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.

There are many downsides to being an independent consultant/contractor but the main benefit is this: you never have to deal with anyone from HR, ever; you don't do "job interviews", no one asks you fake questions like "tell me about yourself" or "where would you like to be in your career five years from now", etc.

The discussion almost always goes like this: "here's my problem, can you solve it and how much will it cost". You answer with "yes" and a quote and off you go.

Source: I've been an independent consultant for 20+ years. Never once did I meet or even received one communication from anyone from HR at any of my clients, before, during or after a job.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HR can use AI to do interviews and developers can use AI to write 90% of the code. Sounds fair

You wrote something that I think is untrue of most tech companies, so I'd like to discuss it:

> [As I and a friend spoke], I realised something: Three technical interviews went well, I was feeling confident going into the behavioural interview... This means that I'm heading into behavioural and HR contract stages with confidence in my performance thus far and my ability to excel at the role. And it means that I have the upper hand in salary and benefit negotiation. This is horrible for them. THEY NEED to shut me down and bring me down a few rungs before this step. And to edge me for 2 weeks (and counting...) after the supposed final round before I hear anything back.

I suspect that approximately 0% of top tech firms are trying to tank your interview as a comp-negotiating tactic. For most of these firms, the biggest problem is finding people they want to hire. To find qualified people, they need to measure what applicants, like you, can actually do. And they can't get a good measurement when they sabotage your performance. Further, if they decide to hire you, they need you to feel good about the company, not hate it because of how you were maltreated. They want you to say yes to their offer, not rage quit the hiring pipeline.

I'm not saying that there aren't bad companies or bad interviewers out there. Nor am I saying that you can't get into an interview where the other person is actually out to get you. It happens. Maybe it happened to you.

What I'm trying to say is that if your mental model of the hiring process is that the company is probably going to sabatage your end-game interviews, you're probably going to be wrong most of the time and make some bad decisions.

> What do you think? Was that a normal interview that I should have expected? I am in the wrong by posting this? Should I nuke my blog?

Here's what I think. If you have a public blog, it's fair game at an interview. If you write mostly about data science stuff but you apply for a software engineering job, you ought to be prepared to explain the contrast. Understand that, for most top firms, hiring good people and getting them to stick is hard. Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for. If you send signals that you might want some other position, be prepared to get asked about those signals.

And you got asked about those signals:

> "How do we know we won't hire you and you'll try to transition to a data scientist?"

You ought to be prepared for questions like these. For example, most interviewers would probably be satisfied with an answer like these:

That's a great question. Data science is something I do for fun in my spare time. I don't want it to become my day job. I love software engineering and that's what I want to focus my career on.

Or:

That's an important question. Thanks for asking about it. I try to stay abreast of important trends in industry, and when AI and data became important in some of my past work, I put in some personal time to learn more about them. When I learn things, I often write about them on my blog to help me remember. My blog's just a learning tool, a memory aid, right? It's not a barometer of my career interests. If you want to know what my career interests are, let me be clear: I want to write software. Five years from now, I still want to be a software engineer.

> Should I nuke my blog?

I'd say no. But you should read your blog from the perspective of a firm that's considering you for a job and be prepared to explain away anything they might have concerns about.

That's just my two cents. If you find anything in my comment helpful, great. If not, feel free to dismiss everything I've written.

Best wishes on your job hunt.

This is the danger of treating everything in life as transactional. If you are an anonymous coworker, employee, student, neighbor, citizen you are bankrupting your social capital. At the same time, if you are only engaged with others out of self-interest, it can backfire spectacularly when you are found out. Live authentically, take a genuine interest in others, play matchmaker and let others play matchmaker for you.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJVSDjRXVoo

I have been reading this advice for a decade, and I have been working as a software engineer as a decade, and I don't know anyone who got a job this way.

I'm not doubting it happens. It's just interesting that this obviously seems very common in some software engineering circles, but is virtually unheard of in others.

Wow, this is a great way of putting it. It's draining enough to go to third- and fourth-round interviews with other humans. Doing it with a series of AI chat bots would be devastating!

As someone on the spectrum this is something I struggle with. I have few but close friends, and only 2 of them work in tech; neither of their companies are hiring right now.

I need to find ways in which I can make new connections with people who work in tech, but I am unsure how to go about doing so.

So you waste the weekend on this project when you had no chance from the beginning. And the time restrictions they list mean nothing since if you actually stop after x hours, they will just pick the person who spent the whole weekend and did a more complete job.

- It was designed to be fast to complete (20min max -- not a huge imposition if being hired is likely, obviously very expensive if you're taking one for every job posting).

- I only gave them out after a resume screen. If you had a 0% chance then I didn't waste your time. If you had enough other proof of abilities then I skipped the take-home.

- Candidates were told that it was designed to be fast and that if they couldn't complete it quickly they were unlikely to be successful interviewing either. They still had the option to spend a lot of time if they thought my assessment of the situation was wrong, but part of the point was to allow candidates to gauge their own abilities and not waste their time interviewing without a chance of being hired.

- I did a lot of work behind the scenes calibrating and re-writing the questions individually and as a whole so that the test score correlated very well with interview performance (most interviews administered by not-me, removing a form of bias that's easy to creep in there).

I hate it from the candidates' perspective, but it's not illogical from the employer perspective.

No, I don't know how to fix it.

Most people fail to come to a conclusion by induction so they'll find enough customers.

i think it is important to remember that ai interviews arent constrained to the tech industry. many people who have no idea what a 'leet-code' is, and who have always done normal human-human interviews, are now having to navigate being interviewed by ai as well.

2. Automated code screens usually have an objective right answer. With an AI interview you have no idea what the how you did or how your answers could trigger an LLM to reject you.

And there’s the fact that you have to talk to it like it’s a human which many maybe most people find at least a bit dehumanizing.

However, an interview, which should be conducted by human, but instead by something AI pretends to be human, would make most of the current human beings feel disgusted, naturally.

Is there any formal proof that an AI conducted interview yields more than a pencil & paper test? Or is there any scientific research about that? I doubt there would be any in the near future. Then using such AI conducted interviews is simply a belief.

Today if you post any job online you will be flooded with AI applicants. Even one-time contract jobs below Us minimum wage on Upworks. It's not funny.

Edit: I see why now. Wish this kind of stuff was pinned at the top. /shrug https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341763

Unfortunately, the message will not sink in because it is unpleasant. Almost ll of us want to think we're fair and unbiased.

I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.

Several folks have noted that my immediate reply threw them for loops. One told me she thought it was spam that I responded so quickly.

