* developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer.

* developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow.

* the glorious mechanical keyboard, as they google for an answer.

* interviewed one person and had a different one show up.

One of my favorite interviews (as an interviewer) was when a SDET candidate provided a link to their website. When I visited it there was an issue loading some page. So I asked him about it and how he would troubleshoot, then asked him to come back on Monday with a solution. On Monday, the site was fixed, and he explained to me what happened in AWS, how he figured it out, etc. So he was hired, going on 2 years now and doing very well.

I don’t need robots who can recite what a b-tree is (ChatGPT can do that). I need people who will work hard, can understand the big picture and how to approach problems, while being a good personality on the team.

My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?"

The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP?

It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.

MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong.

I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any of the details they want.

Ah, I am so happy I am not the only one who invented this interview method :-)

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Thing about "Google.com" (I used Facebook/Gmail) is that when server side stuff is of interest (as it was for this cloud engineer job), then I also want to hear about geo DNS, reverse proxies, LBs, CDNs, eventual consistency, distributed storage, etc, all the complexity that is happening once that cat video appears in the browser.

Then again we can go back to JS, CSS, JIT and others' space

We were hiring students for a temp position. We're a Controls Engineering company, but my department is dealing with more traditional languages for supporting applications and needed extra help for a bigger project. I know the tech we use isn't standard in the university so the interview was asking students about how they approached their major projects and their methodology for learning new tools/languages.

The first guy who straight up said "I already know enough of C++ and Java, I suppose I'd just google how to do x in c# and branch from there" got the job. Because...yeah, that's about it. We talked about a 4th year project and what his responsibilities in the team where, problems faced, solutions found, etc.

Researchers' fields/interests are too narrow, by far, for companies to find enough candidates. Machine learning departments go from low thousands (FANG) to maybe a dozen individuals on the low end (small regional banks, ...). That adds up to let's say 40.000 jobs worldwide.

Plus there's the non-cheating cheating. The majority of conferences (including ICLR/NIPS/CVPR) are still presentations by companies about how they "innovated" by letting an intern use 10-year old techniques, in an established library (ie. not pytorch, but an "integrated" solution, sometimes going as far as an Oracle tool) to look at their own proprietary data (in medical, social sciences, sometimes chemistry). This then delivers them a "paper", goes into the conference proceedings, and they make sure this delivers dozens, sometimes hundreds of citations for all individuals involved.

Don't get me wrong. Delivering a major paper at those conferences is a major, incredible accomplishment that's beyond me, for example. But there's 20-30 people on a yearly basis that "really"/honestly do that and over 5000 total presentations at those conferences. And there's 10000 or more candidates needed to fill positions at companies.

And then the question is: who would you rather hire? A math phd, or frankly even a CS master with no relevant machine learning papers, or that intern?

I had several bad experiences right out of school - I would regularly do programming exercises for recruiters and wasted a lot of my time I will never get back. Some of those exercises would take 3 to 5 hours, and I was told I was one of the faster candidates :/

Once I was able to build a resume and show off projects I told myself I would never go through that experience again.

I don't know if this comment will help you at all, but good luck to you! If you are in the Midwest area I know of a recruiter or two that are great people and can help get you pointed in the right direction. My email is in my profile.

Interviewing is a bit different, since there's no book, but when we looked for a junior dev, the applicants got a laptop with VS Code, the common browsers, internet access and an empty (macOS guest) account, and a few (short!) tasks to show if they understood the questions and were able to start formulating an answer. We also looked for a personality match (we're a small company) and signs of general intelligence. Worked out reasonably well.

I really dislike the more extreme approaches to interviewing that one sometimes comes across, like leet code scores. That's just too disconnected from the actual work. Unless you need your employee to grind leet code questions, of course.

Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out fraud was committed, the benefit payout is guaranteed after two years.

Taken back to the fraud in interviews, you could make the same argument that after some time working on the job and not gettimg fired, the risk of getting someone not actually qualified did not come to pass, so its more useful to look at the employees current performance than their original fraudulent interview.

This is true not only because of status quo bias, sunk cost etc., but also because employers will often try really hard and be very patient, in the hope that an employee's performance will improve.

So perhaps the medical exam stuff should be swapped around; everyone can get life insurance, but if you want payout for certain things to kick in before two years, you get a medical and pass.

Also, there are some policies that do have limited benefits the first two years. This is especially common for any type of insurance that doesn’t require a medical exam. They tend to be very expensive for the amount of insurance they provide, but maybe have a manageable monthly payment because the amount of coverage is relatively low. This type of insurance is usually “I can’t qualify for anything else” coverage, or it’s for a very specific purpose, like paying for funeral expenses when for some reason the person didn’t have the desire to just save that money in the bank.

I suspect you're right.

There certainly are desperate people who go to Vegas, lose their entire savings, and choose to end their life because they're not willing to put in the work to continue trying to survive for another, say, 40 years, starting with zero assets.

