Henry Kirk, a cofounder of the software development company Studio Init, wants to hire the best engineers.
“They still cheated,” he tells me.
“It was so obvious,” Kirk says.
They gave delayed answers or copied and pasted full blocks of code into the system instead of typing step-by-step.
“It’s a waste of our time,” he says.
“I’m a small company.
I have 400 applicants.
How do I screen the people down to a manageable chunk of folks?”
Many software engineers aren’t just allowed but are increasingly expected to use AI on the job.
Companies likeGoogle, Meta, andSalesforceincreasingly rely on it for engineering tasks in the name of efficiency.
Companies are scrambling to change old evaluation processes for a new era.
The traditional coding interview is at a crossroads.
But the end of the old interview might be welcome among engineers.
The interviews create pressure and penalize people who struggle in test environments, Lux says.
“These interviews reward test-taking over engineering,” Lux says.
“They ignore how software engineers actually work.”
An engineer’s skill for writing code may become less impressive than their capacity to understand it.
Kirk says a “perfect storm” bolstered cheaters: The techjob market tightenedjust as ChatGPT went mainstream.
Now, it could hurt them in the long run.
One applicant even admitted to it, and others have left the interview without argument, he says.
Now, his studio has applicants follow up their first test by coming on-site for more tests.
ChatGPT didn’t inventcheating.
But AI is a knowledgeable friend who’s even easier to access.
More people are using it to make a run at land any job bymass applyingor sending AI-generated cover letters.
When it came to engineers, recruiters and hiring managers started to notice something was amiss by early 2023.
Two years ago, the technical interview company Karat flagged about 2% of interviewees as potential cheaters.
Now, that proportion has jumped to 10% of interviewees.
“It’s happening more frequently,” says Jeffrey Spector, the cofounder and president of Karat.
“Ultimately, our belief is that interviews have to evolve.”
“The LLM is becoming a core part of how engineers do their job.
Preventing them from using the tools on their job seems very unnatural.”
So he changed the job app last year.
But he tells them they’ll have to walk him through their work.
“They may have an overreliance on the tool.
Maybe this isn’t the interview apocalypse scenario it seems.
The way interview processes are today, they are very unfair towards candidates.
Of course they’re going to make a run at find anything they can.”
“I think coding in general is already looking extremely different,” he says.
“That implies even without the cheating, the coding test will have to start looking different.”
All this coding mess is evidence of the breakdown in trust between employers and workers.
Amanda Hooveris a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry.
She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