Rover has a “Star Sitter” designation and response time is one of the metrics. Star Sitters show up at the top of the algorithm’s results so I’m incentivized to keep it up. Plus; I absolutely despise waiting forever for others to reply and I want to make sure I get bookings, knowing there are MANY available sitters in my area.

I never would have thought it was spammy or suspicious AI behavior. Thank you for cementing it in my mind that maybe I’m a little too eager. Considering I’m entirely booked out until mid-October, I’m either doing something right or people are that desperate for a good human to watch their pup for them.

If you can’t be bothered to write something to me personally, why should I deal with you? :)

I will go out on a limb and suggest that they are probably happy that you’ve self-selected out of the process.

I’m not saying your expectations are unreasonable, but you have higher expectations than most consumers, and that ultimately becomes a pain in their ass.

So the meaningful difference is that unlike a test you don't know what it's looking for and you don't know if it's ranking you objectively.

The AI won't care if some people get upset because it consistently recommends you get Mexican food instead of Italian when you're visiting south Texas. The weak link is humans not recognizing that that doesn't mean there cannot be good Italian food in south Texas. A logical hurdle I don't see AI having any problem with.

If you ask "Will the role expect me to XYZ" the bot probably only has limited context from a job posting 1 pager, so you can't actually trust it or try to align with it's goals/experiences.

My point is not that they are unbiased, but that could not replicate the example you provided (at least it seems to me that it's an example ? Unless it's fiction ?)

Part of that good experience is talking to a genuine human

I'd see this as something you can hack to get to level 2. Assuming you are interested in the company. I wouldn't let this sort of thing put me off of something I wanted.

For apartments, when I would look they wouldn't even bother to tour me half the time. I couldn't believe it.

I'm trying to give you thousands of dollars a month. In a CONTRACT. And you won't even show me the product I'm buying?

One place told me it was dark outside (4pm...), and they didn't feel comfortable touring me around the apartments. Jesus Christ, are we in Gotham? Many just ghosted my touring requests. One turned me down because it was raining (???). I would show up in person in the office, and many would still refuse to tour me.

It was quite interesting too because the things they'd inferred about me - stuff that I had understood or not understood - were just plain wrong. I didn't get everything right, but some bits I did understand fine, they thought I didn't.

I'm not sure what to take from that, other than that it's not about knowing stuff, it's about convincing someone else that you know stuff.

Also I'm about to do a hardcore leetcode interview. Wish me luck. (I'm probably going to fail; I'm pretty great at programming but only average at leetcode.)

Odds are there are at least a handful of people like you in those groups … and odds are that the everyone else connections to people who could be your contacts.

Just by being there regularly, you become "one of the people in tech I know" of everyone else. And connections and opportunities start magically coming your way.

*It does help if these are the types of things that attract energetic, helpful, confident people.

While the firm wants to hire someone, the hiring pipeline/process is made up of individuals that have their own individual preferences on who should get hired. One person can certainly sabotage a candidate, and the further into the process the greater their incentive.

So I started looking into models I could self-host for this stuff.

I can't remember which model it was, but one of them was kind of amusing because it would be two DJs signing off endlessly

DJ1: "Thanks for listening to WTOM, this has been Greg, signing off for tonight"

DJ2: "You said it Greg, it's been a great night, this is Bill, signing out"

DJ1: "Absolutely Bill, playing you out on a July evening this has been Greg from WTOM"

DJ2: "You better believe it, have a great night everyone! From WTOM this is Bill, wishing you a lovely Wednesday"

And it just kept going. Out of morbid curiosity I just let it keep going for an hour one day and they never stopped "signing out". I found it endlessly amusing.

Don’t overthink this - I’m sure you’re great at what you do, and the people you work with and have worked with in the past know that you are.

If you’re some random startup or no name company, I don’t bother. I already have a good job.

If you’re a top name hot company offering $600k+ total comp, I’m going to spend the hour shooting my shot. Even if it’s lower likelihood.

For random company XYZ, I expect humans to sink as much of their time into the process as I do.

I don't expect answers to random or ad-hoc questions. The A person can clarify a question that is part of a candidate screen. The AI "interviewers" so far have not.

--------

[1] I think it was one of theirs, could have been one of the Android phone makers that has gone all-in on nagging me to give their bot something to do with itself.

Nobody does this.

For the vast, vast, vast majority of employers using AI in hiring, it's even too much to ask for them to set the temperature to 0 to ensure they have consistent reproduceable output.

They're just slinging shit into a completely unaccountable chain of LLMs. Even when explicitly told not to, random workers still just go against company policy and chuck the resume into ChatGPT because they're too lazy to write an email.

The reality of hiring right now is that it's a shitshow both ways. LLMs trained on all the vile racism 4chan and reddit could muster, then given "pls make diverse founding fathers" system prompts. EVERYBODY loses.

Wisdom of the crowd also implies that diversity of human bias is a good thing, in aggregate.

To more closely address your point: if all companies use the same LLM they’ll all have the same hiring bias. But if Company Foo has Hiring Manager Bob that’s biased against me, I can shoot my shot with Company Bar with Hiring Manager Alice who might not be.

....Right???????

They want your money, they are just getting stricter on how they will accept it in order to limit liability and meet compliance, and also maximize profitability.

Much, much better tools these days to address both of those than there were 20 years ago.

They'd rather rent to someone who is desperate enough to rent without seeing it. It's not that they don't want money, it's that they don't want your money, they want someone more abusable instead.

I definitely agree and it is not a mental model that I carry into any interview, I have good intentions and I'm super friendly! This was only a tiny (disillusioned) post-interview reflection. I would say most interviews especially with engineers have gone well but there has absolutely been a vibe shift in the past year.

You can tell teams are a lot more risk averse when it comes to hiring. The promise of a fabled 10x engineer on the horizon paired with SWE automation devaluing existing talent has meant they will make you jump through 10 more loops and even then the decision is scrutinised. Understandably hiring is an expensive process (both successful and unsuccessful).

> Most employers will want some assurance that you are serious about the position you're applying for.

This is also a reflection of the job market. If it was balanced this notion would not exist. It's become a game of numbers, automated screening + AI has meant candidates need to send out 100s of application often with automation on their end too. On the other side every job likely receives 1000s of applications especially with stupid things like "L*nkedIn Easy Apply". Me personally, I would not apply for a role I am not committed to taking and I especially would not have gone through FOUR stages for fun, the first interview should be plenty screening for both parties!!! Alas.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond and thank you for your well wishes!