There are also people with severe mental illness (poor/no executive function, prone to psychotic episodes, imbalances in their brain chemistry) who make poor choices or don't even consciously make choices but their body is nonetheless doing things, who end up also choosing to end their lives.

There is overlap between these two groups. How could an insurance company decide which is which? If cancer can kill you and they pay out for that, why would they not pay out for deaths due to mental illness? Because they can. We're becoming more willing to talk about mental health, but there's still a ways to go.

There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong with the mind and I couldn't hazard a guess at what proportion of people are 100% okay.

(The free will vs determinism is obviously overly simplistic above)

- higher premiums for everyone because the pool of applicants aren’t that healthy

- the super sick people simply die in the first two years

- the semi sick people can hang on for years, but weak health may me limited ability to pay because of limited employment prospects

- the not sick people will find better prices or simply realize the insurance is overpriced and cancel it

If they can still answer the question and show evidence that they understand it, what's wrong with reference materials and googling?

Context matters. If you're looking to see "have you really done security stuff?" by mentioning some OWASP Top 10 vulns and asking for a quick description, for somebody that has indeed done any security at all that will be trivially easy and anybody else will need to google it. Can they skim google and get you an intelligeable answer? Maybe but that's not what you're looking for, the question itself is a proxy for something else.

For most of my interviews I tell folk up front to google whatever they need to. But at the very very earliest stage of the interview loop we do a quick "programmer is a big field, what kind are you?" round so we know how to place people and the questions we use for it are all trivially easy for somebody even remotely familiar with the fields we're looking at and also trivially googleable for anybody else. The goal with that piece isn't to challenge people it's just to round their skillset to the nearest role that we have. I've caught people retyping code, pretending to be inventing it, from what's clearly the first article they found when they googled the keywords. It was never intended to be a hard problem, just something to quickly tell an infrastructure from a frontend engineer. It was more or less bitwise identical to the article they were retyping from and they couldn't explain the code or modify it. That doesn't even accomplish what they want, even if it worked we'd then go on to interview them for a job they couldn't do.

Again you can argue about whether that's a good practise or not but it's still not licence to simply cheat on it. You're conflating these and and I think it's not the right thing to do.

Basically become a PM for a team of four Vietenamese kids and pull in pay from 3 gigs.

I later did some contracting on the side of a full-time job in 2018 and it was hard -- confusion and burnout set in quickly. But still think about the offshoring approach sometimes...

The new person started and we realized the person that came in had no more information on what/how we had talked about in the interviews than we did. What was done easily over a screen share was well outside of what this person was capable of. In the interview, solid yanking/putting in VIM - in person, unable to save/close, for example. He was present -- we did wonder if the recruiter we worked with had a paperwork mistake, so asked a few bits about our interview and while he could parrot bits of the answer and our discussion, he could not come close to actually hitting the why or next steps like he did in the interview.

That was the point where a camera was required for the interview, for us.

I'm always amazed at the extent people go to to cheat. It gets to the point that you're putting in more effort than you would have to be successful without cheating.

I sometimes feel some people simply enjoy cheating too much. Its not about accomplishing a goal by any means necessary, its something about doing something wrong that certain people seem to enjoy.

This became kind of a business where a person sells his services to help you cheat by appearing instead of you in the video interview and also helps you with the work after you got the job.

- If the answers are so basic and guessable that one can both find and then deal with a printer to commit it to slow-RAM physical legacy memory, then the problem is not with the candidate

- People with such little self awareness that fail to perceive this problem have demonstrated why you don't want to work with them. The problem is not the fact that they were hotfixing answers straight to prod

- This was just a reverse racial discrimination security test. By identifying the non-authenticated user, you both demonstrated exemplary awareness of identity phishing attacks as well as a base standard that 2 people aren't the same based on their protected identity criteria

What happens during the actual in-person interview that follows ??

Google Meet is cheaper than a flight & hotel room.

Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview performance) to subsequently get promoted. So, hiring mission accomplished, end of story. They may not have found the very best person for the job (very subjective and unknowable anyway), but if the process didn't result in an under-performer taking the job, the process did not fail. And, importantly, there's no reason whatsoever to think that if no cheating was allowed and a different person took the job, that they would on average be any better.

The interview process is probably calibrated more like a rationing system than a ranking system. They'd have too many capable hires applying for each job.

At some point, if someone says their company hires cheaters, promotes thieves, and has a culture that celebrates those things. . . either there is more to the story or that person needs to run like hell because the company is toxic.

Sadly, that's not how it works in practice. In fact, a person I worked with was the perfect counter-example.

As an SEM, he routinely portrayed his engineers' ideas as his own when talking to senior management, he committed to unrealistic timelines, shipped utterly broken code to meet those timelines, then cast blame on other teams for the brokenness. (E.g. blaming the mobile team for broken responses in his team's backend APIs). Things like that.

