I’m not sure why anyone would want a job they clearly aren’t qualified for.
It's a tool, and if they can master it to make it useful, then credit to them.
Alas, ChatGPT seems to be a jack of all trades, but master of none, which is gonna make it hard to pass my interviews which test very specific technical skills.
Tool usage is what separates us from animals and is generally ok where tools are available/expected, but in this case I think you misunderstand which tool we're talking about. The tool involved isn't actually chatGPT, it's more like strategic deception. Consider the structurally similar remark "as a voter, if a candidate can use lies to represent themselves as better than other candidates, I'm not gonna mark them down for use of dishonesty".
The rest of this comment is not directed at you personally at all, but the number of folks in this thread who are extremely eager to make various excuses for dishonesty surprised me. The best one is "if dishonesty works, blame the interviewer". I get the superficial justification here like "should have asked better questions", but OTOH we all want fairly short interview processes, no homework, job-related questions without weird data-structures and algorithms pop-quizes, etc, so what's with the double standards? Hiring/firing is expensive, time-consuming, and tedious, and interviewing is also tedious. No one likes picking up the slack for fake coworkers. No one likes being lied to.
Not me. I see it all the time, online and offline. I suspect they think it confers status on themselves, but what actually happens is honest people wind up shunning them.
It does not. Please ask any LLM for examples of animals that use tools. (My examples: chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, dolphins, otters...)
If someone aces the interview using an LLM and then does good work using that same LLM then what should the employer or other employees care? The work is getting done, so what's the problem?
Compare a shitty worker to a deceptive one using an LLM. They both passed the interview and in both cases the work isn't being done. How are those two cases different?
I think that makes you an incompetent interviewer, unless your questions are too hard for ChatGPT. In any case, solving the question without ChatGPT is more impressive than using it. Just like most other tools, like search engines or IDEs.
Even if you don't mind that situation, shouldn't you get buddy's contact information and offer him the job?
A better analogy is an interview where you can use a calculator (and not be detected). If the interviewer were only to ask you simple arithmetic questions with numeric answers then sure you'd seem to do well. So interviewers adjust to not doing that.
Yeah, hiring someone to code a website isn't the same as maintaining a nuclear plant, but it's the same concept of someone that knows their craft vs. someone that needs to rely on tools. There's a major difference in my mind.
Similar it is unreasonable and bordering on negligence to assume a person has the skill set unique to your situation.
to your point though, a person needs both. all of one and none of the other is useless. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing to play around disabling safety systems so you don't get Chernobyl, but for the everyday crud website you can just hire the coding monkey at a reduced cost.
At my company we tell people that they should feel free to google or consult references at practical coding challenges.
> It seems hard to test someone's knowledge that way.
I don’t really want to test knowledge but skill. Can you do the thing? At work you will have access to these references so why not during the interview?
Now that doesn’t mean that we are not taking note when you go searching and what you go searching for.
If you told us that you spent the last 8 years of your life working with python and you totally blank on the syntax of how to write a class that is suspicious. If you don’t remember the argument order of some obscure method? Who cares. If you worked in so many languages that you don’t remember if the Lock class in this particular one is reentrant or not and have to look it up? You might even get “bonus points” for saying something like that because it demonstrates a broad interest and attention to detail. (Assuming that using a Lock is reasonable in the situation and so on of course :))
What happened to all those folks? They retired, and turned into Boomers who are now unable to function in society at a basic level and do things like online banking or operate a smartphone.
You're on your own matey.
But hey, you'll have Google.
Well, I suck at interviewing and/or leetcode questions, but have so far done perfectly fine in any actual position.
I can totally see how you’d resort to ChatGPT to give the interviewers their desired robotic answers after 3 months of failing to pass an interview the conventional way.
As someone who has interviewed a lot of people – robotic answers are specifically not what I (we?) look for. The difference between hands-on experience and book knowledge is exactly what we're trying to tease out.
It's very obvious when someone is reciting answers from a book or google or youtube or whatever vs. when they have actually done the thing before.
For the record: ChatGPT is very good and the answers it gives are exactly the kind of answers that people with book knowledge would give. High level, directionally correct, soft on specifics.
I mostly interview seniors, you obviously wouldn't expect experience from an entry-level candidate. Those interviews are different.
And yes, most large companies have terrible interviewers.
I've never once seen an interviewer getting better in any company I've worked for. What happens is they just move onto the next interviewee.
Here's Pew's Janna Anderson in 2015:
"Algorithms are taking over much of the human work of hiring humans. And, unless they are programmed to seek out currently undervalued and difficult-to-track factors, they may tend to find that the more robot-like a human is the best she or he will be at doing most jobs. So, it could be that the robots are most likely to hire the most robotic humans."
I find the whole gamified system to be bizarre and disheartening no matter which side of the table you're on.
To me, looking at modern tech interviewing is like comparing the gold standard OCEAN and the emergent HEXACO in personality surveys. Take the former on a bad day and it may leave the test taker feeling bad about themselves. The latter, much kinder and gentler in messaging around strengths and weaknesses.
That "by design" quality strikes me as missing from the entire tech interview system. If it weren't broken, this would not be a 7-year conversation updated yesterday:
$$$,$$$
I’ve gone public, been acquired by Google, and scaled solutions to tens of millions of users. I’m probably overqualified for your CRUD app.
Instead of tearing into their experience, my coworker is asking what you would use the X class for.
Drives me fucking nuts. Who memorized all the parts of a random, mostly unused .NET class.
I asked the coworker afterwards if he ever used said class, dude said no.
How is that a fair question if it isn’t even used here?
Luckily I have the contacts and experience to never have to.
If you slide from 50% to 99%, how do people feel about using ChatGPT? What is more honest: Many people here were hired when they were less than 100% qualified, and did very well in their new role. It has happened to me more than once.
Money, obviously.
Software jobs in particular are magic in this way - the pay is way above the average, and performance metrics are so poorly defined that one can coast for months doing nothing before anyone starts suspecting anything. Years, even, in a large company, if one's lucky. 80% of the trick is landing the first gig, 15% is lasting long enough to be able to use it as a foundation of your CV, and then 5% is to keep sailing on.
No, really. There's nothing surprising about unqualified people applying for software companies. If one's fine with freeloading, then I can't think of easier money.
(And to be fair, I'd say it's 10% of freeloaders, 10% of hard workers, and in between, there's a whole spectrum of varying skills and time and mental makeups, the lower half of that is kind of unqualified but not really dishonest.)
Easy. They have nothing to lose because the jobs they are qualified for don't even pay enough to survive. You probably could have figured this out yourself.