Great! Let me trawl through all candidates' HN and social media comments, and ask why they spend more time talking about politics, movies, science fiction, than CRUD SW development. They need to justify it!

This is kind of absurd. Could you imagine a registered nurse being asked to expain why they have a blog about astronomy and not nursing?

"What do you mean you don't write about dressing wounds in your spare time? How much could you really know about it then?"

"Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about? I'll have you know most of the patients htat you would be dealing with at this long term care facility have T2D. I'm skeptical that you'd be able to care for them."

Why do we allow this kind of BS in the tech industry? Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?

The other factor is finding “high elo” people with influence that can help you if you live in a “low elo” area. You’ll have to go to the “high elo” areas more often to increase chance of a better match.

None of those have had an insular bubble - typically you know a few people, and they each have worked with a few others, but unless you go all “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” on it, none of these jobs look like what you’re describing.

Even if a magical unicorn were to step in and start distributing resources perfectly, solving that particular problem, if humans can't even get something as simple as resource allocation right, why are you so sure they won't also screw up everything else to ensure that all other problems remain?

Writing it like you did implies that a magical solution exists and we are all maliciously withholding it from you. It does not and we are not.

Like sure things aren't perfect, not everyone is compensated proportionally to their contributions, no perfect markets and you can certainly improve things, but "I hate this planet" vibe when the default is hunter gatherer I feel like is majorly lacking perspective.

At this point, we think using AI and being able to use AI effectively is a skill in and of itself. When you're hired, you'll have access to AI. You'd be expected to be able to use said AI effectively.

So, we still give you a FizzBuzz. You can use AI. Even if we told you not to use AI, we know almost everyone would use AI. But you have to understand the FizzBuzz and be able to explain it to us and make changes to it "live". The amount of people that get weeded out just by having to explain the code they "coded themselves" is staggering (even pre-AI, even on a take home where you had no "OMG I suck at live coding" pressure).

This happened before "AI" too. When all it takes is clicking an "apply now" button on LinkedIn some desperate people will spam any job they see.

I get tons of spam that could be generated by even a basic LLM based on public information about me, but for positions that are not a reasonable fit.

Apparently, it is common for such cold calls to come from “recruiters” that are not affiliated with the hiring firm, but are trying to collect some sort of referral bounty.

I have no idea why an HR department would be dumb enough to set up such a pipeline (by actually paying for the third party “service”), but I guess once they have the program in place, they also need an LLM to screen spam applications.

Take home tests were never a worthwhile signal. Pre-AI, people would search for solutions or have another person complete it.

If you want to make it more of a fair consideration of time, consider moving your take home to interviews, that way there isn't a time cost asymmetry. You can enforce your "20 min max" claim this way, you can judge a candidate's performance, thought process and filter out anyone who is LLMing or spending inordinate amounts of time on them.

You will also make a better impression on candidates by investing your time in them in the same way they are with you. Maybe you're hiring kids out of college without experience, but you only have to do so many take home tests before you realize that they're a waste of time, and pass on potential employers who throw them at you, or you learn to just send them your hourly rate for the test.

In my experience this is the wrong game theory. Unemployed people can make job hunting their full time job, so a 20 minute take home doesn't select for "who delivers the highest quality solution in the least amount of time," it selects for "who is the richest applicant who can burn hours on a take home to deliver a higher quality result than people with less time they can afford to spend?"

Also, nobody should ever self-select themselves out of an interview process. Passing a resume review and getting a callback is about 10% likely: for every job hunt, in my experience , candidates get about 10 callbacks for every 100 resume sends. From there, it's about 20% chance to get to final stage, and from there, maybe 50% to get an offer (you're either their first choice or second; if second, your hiring hinges on whether the first choice accepts). Math is right there: once you pass a resume check, in terms of the volume of applications you've sent, it's optimal to spend far more effort into this gig than into firing off ten or twenty more resumes.

Therefore, even if the candidate doesn't think they're a good fit, they should do everything they can to stay in the game, including lying by omission.

After all they might be engaging in imposter syndrome, right? Why assume for the interviewer that your python skills aren't good enough - maybe the interviewer understands perfectly well that you've only used it for scripts and one off tools, but doesn't care because they personally believe your startup experience is more valuable to them and they believe you can up skill! Maybe the take home was designed poorly by someone who was tasked randomly by a lead to shit out a take home, and it's not an accurate indication of what the job would be like. Maybe they sent you the wrong take home? Maybe it's a good take home but you need money so fuck it, if you manage to sneak in despite not being a good fit, you can just bust ass to upskill and make up the difference before anyone notices. Or fuck it twice, it's a shit market and who knows how much longer you'll be able to sell your labor as an engineer, even if you can only fool them for two weeks, that's two weeks of income while you still keep up your job hunt.

I've worked at places that would send out 100. People would spend their weekends working on it and we often wouldn't even look at the submissions.

It's quite rare for companies to have evidence to support their hiring methods, which unfortunately means it's heavily driven by trends.

I only have the bandwidth to talk to a couple 10s of candidates since I have the entire rest of my job to do, so I can see the appeal of an AI interviewer. I'd never use one due to the issues brought up here though.

“ps— hope I hit my goal of responding in <5min like I said in my ad!”

(w/biz hours mentioned in ad)

Then they made me take some weird IQ test thing, and then they wanted me to take another one. I was genuinely starting to get kind of worried that they were going to make me talk about my astrology sign, so I eventually just emailed them saying that this is all stupid and I don't want to continue.

I’m sorry but I can’t let you get away with this terrible argument and conclusion. No one argues for completely erasing bias (especially the scientific form of the word bias), that’s a strawman.

Strong proponents argue that we should all be aware of our biases, and attempt to adjust our opinions and behavior according to the results of that exercise of self-reflection. Stronger proponents might even argue that the inability to perform this exercise of self-reflection is a path to bigotry.

Being racist AF isn’t something that you can excuse with “statistical inference”, and your comment sounds like it’s flirting with that concept. It’s the intellectually juvenile pseudo-philosophy that the techbro scene is absolutely riddled with like a malignant sexually transmitted infection, all the way up to Mu$k and Thi€l.

Back to LLM world, the issue is that there is no diversity in its bias: one LLM, one bias. If everyone uses the same dozen or so state-of-the-art LLMs, then all of our processes will have the same dozen or so biases. That would kind of suck if you were a member of a group that those LLMs happened to be biased against. LLMs are also famously not capable of self-reflection, barring the Rube Goldberg machines that people have built on top of them to simulate thought processes.