At some point, it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because senior management saw him as the guy who delivered, they dismissed the complaints about his behaviours as the cost of doing business, so they never really acknowledged that he wasn't delivering in the first place, so the people complaining were cast as jealous b-tier whiners.

OP is right though, that all CreditTaker's peers know he isn't doing any of the work, but it doesn't matter because companies are hierarchal and CreditTaker is the only one talking to execs above him, so his story is what gets passed around as reality. His peers who know the truth are too busy doing the actual work.

Taking credit doesn't look just one way. Very few mid-level management types will delegate work then when the work is completed they go to their direct report and say "Hey look what I created all by myself with no help. Pretty great huh!?" What happens more commonly is that they will delegate a project to team members A & B and have them come up with a solution to a problem. When the project is complete A & B show it to manager I. Manager I then goes to manager II and says "Here is what my team came up with as a solution to our current problem." Manager I had little to no involvement in the work or development of the solution, but they present it as though they had. That happens constantly in the working world. A good manager and leader will always mention, by name, who did the work.

It's credit-taking all the way up.

Not the people deciding rankings and promotions.

Consider that every manager, over the course of a year, has things they want done but which they can't directly task people to do because those people either have defined job responsibilities or require a job code to charge their time while performing the task (which the manager can't, or won't, provide.)

Now consider that there are some employees that care more about doing what their manager wants than they care for doing their job (shocking I know.) They will happily take on the 'extra-credit' tasks without regard for any collateral consequences because when it comes time for annual reviews the manager will place them at the head of the queue for promotion.

And yes that does mean that the culture is broken and it's probably why so many people hate their jobs.

I'm not sure that is true. Plenty of mid level management types will assign work to the people they oversee on their team. Then never make mention of who actually performed the work when they present the completed product to the folks above them. It is incredibly common. One way this also happens is to have a mid-level manager delegate a project to someone. They quite literally do all the work. Then they present it as a team effort later on when it wasn't because as a team effort it gives the appearance of their involvement.

Taking credit by omission of information is still taking credit.

If we surveyed the three of us and asked for the percentage contribution, that would typically add up to more than 100%.

Trust is invaluable, and you will not see its savings enumerated on the P&L, but lack of trust will eventually find itself on the P&L, due to ever increasing costs.

I mean one of the companies they mention is Amazon

It has become the premier cloud provider. That wasn't the original goal, but it's good for them.

As a marketplace it is degenerating into an absolute mess. The force that maintains Prime membership is about 70% inertia.

/s

I have lots of sympathy for people that lose time discarding cheaters from their hiring processes, or that hire people just to immediately fire them due to cheating. But if they are promoting those cheaters, then they are the fraudulent ones.

The manager who hired them can either a) fire them, admitting they made a mistake, and taking a headcount and budget reduction; or b) promote them, congratulating themselves for the successful hire and increasing the budget.

Nobody gets promoted to stop doing damage, they get fired. Contrary to popular belief, it's not difficult to fire people, less so incompetent people.

If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.

Either it's because they have very refined tastes and value aesthetics over money, or...

Anyway, a king that hoards priceless art seems worse? The good stuff belongs in a museum visible to the public, not a private collection or walled off throne room. And lots of the art (jewelry for example) produced for royals was just expensive gaudy crap anyway, a waste of gold.

Based on how I believe the world works, and on larger patterns at play here, this general cultural trend (if this is in fact what it is) will backfire.

If this is deemed culturally acceptable, and one extrapolates this pattern further, there is little deeper value that a culture has to offer.

Everything becomes more expensive and dangerous when there isn't basic trust. You have to verify, surveil, and credential everything.

Old people get scammed not because they are dumb, but because they grew up in a society insulated from dishonesty.

Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.

A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.

Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.

I'm satisfied, in an interview, if I feel the person is interested in the topic, is able to admit that they don't know something, and seems like they'd be pleasant (although i'd settle for "not difficult") to work with.

The breadth and depth of their knowledge is secondary and it's always a gamble because people excel at putting up very convincing façades of whatever it is that they think they're being evaluated for.

People have different things to offer, and you really don't find out until at least 6-12 months into their employment what they really excel at, you have no chance in 30-60 minute (or whatever) interview.

The best you can hope for is to rule out the obvious sociopaths.

That's what the parent comment is saying. Open-book instead of closed-book, just have the candidate walk you through figuring out what they don't know, listen to them think aloud, and evaluate that.

I hate jumping through hoops too, but have you seen other industries (LSAT, mcat, etc)?

If you've never done it before leetcode style problems are bound to teach you something useful to your work.

Taxi laws are an instance of almost 100% public corruption, unnecessary bureaucracy, and regulatory capture, but at the same time they would have been almost impossible to dislodge except through widespread disobedience. What happened with Uber and Lyft was for the best. The market spoke.

