of employees are treated by their employers. This is particularly true in the US, where unionization rates are very low, the dominant culture is massively biased in favor of owners/employers, and labor laws are few and grant little.

That is to say, that as bad as this experience is, it is unfortunately not something so far from what many potential employees have to look forward to. Remember that people interviewing to work as unskilled laborers in a Domino's pizza store (to give an example from the video) may not have such a wide array of choices and likely really need to get some job to make ends meet.