If you talk to 100 instances of chatgpt during 100 separate interviews you'll have 1 single bias source

Personally, any time I have ever been the interviewee, I write up notes for things to cover during an interview, or list a few common problems, etc. I've dealt with in the past, but I would strongly prefer to share my screen with them so they can see I'm not getting "assistance" from an LLM or whatever. I just personally get very, very stressed when I interview for a job. Having a simple set of notes helps keep me on track with covering XYZ.

If you want to replicate, you should try the same question on the same custom LLM, not Gemini.

In practice I doubt many people are aware of their biases either, or think "it's not bias if it's true" or something. But at least on the less "internally" biased end of humans there will be less external manifestation of it.

It comes from the source they said it's from, https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms. Expand the toggle at "Should women be allowed to work?".

All companies attempt to give the same interviews, just have one centralized organization give two programing questions and two system design questions and some kind of proof once you pass it.

You filter every one that can't pass the interview in the first place, you get a better interview experience, and just focus on experience

If someone has to pay for a stamp it will stop spam applications.

Also, if you are having trouble hiring right now, that is 1000% a skill issue. It is easier to hire good talent right now than ever before. So I have absolutely 0 sympathy for this POV. Go down to your HR department if you want to see who is at fault.

PS You fix it by charging $1 to apply for jobs. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure that one out.

One thing to keep in mind is that leetcode is testing (surprise) social anxiety. You can be a great engineer, terrific peer to have in the time when crisis hits but still fail at leetcode problem because someone is watching.

My point was that potential employers are not blind to what you put out in the public space. If what you put out would cause a reasonable employer to have questions about your viability as candidate, you ought to be prepared for those questions. If you're lucky, they'll ask you those questions and you can dispell their concerns.

Careful: you don't want to poison the well you drink from.

Relationships can sour. Accusations (false or not) can easily translate directly to not having a job when your dating pool includes current, past, or future coworkers.

Most good companies will interview you multiple times simply because they understand that individual interviewers can be biased. If five different people all say hire this guy, that's a much more trustworthy signal than if one person says the same thing.

That hits pretty close to home... I'm a doctor who has a small blog about the implementation details of the lisp I made.

> Managing Type 2 Diabetes isn't interesting enough for you to blog about?

If someone asked me this point blank I think I'd laugh out loud. It's interesting enough for me to keep up with the latest evidence, thanks.

> Whens the last time a nurse did a whiteboard interview?

To be fair, healthcare professionals have some pretty gruelling training and difficult licensing examinations. Some amount of preselection is taking place. Nobody needs a license to write software.

i did not get that from what they wrote at all.

they sound frustrated. but that does not mean they are frustrated at you specifically.

You might not be, but it sounds that way to me.

And if you think this knee-jerk reaction is unfair, let that be a lesson to you! :)

Nothing about everyone having their needs met precludes the dirty work getting done - heck, some people even enjoy it!

The idea that everyone would just give up taking care of the necessities is, imo, ridiculous. It smacks of the tired line of “in an emergency, it’s every man for himself and no one will have your back” when history has shown again and again that communities come together and mutual aid flourishes in the face of disaster.

I started refusing take-home tests a couple of decades ago, but when I did them, this is 100% what I would have done.

That can't exactly be true, because scarcity is a physical limit. If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it. That is no social construct.

There is a large social element involved, but that in itself is done in such a way as to try and encourage creation of a large amount of stuff to a large number of people. It isn't arbitrary; there are a lot of allocation schemes that lead to mass starvation and poverty. The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources; pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.

You can likely control for that, if you either interview in person or via screen sharing. (Yes, it could be faked, but that's harder.)

If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.

Magicly, the spamming stopped, and we only had applications from good genuine candidates with a real interest in the role.

The job of any technology (like email and "apply now" buttons) is to make life easier and better. If it doesn't do that, then don't use it!

"We saw your profile on github and thought you might be a suitable candidate for our open position at $CRYPTO startup.

PS you must be a US-citizen, and the job is 100% on-site"

Those things seem to be blasted out with no regard for my location - I'm not looking for a developer job anyway - but certainly not one in another country.

Spamming github users seems to be the latest growth hack, and it drives me nuts. I made all my repositories archived when I started getting hit with AI-PRs to review, but I'm reaching a point where I think my life would be easier if I just closed the account.

The AI point is worth diving into a little. This was a year ago, so SOTA was worse, but I didn't find it terribly hard to write questions AI couldn't solve, whose answers you couldn't search for, and which good candidates could solve. The test was a few of those questions and a few which were easier to cheat, and almost nobody had good scores on just the cheatable section.

I don't think that moat will exist indefinitely, but today's AI just isn't very good at a lot of incredibly basic tasks unless the operator has enough outside knowledge to guide it in the right direction (and if a candidate did that I mostly wouldn't care because, by definition, they had the knowledge I was looking for). I use AI a lot, it's great at a lot of things, some even quite complicated, but it was weaknesses, and those are pretty easy to exploit.

[0] The most reliable strategy I've found for that is choosing questions where the wrong answer is the right answer for some much more common question. Actually spending a few seconds and solving the problem easily lets a human pass, but an LLM with insufficient weights or training data (all of them) doesn't stand a chance.

There is usually a huge disconnect between someone who knows that “this task should take 20mins” and doing it cold in a super high-pressure environment.

People sweat, panic, brain freeze, and are just plain out stressed.

I’ll only OK something like this if we give out a similar but not the same task before the interview so a person can train a bit beforehand.

I’ve heard it all justified as “we want to see how you perform under pressure” but to me that has always sounded super flimsy - like if this is representative of how work is done at this organisation, then do I want to work there in the first place? And if it isn’t, why the hell are you putting people through this ringer in the first place, just sounds inhumane.

The ones we use have a clear scoring system and prepared inputs - all it matters is the generated output.

Employers can, with a somewhat high (?) degree of certainty, weed out candidates using AI.

GP specifically stated that this was the point of the takehome though. If the person handing it out specifically warns you that struggling with it means you aren't a good fit then if you struggle with it that's not imposter syndrome - you aren't a good fit! Not dropping out at that point is just refusing to acknowledge reality and insisting on wasting everyone's time.

I've done quite a few interviews and as long as the interviewee maybe said something like "it would be better to use a shadow DOM" and could explain what a shadow DOM is, I would be pretty happy with that

Expecting someone to build a full shadow DOM as part of their interview take home is excessive

People who have really good jobs aren’t applying for jobs below them, so your applicant pool will always be people who are in an equal or worse position than your job.

No one at, Anthropic, for example, is applying to a job at Geico.