I think there is plenty of reason to think people who actually know the stuff instead of cheating would be better on average. It's a signal that they were smart enough and motivated enough to learn the material (basic algorithms/coding skills in this case)- both traits that would probably make them better on average at the job.

Being a good cheater is a useful skill that probably also helps people on average- but I doubt it's nearly as useful an indicator of future success as being good at the skills necessary to do well on interview questions (w/o cheating).

Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself. The best interview that I've encountered is the long interview. I hire you for four months as a co-op, see what you can do, and we go from there. Impractical in many/most settings, obviously.

But this is usually not possible- it's contingent on other people having already solved and posted solutions online for some question worded nearly the same. Much of the knowledge behind interview questions applies to all sorts of programming problems where the solution won't be available to copy. A knowledgeable programmer would know quickly that some problem is best approached by dfs or bfs, while the cheater may not.

> Fundamentally, the issue is the interviewing/selection process itself

I agree, but this will always be a hard process. LC problems are like IQ test or SATs, they work fairly well most of the time, but probably better to weed out the particularly weak candidates than determine how good people truly are.

The problem is while you can’t control randomness, on average those roofs do fail much more.

But more broadly it’s amazing how far developers on HN will go to defend things that will mildly inconvenience developers.

Cheating to bypass a stupid gatekeeping system that's designed to ration 1 job per N perfectly qualified applicants is only a problem if it's a problem. If you claim that people who didn't cheat during that process are any less likely to do something unethical when hired, I'd say that's a claim in need of proof.

My preferred solution is to come up with a less stupid gatekeeping system. But I only ever hire co-op students, and no one will let me try anything that involves more than a 30-minute chat. Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.

If an individual cheats but turns out to be competent, it's no loss for the company or anyone else, really. But on average, if cheating is common, more incompetent people will slip through and ultimately cause problems. I can bet my life savings on black and win, but that doesn't make it a good decision.

> Works well enough, but it's a highly non-scientific, non-rational exercise.

If you'd like to know about the research behind interviews, they've found that unstructured interviews aren't better than pulling people out of a hat, regardless of how effective they feel.

The process did not fail in the same way my bear repelling crystal necklace has not yet failed me in repelling bears.

It's not "right" or "wrong" - it's just a decision. There may be other choices and other decisions but to paint this one as flat wrong seems, well, wrong.

> They may not have found the very best person for the job

The vast majority of job searches do not have this as a goal!

Most companies want to hire somebody who's good enough relatively quickly for a price they want to pay.

No you don't! Or else you'd never hire anybody because how can you be sure anyone is the best person for the job?

You want to hire the person in front of you who is good enough to be likely enough to be able to do the job.

My process is that I hire only men. I have not yet had an underperformer. Hence, my process never failed.

At some level, fairness is important. And no, it's not important only when there is a law behind it.

I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when presenting it. It's not "cheating" but it's skipping the effort and preparation in the same way.

Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all these presentations?” instead of “why do you all put so little effort in your presentations.”

"Any questions?"

"How are we going to scale the data storage?"

"Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance."

"Great."

It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.

Just like cheating is a problem for a teacher to solve, a lack of preparation is a problem for the audience to solve.

See, for example, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Hoxha's Albania, the Taliban's Afghanistan...

I'm suprised that so many companies are unable to measure the performance of their employees in an effective manner. This entire discussion comes down to whether management actually wants to own the product and subsequently the product development lifecycle and is then also willing to investigate potential friction, or, as is much more often the case, doesn't really care and just wants to be told what they want to hear.

You prioritize a metric (keep management happy) over actualy results. If I can improve that metric by improvising, how am I a cheater?

They put 4x more effort to achieve what I would say was a 20% better result. That’s not meant to be an insult to them, I have much more experience.

The point of presentation is usably not to put up great presentation, but to get certain points across.

If you successfully do that with quickly thrown presentation, then its waste of time spending more on it.

- No country for old men

When the easier money dries up, that will change.

I am curious to know what conclusion you draw from the anecdote about the test?

Is it that you aren't good enough because you tried your best and failed?

Or is it that the test is a fallible instrument, designed by a human being who works within the constraints of an institution and has no choice but to treat education as if it is a magic juice that it's his job to squirt into the students heads and then administer tests to determine if the juice stuck there or leaked out, thereby identifying the defective and leaky craniums?

Or is it that you seemed out of touch with what every else intuitively understood? ie. That they're being evaluated and that a negative evaluation can have profound consequences for the rest of their life, regardless of if the testing procedure is fair or not?

You seem to be getting my point though - I would have rather failed than cheat.

I learned that people (even smart people - which my peers were) will cheat if its beneficial to them.

If you really wanted to challenge yourself there's nothing stopping you from doing extra excerises outside of class. Yes, your other classmates were wrong for cheating, but you're paying the university and they can't even be bothered to update the their tests because they don't care about the cheating or you getting an education either.

