Job descriptions, resumes, cover letters, filling out forms, writing boilerplate for take home projects, etc. All of these are massive problems in the hiring process, and should be addressed before the entire thing turns into a complete nonsensical clown fest of nobody reading anything unless they're face to face with somebody.
So much of these things are just leftovers from the old days, we demand a resume not because it's an accurate assessment of history or skill but because "it's tradition". We write job descriptions not based on accurate demands of the job, but to fit in as many keywords as possible in hopes your ideal candidate doesn't miss it. List goes on, but really we can't start addressing these until we admit there's a serious problem - and this time not just relying on Google to maybe come up with something new.
total normalised workload: w
c requirements: r_c(person skill_c, time)
number of positions to fill: n
where
time[now, infinity] integrated:
sum over i:= 1 to c:
involvement of person ×
r_i(person skill_i)
= w
(solving for total involvement × requirement = total normalised workload,
because it's a boundary of inequality (>=100% of w))
finds out about posting: A subset of L
would accept: B subset of L
beta(person) := how much of required workload will this person fill after integrating their (involvement x requirement) over their time there
time: 0 to inf (now until end of the universe)
involvement(t): -inf to inf (work units)
requirement_i(t): [0, 1] (in units inverse to work units)
(a capable and willing person who's not conscious will have involvement=0,
someone who only would work on weekends for a place that's closed on weekends will have person skill_attendance>0 on weekends, but requirement_attendance>0 only on workdays, a disjoint set)
a person with beta=1 fills the position until the position ceases to exist
basically nobody has beta=1, that happens probably only if trade becomes obsolete or position is e.g. to paint a specific room)
remaining workload after parting ways (company closed, person dead and/or universe ended):
w_r = w - beta(w)
if w_r = 0 then they never have to hire anyone for this position ever again
otherwise the hiring process repeats with w=w_r
I think my main point is, hiring processess seem to be very far from addressing the basic parameters of actual process of working somewhere in my view.
Let's get GPT-4 onto this maybe
The really clever thing was, they did a line by line breakdown of the solution chatGPT came up with, keeping certain parts and throwing out others, giving reasons why each part deserved to stay or be tossed.
Then they wrote a second solution incorporating parts of the first and their own original code, which was genius. They put it all in a readme file with the solution. It instantly put them at the top of our candidate pile.
Unfortunately, the in person interview didn't go so well so we didn't hire them.
Smart approach though. If they'd just used ChatGPT to come up with some bog standard interview questions and solutions they'd probably have walked right into a job with us.
what is the line for you when the day to day doesn't involve unassisted time trials, but instead requires code reviews of assisted work and code reviews of colleagues work
in-person interview can give you some insight into what it might be like to work with a person day to day, it has more value than a take-home test in a lot of ways.
Didn’t even get a phone interview.
I really don’t care though because coding tests are usually a silly waste of time and I’ve had my time completely burned by employers wanting coding tests to which they reply either nothing at all, or some one liner like “we didn’t like it”.
If you DO are coding test, agree to it only on condition they supply your their assessment methodology first …. a request to which very few employers would respond.
Coding tests are mostly arbitrary, meaningless, unscientific and evaluate nothing real world.
I say refuse coding tests and go to another employer.
“We just want to see how you think”
really meaning they wanted unit tests, client side caching, and a particular design pattern
or really meaning they didn't want you to go outside the scope
or really meaning that they didn't even know that budget for their whole department could be revoked, so you wasted your time even if the single gatekeeper didn’t arbitrarily move the goal posts on you
in my experience, nobody can even tell you the details of what the “technical assessment“ will be, I’ve expected coderpads and instead gotten surprise screen sharing requests for using my own IDE, requiring an environment that isn’t even currently set up on that computer if I normally use a work laptop for the last who knows how long. I’ve NEVER seen a takehome project have some clear prewritten unit tests that the outcome had to conform to, I don't think this is a realistic request in this day and age.
When I interviewed at my current employer they made it very clear that the take home was meant as a conversation starter, and everyone who gets a take-home made it to the on-site (virtual in this case since its a remote role). This removed the guess work into whether the test will be a waste of time, as there was a guaranteed on-site interview. The test itself was also a more accurate representation of a simpler version of problems that the team was working on, as opposed to a generic algorithm problem.
Overall this was the most positive interview loop I've ever bene through, and was a big factor in making a decision to say yes to the job offer.
Edited to include “in 5 years”
there, that was easy to imagine
And if it sinks one model, there will be others. Like has been said, the genie is out of the bottle.
There is no reason to believe that the large (language/multimodal) models will stop progressing. In six months the IQ of ChatGPT increased by 30-40 points. If we pretend that these things are linear, (so far they are actually exponential) then that's a 430 IQ in five years. Assuming the acceleration of progress entirely stops and just increases linearly from here on out.
There are quite a few people that think this stuff can easily become millions of times smarter. I am doubtful of that in the short term, because I think there are practical limits to compression, but you have to admit that multiple orders of magnitude increases in speed, data size, and efficiency are very plausible. Especially as new compute-in-memory systems start to roll out which is feasible in five years.
The non-conservative and increasingly popular belief is that these systems will be hundreds of times faster than humans and fully autonomous within a few years. Which seems extremely foolhardy but also the most likely path due to the inability of society to recognize and adapt to the real danger with enough nuance.
So I am wondering if there will be any jobs for any people at that point unless the AI is deeply integrated into their brain.