Indeed, but - human productive capacity has become so vast, that the only way for there to be scarcity is for it to be artificially maintained.

> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources

Disagree, in the sense that a lot of what we consider "natural" is the result of social circumstances, emphasizing or encouraging the expression of some sentiments and tendencies over others. In other words, "natural" is usually rather artificial.

Have they? Aside from maybe Revolutionary Catalonia, which only stood up for a few years*, we haven't actually tried anything else since the emergence of capital. Obviously pre-neolithic humans lived under a different model, but that is because capital didn't exist yet.

The closest thing to an aberration was the USSR. Despite all the lip service paid to trying to suggest otherwise, in the end it remained under capitalism, standing out only because a small group of capitalists managed to seize control of all the capital.

* Which ironically, given what the USSR stood for on paper, fell down to war pressure from the USSR. Less ironic when you remember that the USSR was, in practice, actually most interested in capitalism for the benefit of the "elite", of course.

You're right the time commitment wasn't equal. Early on I spent much more time than the candidates designing and analyzing the test. Afterward, their 20 minutes would usually take me <5min (often <1min for obvious failures and obvious passes, the average brought up due to time analyzing edge cases).

I did read every submission though. It wasn't wasted time for candidates.

Which is a shame, as a former Debian developer I feel I could work on interesting things with them.

For instance, if I discuss audio electronics with Google Gemini, depending on what kinds of questions I ask, I can get audiophile crackpot quackery out of it, or I can get solid electronic engineering statements.

The training data contains a vast number of narratives that are filled with different points of view. Generally speaking, you get the ones that resonate with your own narrative threaded through your prompts.

One way is if you ask loaded questions: questions which assume that some statements hold true, and are seeking clarification within that context. If the AI hasn't been system-prompted or fine tuned to push back on that topic, it may just take those assumptions at face value, and then produce token predictions out of narratives which express similar assumptions.

I'm now leaning heavily on recommendations from existing resources as my preferred interview strategy

The “good” news, was, that it was pretty easy to bin the spam.

Yeah, I don't see anyone lining up to game that system. Maybe you ought to think about that a little longer than 30 seconds.

Aren't you ignoring the reports of companies receiving thousands of ChatGPT-written resumes, bots sending applications, and interviews with applicants being live coached by AI?

This is a breakdown of trust on both sides.

The amount of people that can't even navigate "their own" code is astonishing. Never mind explaining what it does or making changes.

> The test was a few of those questions and a few which were easier to cheat, and almost nobody had good scores on just the cheatable section

I also like how you allow/encourage self-assessment, where if a candidate can't do the test in ~20 minutes under zero pressure, they probably won't be a good fit in the role itself.

And considering our (humanity's) food production outmatches our total food calorie/nutrition requirements... any argument using food as an example for scarcity indicates that you may be working with incorrect, or outdated information.

And Is "money" a social construct, or is there 'natural' money, some platonic ideal from which all other instantiations of money arise? I'm betting on the former.

The mean American has a net worth of $620k. The median American net worth is $192k.

The global mean net worth is $95k. The median is $9k.

Hence resource allocation. If there were no physical limit, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.

> If there is exactly 1 apple, it is impossible for 2 people to eat it.

Hence resource allocation. If there were an infinite number of apples, there would be nothing in need of allocation. Allocation is intrinsically bound to scarcity.

> There is a large social element involved

There is only the human social element involved. There isn't a magical deity in the sky waving a magic wand or a group of space aliens from Xylos IV deciding who gets what. Resources are allocated only by how people, and people alone, decide they want to allocate them.

You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe. It is simply something people made up at random and decided to run with it. People could, in theory, change their mind on a whim such that suddenly you could become able to afford something.

> The natural human instincts are beyond terrible at allocating resources

Now you're finally starting to get on-topic. So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment? Not going to happen. The harsh reality is that creating problems is human nature.

I think most of the issue with this kind of thing, practical stuff aside like extra time invested and potential unpleasantness of actual experience, is what it implies about the culture and your relationship. If you level with people a lot of that gets addressed, and you're left with 'only' the practical inconvenience.

I'm not sure that first sentence true. Let me play Devil's advocate:

What's the primary cause of not being able to find someone who meets your standard when you already get lots of applications? It's that your hiring process is bogged down by the masses of unwanted candidates you must evaluate to find the few wanted candidates in the crowd of applicants. And what's the fix? It's better screening. Which is raising your bar, isn't it? Even if it's only to add cargo-cult screens to your bar, it's making the bar more selective, isn't it? Fewer people clear it, right?

The advantage of a bot is for owner of a bot, not for those forced to use that bot. So, owners are incentivized to lie about bot usage.

Like your argument mentions, the problem is with human brains, not AI. AI is already plainly miles ahead of most humans in understanding nuance.

What will be inescapable though, is trying to be an Italian restaurant that can compete for customers in a south Texas environment will just intrinsically be much more difficult than being a Mexican place. Even the most honest morally pure AI will tell people "When in south texas, you gotta have their mexican food"

If you can't use the statistics to generate biases then what is the purpose of building an inefficient processor. Not only is it inefficient because of ignoring the statistical data, it's inefficiency is compounded by the fact that you have to go out of your way to add extra layers in order to mitigate the observable statistical inference.

That way I know I'm not giving money to some huge corporation and they know I think applying to their job should at least cost me Y amounts of currency.

And if they waste more than an hour of my time with the hiring process, they could similarly pay a charity some money per hour.

That was neither me nor the company will feel cheated and in the end, no matter how the hiring turns out, a charity will have benefited.

I recall seeing one where you had to send a specific payload to an https endpoint to apply (or it might have been an automated screen immediately after the application was submitted). Forcing potential candidates to briefly open the curl manpage seemed like a similarly elegant solution to me. I doubt it works as well in the era of LLMs though.

I’ve mostly given up on all of the standard techniques for interviewing sadly, just because “using ai” makes a lot of them trivial, and have resorted to the good old fashioned interview, where I screen for drive, values and root cause seeking, and let people learn tech/frameworks/etc themselves.

But I was wondering, isn’t a take home question still good, if you give a more open ended and ambitious task, and let people vibe code the solution, review the result but ask for the prompt/session as well?

People will be doing that during normal work anyway, so why not test that directly?

If you give unlimited amount of time, you're giving an advantage to people with no life who can just focus on your assignment and polish it as if it were a full time job.

If you give a limited amount of time, then you're making the interview a pressure cooker with a countdown clock, giving a disadvantage to people who are just not great at working under minute-to-minute time pressure.