There's any number of situtations like this that happen in real life, from school, government, politics, work, etc. Not understanding these rules is much worse than being able to do some assignment in university.

Interestingly it doesn't have to be this way. This is mostly due to the fact that nearly all companies use a command-and-control management structure where people are promoted by the people above them. Stealing credit from your co-workers and/or convincing your manager that you're going to support them is a surefire way to climb the ladder.

The solution is simple: promote from below.

Basically, teams should be lead by people they have democratically chosen, and that process should continue all the way to the top. I've always found it curious that most of the world recognizes democracy as the most effective way to structure a government, but the corporate world is obsessed with dictatorial command-and-control structure - with predictable results.

Disclaimer: I am the co-founder of a co-op dev studio that was based on 18th century pirate charters (https://www.fountstudio.com/blog/yes-we-have-a-pirate-code-1...).

I had a friend in college friend who was in a Government major program, which was notorious for handing out insanely large reading lists for each class, like literally a ~meter tall stack of books for a term. Being the highly conscientious person she was, she spent the first three years trying to get through it all. She was blown away her senior year when she found out that the professors did NOT expect every book to be read! The professors had worked at the highest levels of govt (including Cabinet level), and knew that the volume of available references in the real role was enormous, and that a key skill was being able to efficiently whittle them down to a usable level without reading every page. So, they were literally recreating the situation for their students. Her senior year went a lot better after learning that...

I'm pretty sure it was because it is actually the same situation in the real world — you're EXPECTED to have full command of all that information, yet need to filter it down in real time. If you are told to just skim forever, you don't ever face the real-world problem, and fail when you get there.

EDIT typo

That sounds like bad professors to me.

This is the one thing that I always remind myself and my people, whenever the temptation arises.

If my cheating works, I could never stop myself from doing it again, bigger, causing much worse damage to me and people around me when I get caught.

If my cheating fails, I've lost more than what I could have gained anyway.

To me its a lose-lose. I'd rather get up and leave, or find another way than cheat.

And I hold that standard for people around me too. If I know they've cheated, even when I'm not involved or affected, that person or group and I are done.

Its a hard non-negotiable thing. And I think I'm better for it.

So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.

I don't bother prepare for client support calls, mostly because I don't want to do them and want to be considered incompetent at them so I am not asked to help in the future as much. So at least for me, presentations are nothing but more work.

I think that's more or less how I would summarize the sympathetic comments in here, but if I missed something or if I'm being unfair then let me know.

I for one think this kind of stuff is pretty shameful, and I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that. The scariest thing for me is how all that's really changed since university, which was full of cheaters, is how much easier it's become, and I don't just mean in engineering. I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dishonesty.

I guess the silver lining is there will probably be incredible opportunity down the road to combat this, but nonetheless it's a little sad that it isn't inherent to the discipline of technology itself anymore. Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA, but Computer Science and Engineering were considered too hard to really be worth the effort. Obviously I don't mean to say that there were zero grifters, but on the whole the only people who pursued these disciplines were true, dyed in the wool nerds who simply thought making stuff was cool.

As a passing thought I've noticed that there's also sort of like a fierce loyalty to defending LLM's in the forums, often by people who display a certain amount of ignorance as to how they work. I wonder if there's a similar dynamic there as to the people who are justifying the cheaters in the comments?

One nuance that may help explain how the change happened is how the status of CS has changed in the last 20 years. Maybe its just my age bias, but there seems to be a perceptible change of how CS majors are viewed by society and that changes the type of people attracted to that curriculum.

It used to be that CS and engineering majors were the nerds who, as you say, "simply thought making stuff was cool." Nowadays, though, as CS commands a disproportionately large salary, it has higher status. This tends to attract more people who are in it the reasons of status and money, rather than for a fascination with the work. Anecdotally, when I ask people why they got into CS a surprising number now say something along the lines of "because it pays well."

It's my opinion that change in perspective can bias how one views cheating. If the curriculum is just a means to an end (i.e., if school is just a means to a degree, which is just a gateway to a job/paycheck), it seems to make cheating more palatable.

Yeah, I've noticed that too. It's utterly depressing.

Even though we're both talking about SWE, whereas CS is a different thing altogether.

Somebody can still quite easily work in CS and find affordable and high quality living. But maybe not in SV. I’d even argue you can work on more interesting problems. But people overwhelmingly want to work in SV because of the status it confers.

Not lower class people moving into middle class.

However, I think you're being a little naive if you think the days of "yesteryear" were somehow different in man's capacity and willingness to do what he needs to do to survive.

    I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dishonesty.

    it isn't inherent to the discipline of technology itself anymore.

    Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA

The reality is that humans have not fundamentally changed in hundreds of thousands of years. If we're doing it today, you can bet we were doing it yesterday and that we'll be doing it tomorrow.

Any policy, technology, process, etc must take that into account.

I definitely wish that's not how it was, and I don't think that's how it should be, but we have to work with what we have to work with.

There are plenty of ways to get people to rise to their best selves, rather than sink to their worst selves, as they are in this context while competing for high paying jobs, and we should always try to induce the best outcomes possible.

I think this what you're getting at by suggesting we don't just give up, despite knowing what we know about human nature. But we also shouldn't deny the hard truth that humans won't anyways behave the way we wish they did.

Robbing a loaf of bread so your children can eat is very different from cheating on a test/interview for a job with a kingly salary. One is doing what one needs to do to survive, and morally justifiable. The other is pathetic and craven.

Except the honest competitor who was passed over for the position, or the promotion?

- nature is inherently competitive. - civilization and culture temper this but requires vigilance to maintain.

The second implies that some cultures may be more effective at tempering nature’s excesses than others… and also that it can change in a way in which it becomes less or more effective, or at least effective for different things…

I think this part is a crucial part, that many comments here miss. Honesty is not useful if it's not rewarded, consequently if cheating can be rewarding, because of non-vigilance. We see this not only among humans but also in animals/birds, and in general nature.

It's hard to speak quantitatively about qualitative things, but that' something that enters the discussion as soon as words like "more" or "less" are uttered.

In any case, you're absolutely correct that I'm definitely naive because I'm limited to just my lifetime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmMqMYgswsA&t=609s

The fact that people can just cheat in these interviews and not get PIP'd within 6 months, at an organization notorious for PIPing its under-performers, does illustrate how bad the screening process it. Not only do they need to shift back to in-person interviews, they also need to fix their process to actually test skills.

If we're being honest, LC style interviews aren't even about testing skills, it's trying to proxy for testing raw intelligence (or at least the ability to remember and regurgitate lots of facts). If companies could just IQ test people and hire by IQ, there'd be a lot less weirdness in interviews, but that's illegal (and probably rightly so).

> The Act proscribes not only overt discrimination, but also practices that are > fair in form, but discriminatory in operation. The touchstone is business > necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot > be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.

(apologies for the dated and offensive language, starring it out seemed like it would imply a different and more offensive term so I left it as is)

My reading of it is that IQ tests aren't broadly illegal, but the employer would have to demonstrate that it's somehow related to job performance. E.g. one employer refused to hire people with too high of an IQ, and the courts ruled that was a reasonable (if unwise) justification [2].

I'm doubtful any case challenging LeetCode tests on the same grounds would succeed. I think it would be exceptionally difficult to convince a court that solving coding problems is unrelated to a programmer's job performance.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

2: https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

I bet many involved in designing and setting the requirements know exactly how it works but they'd use veiled language and never put anything down in written communication.

IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Maybe IQ doesn't exactly track "intelligence", or whatever that is, but it is certainly tracking something that is correlated to success.

You could probably screen candidates based on the question "Did any of your parents go to college? And if so, did they study or work in a STEM field?" and be roughly as predictable.

(This is terrible and you shouldn't do this)

high quality studies have found that the additive heritability of IQ is somewhere around 0.8-0.9, that's just totally incompatible with parental SES as the primary upstream cause. it's simply not debatable. and it wasn't debatable ten or twenty or fifty years ago either; it is one of the most well-established facts in human quantitative genetics.

ironically one of the things having a high IQ is bad for is having accurate beliefs about IQ; ask anyone who didn't go to college and odds are they'll correctly tell you that smartness runs in families.

It's strange to me that anyone would care about people cheating at job interviews and not say CEO pay that's 1,000X the average employee. More power to those who can balance things in their favor against those who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

But to answer your question subjectively, yes, in my experience cheaters will cheat. If they used unethical methods to get hired that's a strong indicator that they will also cheat their way to raises and promotions.

Alphabet's CEO makes about 1000x the average googler, but that's only about 1% of salaries. What I mean is that for every $100 a Googler makes, about $1 goes to the CEO. It's not like top executives are claiming ing most of the value for themselves, the majority of the value a worker generates is returned to them in their compensation.

When people cheat at the job interview and end up on my team or interacting with me but are not competent at the job, that directly and negatively impacts me and my work life, as well as my productivity. The fact the CEO makes more money than me does not directly impact me (although it does indirectly through larger society).

I like being part of a team that is high performance and competent and linked to other high performance and competent teams. Cheating makes this less likely and damages the quality of the work life and creates the need for more process that slows does the productivity and performance of the team in order to account for and hedge against incompetence.

If you like to excel, the best choice is to preserve your energy as much as possible while working for your employer and build something amazing that you own with the energy that otherwise would have been given to them.