But you’d need to actually care to take something like that into consideration so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sure, but, there's nothing incentivizing the candidate to not waste time. At the very least, they can get free interview practice.

I get that that's very annoying when you're on the hiring side, but it's not all so bad in the end, you're getting paid for your time!

Then they email me back and said the other candidate did the whole thing and they aren't sure if I know how to style a page now because I only completed the backend part.

Is this one of the tests where I just need to throw together a five minute quickie to get over your “can you program” filter? or do you need me to put together something flashy and memorable to show off my ceiling? If o put together my flashy thing, would I get dinged for over-engineering something where a five minute hack solution was good enough?

The worst is when they basically ask how you'd build their product. Some people can't handle a different answer, even as they're busy hiring you to improve things.

Also I know plenty of people in startup world who are phenomenal engineers that only have companies I've never heard of on their resumes - startups that for one reason or another simply didn't have a news-grabbing exit.

I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here. Just observing that frustration doesn't necessarily imply that you're wrong. Of course the inverse is also true. Being frustrated doesn't mean others are necessarily in the wrong - it might well be your own damn fault.

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-eq...

Ancient discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087267

> Not being afford something is a 'pretend' state that only exists because everyone agrees to go along with it.

though. If there are n people who want things and (n-1) things, then someone being unable to afford something isn't some pretend state. There is certainly an element of social construct in that the word we use is "afford", if we all agreed to use a different word that'd be possible. But the thing/people ratio being below one is not a social construct; and whatever you want to call it and whatever allocation scheme you want to use there will still be people who can't have one. Someone can't afford the thing.

> You being unable to afford something isn't some fundamental property of the universe.

In many cases it is. Eg, topically, how much economically extractable oil is available on earth is actually a fundamental property of the universe. Ditto most energy emasures like watts of solar energy or power from nuclear decay.

> So given that you see humans as being beyond terrible at allocating resources, why do you think, if they were relieved of having to handle resource allocation, that they would suddenly become not terrible at everything else in order to see all of those other problems magically disappear, per the contextual parent comment?

Well I suppose I don't. Although I'll admit the question is too convoluted for me to be sure of that.

What else is involved? Despite the inane ramblings of the parent comment, scarcity isn't actually a factor. Allocation occurs because of scarcity. Without scarcity, there is no such thing as allocation. It is the reason for why resource allocation exists entirely a social construct.

Regardless, such observations are not valid arguments against noticing that a particular situation could be improved in a particular way. The logical outcome of such negative lines of thinking is to ultimately arrive at a mentality of trying to drag others down to your own level rather than to lift them up when possible.

Don't be a crab in a bucket.

Seems like a good screening. Atleast it's better than - "what are your accomplishments.?"

Objective statistical data doesn’t exist, that’s Data Science / Statistics 101. Your sample always has a bias, unless your sample is: everything, always, how it’s been, and how it always will be.

I don’t really know what inefficiency has to do with anything, wish I could respond to the rest of your comment.

One such question (obviously tailored to the role I'm hiring for) is asking whether SoA or AoS inputs will yield a faster dot-product implementation and whether the answer changes for small vs large inputs, also asking why that would be the case.

I typically offer a test with a small number of such questions since each one individually is noisy, but overall the take-home has good signal.

> why not test that directly?

The big thing is that you don't have enough time to probe everything about a candidate, especially if you're being respectful of their time and not burning too much of yours. Your goal is to maximize information gain with respect to the things you care about while minimizing any negative feelings the candidate has about your company.

I could be wrong, but vibe coding feels like another skill which is more efficient to probe indirectly. In your example, I would care about the prompt/session, mostly wouldn't care about the resulting code, and still don't think I would have enough information to judge whether they were any good. There are things I would want to test beyond the vibe coding itself.

In particular, one thing I think is important is being able to reason about code and deeply understand the tradeoffs being made. Even if vibe coding is your job and you're usually able to go straight from Claude to prod, it's detrimental (for the roles I'm looking at) to not be able to easily spot memory leaks, counter-productive OO abstractions, a lack of productive OO abstractions, a host of concurrency issues LLMs are kind of just bad at right now, and so on. My opinion is that the understanding needed to use LLMs effectively (for the code I work on) is much more expensive to develop than any prompt engineering, so I'd rather test those other things directly.

That’s a fiery hot take, unless the words “understanding” and “nuance” are doing some concerningly heavy lifting. Either that or you have an incredibly low opinion of “most humans” that borders on misanthropy.

> What will be inescapable though, is trying to be an Italian restaurant that can compete for customers in a south Texas environment will just intrinsically be much more difficult than being a Mexican place. Even the most honest morally pure AI will tell people "When in south texas, you gotta have their mexican food"

This line of argumentation is bizarre that I can only imagine it was chosen by the OP because it sounded more innocent than something like “AI putting black men in jail because it was trained on 4chan”.

Also what is “moral purity”? Sounds condescending to the concept of fighting unjust bias.

Professional certifications are different

Called the police department's non-emergency line. Got a bot that told me it's a civil problem and that there's nothing they can do.

Scouted out the fire department and chatted up the fire chief in person while he was walking back in after lunch. He was very concerned about all of this (finally, progress!) and called the management company while we stood there, but his call was answered by a bot that said someone would be out in less than 24 hours to silence the noise again.

[...]

Customer service is bots all the way down.

I'm dealing with this all the time in recruitment. It can be done. People lie all the time or don't read the requirements. You need a way for the ones who really do know how to do the thing you need to demonstrate it to you.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to hire someone to help you with something? Would you really follow your own advice? Your advice does not make sense for carpenters, cooks, or drivers. Why should it make sense for programmers?

It's not really bad to ask someone to do a design session with them and "build their product with them from scratch" isn't inherently bad. That's actually pretty neat if you ask me.

What's bad is if there's only a single answer and that's whatever they actually built themselves, which might be a pile of thrown together startup poo that was never cleaned up. But you have the same problem with all sorts of "needless trivia" type questions.

And then do you really want to work at a company, where you can't have a proper "pros and cons of different approaches" type of discussion? If you got hired, you'd have those kinds of discussions with them on an ongoing basis. Bad on the company for letting that person do the hiring but they got what they deserved so to speak.

Just to make an analogy:

If they simply ding you for using 4 spaces coz they use 8, that's bad.

If they ask you why you use 4 spaces, they use 8, give them pros and cons and are there any other approaches and what are the pros and cons of those? That's a good interview so to speak. As an interviewer I would give bonus points if the candidate says something like "I used 4 spaces because I thought that's what you guys were probably using coz everyone's moved away from 8 spaces but secretly I love usings tabs and setting tabwidth to what I want but in reality it really really doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase as humans can get used to almost everything and this one isn't worth fighting over. Linters and formatters exist for a reason".