No it's the other way around. Hinton, basically the father of "AI" and other real experts who are involved in the creation of LLMs are massively divided about the future. Hinton even says the AI actually understands you. The fact that there's division among the real experts (ie not you or me) shows theirs legitimacy in the defense.

There's a fierce artificial downplaying of AI when it comes to programming. A lot of people say that it's not remotely close to replacing programmers. I think this is the delusional group. It's not replacing us yet, but it's obviously close and the trendline is unmistakable.

I think it occurs because a lot of people's identity rests on their actual ability to program. They think they're superior programmers and the fact that a machine is on track to trivialize the skills they take so much pride in causes them to dismiss the technology in the face of actual experts who fear and question it. There's bias on both extremes and one Hallmark of bias is when one fails to address the division and actual controversy.

You have failed to address the controversy instead you categorize people who "defend" AI as people who don't "understand" it and you imply it's some psychological quirk or bias people have. I agree somewhat, but clearly not all who "defend" AI are like this as their are preeminent experts who are on the "defence" side. Instead I think your behavior is an exhibition of other common psychological defensive quirks and biases.

I think you don't realize how it's a dog eat dog world out there and people will do anything to succeed. Maybe your born with talent, so you worship and defend that talent with calls to uphold "integrity." Others, however, will do anything in their power to stay afloat in the face of your "talent." It's more about survival for humans then it is about integrity. Do people really want to live a shitty life getting sub 100k salaries only letting people like you take up all the high paying jobs in the name of "integrity"? No. No one does... not even you, but you have the luxury of talent or ability to master those interviews... that is the only differentiator.

I bet if you couldn't pass those interviews you would be in the same boat. You defend integrity not because you are a stand up person, but because you have the ability to succeed without violating your integrity. That's all.

One thing to note about people is often their truth strangely aligns with their circumstance in life. Why? Most people do not seek actual truth. Instead they construct the truth as a scaffold to support themselves and the weight of their sins. You are no different. I'm pretty sure you are quite good at the technical interview and That strange alignment with your philosophy on interview integrity is Not a coincidence.

Personally I'm unique in this regard. I'm good at interviewing but in my quest in seeking the objective truth of the world... I have, to my own detriment, constructed a life where my truth is not in alignment with what I am in actuality.

> There's a fierce artificial downplaying of AI when it comes to programming. [...] I think this is the delusional group.

This could definitely be the case. I personally wouldn't bet against AI as in all of AI. I, like many, think it's a matter of time and technology, but I do think this particular moment in time, and this particular technology is over hyped. I'll just be candid about that. Still, one day? Yeah you bet, although it appears that we're at least one fundamental breakthrough short, so the technology will be different. Today's tech will still nonetheless be fundamental though.

> I think it occurs because a lot of people's identity rests on their actual ability to program. They think your they're superior programmers [...] causes them to dismiss the technology in the face of actual experts who fear and question it.

I can't speak to the first part, with respect to what one side's biases are, as I don't really know what they're thinking, but you're almost certainly right that there's bias on both the bear and bull cases for AI. Sometimes I think it's a simple as the "line goes up" thinking in crypto just for programming and that's all that people need. I just read a lot of comments that at times feel kind of desperate to defend LLMs and so I added that last part to my original comment to see if anyone felt like adding to that thought, which you have so thanks.

> You have failed to address the controversy instead you categorize people who "defend" AI as people who don't "understand" it and you imply it's some psychological quirk or bias people have

Well, in all fairness I didn't want to make my already very long comment any longer than it already was, however in my defense, with respect to defining the controversy vs. implying there's a psychological quirk - I have seen what you can call some very strange gymnastics around what is learning or what is intelligence in, again, sort of desperate efforts to make LLMs just something that they're not. It's in those situations that I was referring to the people clearly not understanding how they work. That being said, I also did imply there was a psychological quirk but that was just because I didn't have the space nor the ability to really articulate what else might be going there. I think in parts of your response though you conveyed a valid viewpoint.

> Maybe your born with talent, so you worship and defend that talent with calls to uphold "integrity."

First, thank you, but second I don't think this was the case. I am one of those people who actually thinks talent is usually overrated, as "good enough" + perseverance does at least the same job for less in most cases. If anything, I think talent is kind of a scapegoat whenever some great goal proves to be elusive.

> Do people really want to live a shitty life getting sub 100k salaries only letting people like you take up all the high paying jobs in the name of "integrity"? No. No one does... not even you, but you have the luxury of talent or ability to master those interviews.

I think I would just respond by saying that nobody is guaranteed something just because they want it, but all of those people have the same access as anyone else to leetcode and the internet or whatever else they need to do the work to pass the interview. Bearing that in mind, cheating is obviously understandable, but just because I understand it doesn't mean I would do it, personally. I definitely don't think that it's a good thing either, but I don't think I'm high and mighty about it either. Ultimately we all act the way that we do because we don't know any better. If I knew how to be smarter I would, but I don't so I'm kind of stuck where I'm at just like the rest of the world. I make mistakes and at times I can also be dishonest too. It's life. That said, it's not like I wholly embrace the moments in my life where my actions demonstrated my limitations, at least not when it became painfully obvious to me.