But they’re not. And they won’t. And that is my point. They’d make a ML Engineer post on LinkedIn and get a bunch of people for whom Geico would be a step up.

There will never be a job opening from Geico that someone at Anthropic would apply to.

That’s my point - your pool will always be people who are in a worse position than your job. Being laid off is a worse position than a job.

You’ll never see Anthropic candidates in a Geico hiring pool, unless they were laid off for being lousy and can’t find anything else.

The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation.

Affordability requires something to exist. Once all the oil is used up it won't be affordability that prevents you from obtaining some. As oil still exists, your ability to afford it is entirely a social construct. There isn't some fundamental property of the universe that prevents you from having that oil. The only thing standing in your way from not getting the oil you want to have is what people believe. Again, resource allocation is entirely a social construct. Scarcity is the reason for that construct. Allocation is not a thing where there is no scarcity.

So there is nuance.

On the other hand if you "raise your bar" (let's say you do so by some method that makes it twice as expensive to judge a candidate; twice as likely to reject a candidate that would fit what you need, i.e. doubles your false negative rate; but cuts down on the number of applications by 10x, so that now 1 out of 100 candidates are what you need, which isn't that far off the mark for certain kinds of things), you cut down the effort (and time) you need to spend on finding a candidate by over double.

EDIT: On reflection I think we're mainly talking past each other. You are thinking of a scenario where all stages take roughly the same amount of effort/time, whereas tmorel and I are thinking of a scenario where different stages take different amounts of effort/time. If you "raise the bar" on the stages that take less amount of effort/time (assuming that those stages still have some amount of selection usefulness) then you will reduce the overall amount of time/energy spent on hiring someone that meets your final bar.

if you get a response from the "Bureaucrat Bot" you just got to fire up the "Annoy Customer Service Bot" as a counter-measure

The underlying problem with today's world is that people only want to solve their problem at the cost of everyone else. Everything else (like bot's, ai) is only a tool which is used on the way to enrich an individual.

This could also be used for combating spam elsewhere, like posting in forums, comment sections and so on. To preserve privacy, something like zero-knowledge proofs could be utilized. I don't know how the cryptography would work exactly, but if you can't double spend a credit and you can choose whether to keep it anonymous or not, it could work, too. It would be best if for a given credit spent, you could only disclose your identity to the entity you want access to, not the credit issuing entity.

For spam, it seems like the cost of maintaining a forum like the servers are much lower than the cost of the mods that deal with spam. So instead of paying the forum directly, we lower the need for human mods to spend their time. That way we lower resources to the forum indirectly. The credits could be per post or per account creation. I assume the HN mods' time is worth a lot more than the servers and power HN runs on.

Also, we won't have the issue that PoW and other proofs-of-X's have of being easier to do on some devices, but harder on others (like the power and time it takes to run PoW on a beefy desktop with AES-NI vs an on old phone).

But we'll still have the issue with different standards of living in different places making the credits more or less expensive for the user subjectively. Companies hiring worldwide could require different amounts of credits for applicants from different countries, but for forums this wouldn't work.

A solution to that could be issuers giving credits for local volunteering work. Clean up some garbage from the shore and get a credit regardless of whether you're in the USA or Bangladesh. But if you want to prevent credits from being traded (do we? idk) and, at the same time, have some amount of privacy, how would you do it?

But now you'd have to make sure that credit issuers all over the world only issue credits for real charity-like work. And who's to say how to value picking up garbage vs volunteering at an animal shelter vs donating 1$ to a charity.

It's interesting to think about this, even though I don't have any resource to implement anything like that.

This still seems like an oversimplification. It's easy to label FAANG, "frontier AI companies," whatever else, but the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of engineers are in a soup that's maybe able to be split between "startup world" and "enterprise world" but beyond that, difficult to say one is "worse" or "better." And I've worked alongside FAANG people in startup world so, either that isn't a "worse" job and therefore your theory doesn't work because that means it's not really possible to accurately evaluate every single company as objectively worse/better, or, your theory doesn't work because people do apply to "worse" jobs.

Years ago, I hired people at closer to entry level. If they had experience that was a bonus but if they didn't we trained them. If they didn't respond to the training, they were let go after a probationary period.

Who still uses 8? Isn't that like a COBOL thing?

Ok so jumping back to applies, say I have an apple and Mr A and Mr B want it. I'm going to give the apple to the person who pays me the most money. To keep it simple, this is the only apple. Maybe I've drawn a smiley face on it to make it an artwork, maybe there has been a breakout of Apple Plague, I dunno.

How do you square that with this conception of affordability? Since only one apple exists, is the person who doesn't get the apple in a state where they can afford it even though they didn't have enough money to buy it?

> The only thing standing in your way from not getting the oil you want to have is what people believe.

I'm pretty sure it is physical limits. I can think of a lot of schemes for infinite oil it is were available. There'd be a lot of space travel involved.

They're the same thing. The point of food is to provide energy and the constraint limiting food availability is energy.

All of these examples are irrelevant. Resource allocation happens because of scarcity, not alongside it.

> There is enough food produced to feed the entirety of humanity, probably several times over, but the social and political problem of who the food gets distributed to is the limiting factor, so hunger exists.

We theoretically produce enough calories to feed the entirety of humanity, but we do not come anywhere close to producing enough nutrients to feed the entirety of humanity. Calories are not sufficient to stave off hunger. One must also meet their nutrient needs to become "full". This is one of the reasons for why we see obesity: People continue to eat even after their caloric needs are met as nutrient deficiencies sees them continue to want to eat more to satisfy what is lacking.

However, even calories are only theoretically sufficient when you ignore the inefficiencies in the food supply system. Even if the social order was perfection, we don't have the technology or know-how to avoid those inefficiencies. It is, for now, a necessary part of the food supply chain.

That, of course, is why we created resource allocation as a social construct. Obviously you fundamentally cannot have allocation without scarcity.

But it doesn't answer the question. If resource allocation is not entirely a social construct, are you imagining that resources are also allocated by some kind of natural force? Given the scarcity of silver, maybe the universe decides that you get some and I don't? And if you try to give me yours, contrary to the fabric of the universe, you will be struck down by a bolt of lightning before you can give it to me? What is the "what else" here?

This nuance you vaguely refer to but don't say anything about is certainly intriguing. I am looking forward to you completing that chain of thought.