> You defend integrity not because you are a stand up person, but because you have the ability to succeed without violating your integrity

I appreciate your honesty about this and I don't think there's really anyway I can disagree with it. Maybe in another life, if I were in another person's shoes, I would act differently. I mean, that makes sense to me. I can't prove otherwise. That said, knowing what I know in this life, I stand by what I said.

The last thing I'll say is why I believe we should still make our best efforts to be good, at least within our ability. That is because living for the sake of accumulating power, at the cost of doing what you believe is right, is just not in one's own best interest. In the absence of understanding what is right and what is wrong, the power that we accumulate has the same opportunity to cause tremendous harm as it does joy.

Just think about why people always love really down to earth celebrities. We see them and think that despite all their money, power, and fame, they're happy and there's something comforting about that. Can the same really be said for the contrary? I know it's a silly argument because you kind have to keep an open mind to agree with me, but it's not as undeniable as 2+2=4. Still, that's what I truly believe and you don't know me or where I've been or what I've done. However, I wouldn't think this if I wasn't sincere about it. I have had my own mistakes and there have been times in my life, like anyone, where I've been immoral and I honestly came out the other end thinking the means didn't justify the ends. But it's up to you to believe me.

Anyways, apologies to everyone for the massive response. I wish I knew how to be more succinct in response.

Nature doesn't require that we be happy, only that we procreate. Excess resources often make us feel comfortable enough to procreate, despite any unhappiness we may feel.

I think you've nailed a sad reality.

The grifters and cheaters of our world are an opportunity cost. Who knows how much more productive or fair the world would be if we didn't tolerate them? By allowing them to succeed, we deny a world where they wouldn't need to exist.

Exactly. Every time I push back on people who dismiss LLMs as not understanding, they but don't seem to realize how little we know about the brain and what "understanding" actually means, mechanistically. So even with perfect understanding of how LLMs function, that tells us nothing about whether they actually understand.

If defined operationally as being able to reliably and coherently converse about topics, make connections, solve problems and respond in novel or surprising ways, LLMs these days are at or slightly above the average human. Way above in some respects, but still below in others. It won't be long before their capabilities undeniably surpass the average.

So, what happens when a company succeeds is that the competent people eventually either get tenured, or they get forced out by bozos (I'm using this as a term of art. Look up the bozo effect.) Eventually, the bozos win, and the company becomes unable to do anything other than extract monopoly rent. Then, some technology or regulatory shift arrives, and the incumbent gets forced out by a startup, or they somehow shed their bozos for a while.

So, if you are competent and honest, you have three choices:

- Learn how to be productive despite the promotion criteria. This is the path to tears and burn out, because most of your colleagues will only be good at gaming interviews / promotions, and your attention will be split between that and doing your job (and probably their jobs), placing you at a significant disadvantage.

- Somehow become the tenured engineer on top of this mess, and try to create pockets of competence in the organization. Ruthlessly detect + fire the bozos. This isn't fun either.

- Leave for a startup that's targeting a weak and foolish incumbent, and then leave when the startup grows up and becomes the weak and foolish incumbent (a good sign that this is happening is that the founding engineering team is leaving, or that your boss's boss is incompetent.)

Note that the last option is the lowest stress one for technically strong engineers. It is very hard to fake your way through knowing what you are doing when the entire company has direct visibility into your work.

If you can somehow solve the above problem then you can build a company larger than any of the FAANGs.

> In business there is no cheating, there is only making money and not making money.

This attitude is very common among people I know. You ask "how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that." We muddle through, is the answer.

This is the attitude that turns business from being something that is for the greater benefit of all into something that more like a cancer, harmful to all.

* Candidates now lie about experience. * promotions are given for loyalty, not contribution. * Companies cheat on hiring using false job descriptions and fake career carrots. * Your performance at work does not matter. Advance your career by interview prep, not excelling at your role. * Prestige (ex-FAANG, Ivy league degree) matter more than hard work.

I've noticed that tech companies are now filled with people who have zero interest in computer software. Management at tech companies is comprised of non-technical people.

Sometimes there's good reasons for this

I remember listening to a podcast recently that compared boys and girls in school. The takeaway was that girls generally try to do all of the work, whereas boys were far more likely to take short cuts to success. And this was the reason why boys were doing better in university and afterwards. The conclusion of the podcast was that we should be encouraging girls to try to take the same shortcuts as boys. It's a learned skill to know exactly what needs to be done to get what you want.

Maybe that's what's going on here. Rules, whether we like it or not, can be broken.

Regardless of gender it's useful to teach people endurance, prioritization, and how to judge when it's best to do everything vs only some things.