And even outside those periods, it's completely unrelated to the job or the applicant's suitability for it. It might be fine as small talk when setting a candidate at ease or as an icebreaker, but it's unreasonable to expect to form a judgement based on their answer.

Besides, it's the sort of thing that an LLM-based system should easily be able to handle. I'm not sure it would ever give you any sort of useful signal.

We could have the Swiss model, which is a bit of a culture shock: the customer support line is a paid service like a premium rate 1-900 number. It's very hard to wrap your head around as an American, but it does result in customer support that's very fast, and they either solve your problem quickly or not. And there is an incentive alignment, where you pay for the good support as a separate service, so it should not affect the base price of the good.

In a competitive industry, paid support would be a win-win. High support customers pay for the support they use, and less demanding customers don't pay anything. And if the product needs lots of support because of quality, then customers can choose a competitor.

The management company bot responded to the court declaring that they're doing all they're required to do to correct the noise, and concluded with "the issue is not ripe for adjudication" -- whatever that means.

The court's bot agreed and binned the complaint "with prejudice" -- again, whatever that means, and sent me a fine for wasting their time.

Every day, the noise still happens.

And every day, the man from the management company still shows up to silence the noise.

I've come to know him fairly well.

It turns out that his name is William, although everyone calls him Bill. Bill is a nice guy who once studied computer programming, but the best-paying job he ever managed to get was slinging packages for Amazon back when that was still a thing that people did.

Most Thursday nights, if we don't have anything else going on, Bill and I go bowling at the AMF that's not too far down the road. It was his idea. We've been doing this about every week for long enough that I've learned to become a pretty proficient bowler. And while I still enjoy that part, we spend most of our time having a few beers and solving the world's problems.

A few months ago, we started talking about pinsetters and Bill mentioned that he read once that this was once a job that people did manually -- that rather than having a machine at the end of the alley, there were people behind the wall who would collect the scattered pins and put them back onto the painted dots on the floor. That sounded pretty archaic compared to the machines that I've seen doing this work for my entire life, but it seemed likely enough.

I started thinking about some other things about bowling: These days, we just walk in and our shoes are ready for us by the time we make it up to the front. We pick our own lane and just start bowling. After that, the machine sets the pins, keeps the score, and returns the ball. Pretty normal stuff.

And then, Bill pointed out the other people: There were a couple of small groups of people who were bowling, and one grizzled old fellah nursing what looked like a White Russian at the bar, but that was it. Nobody else was present; nobody actually worked there at all.

How long had it been since I asked for a pair of size 11 shoes, I wondered? When was the last time I talked to a bartender to order another beer? I hadn't paid for a thing using a card, or even carried anything like that with me for what seemed like eons. The self-cleaning bathrooms were certainly a welcome change, but how long ago were those put in and what happened to the person who used to clean them?

Neither of us could pick an exact timeframe for when these things changed. We both agreed that it wasn't important at the time, and that it seemed like a natural-enough progression.

Anyway, it was getting late again. After we put our shoes onto the mat for the sanitizer bot to deal with and started to walk out, the screens by the door told us what our tabs were, debited our accounts, and told us that it would see us next week.

I'm sure that Bill will stop by tomorrow afternoon to push the button and silence the noise from the electrical panel for another 24 hours, just like he always has.

It's hard for government to function well when half of it is trying to sabotage itself. The fact it works as good as it does after 40 years of that is a tribute to public servants.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...

Not because you use 2 spaces. You can argue 2 spaces and the pros and cons and how horizontal scrolling is an issue. One question back would be for example if that means you have huge run-on files where a single function does everything and that's why you need like 17 levels of indentation and that's why only using 2 spaces for each becomes important to you. And then you'd need to argue how that's better for visibility and what might actually be worse about it. If you can do all that, you're hired (if the rest of the interview goes well :P )

    Who still uses 8? Isn't that like a COBOL thing?

Honestly for dealing with job application spam, this sounds like a neat way to handle this, but without that context, it is just weird. Also it seems to be obsolete against people using LLMs for these applications, I expect them to be able to just invent an answer for that question just fine.

Check all that apply.

You could choose to give the apple to the hungry person. You might choose that because you want their help in a different way. Or because you feel it is right. Or they are your kid. Or you give it to the strong person to have a better alliance.

Or you could have the apple taken from you. You might even have more taken, like your life. The other side has a say too! They both might believe that you shouldn't have it and (might makes right, right?) capitalism wont save you there.

That we don't (or do) take by force is a social construct. That we choose to instead honor an imaginary dollar tied to the intrinsic ability of our government to service its own debts is a social construct. Or the idea that maybe we should split the apple or plant it to make more apples. I can imagine a parent with two kids: "fine, nobody gets an apple, it goes in the trash since we can't agree." Nothing here is "one natural order." It is what people decide. And why they decide is based on squishy human reasoning. Social constructs.

Right. Purely a social construct. You are enabled to make that choice because Mr A and Mr B also believe you should be able to make that choice.

But what if they stop believing? Consider that Mr A and Mr B now believe the Mr B has the devine right to the last remaining apple. Do you think they are going to continue to respect that you want the most money for it? Of course not. They'll simply take it from you.

> I'm pretty sure it is physical limits.

Do you mean like if you attempted to take oil that isn't considered to be yours that an army will roll in and destroy you? That is quite likely, but the consideration of it not being yours and even the army itself are social constructs. That only plays out because the people believe in it. If, instead, people believed that the oil should be yours, you'd have no issue.

Again, whether or not you can afford oil — or anything else — simply comes down to whether or not people believe you should have it. It is entirely a social construct.

We already have such a credential. It's called "lasting two years at a FAANG+ without getting fired". If you do that you can get interviews anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space

Btw, at an old job, some joker developer added or copied 1, and broke the whole testbed. It was quite funny. I came over to the sourcecode hosted in Gitlab, ran my regexes that look for naughty characters. Found it after it ate the devs for half a day.

The other poster said it's just a question to easily filter out applicants who aren't paying attention, and it seems as good a method as any. Say "just a cup of coffee" and move on. If the interviewer continues to talk about breakfast or other irrelevant stuff, then I'd just end the conversation. But they can have one for free.

But on the subject, I have no idea how companies manage to screw up their hiring process this much. I used to sometimes interview and hire people and found it to be the easiest thing ever, and I never had the need to do these weird games or more than a phone interview to find great employees. How hard is it to just focus on the exact task of the job and find a candidate who understands it and has a good attitude?

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (?) market-based ( ) vigilante

(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

- for the specific forums, jobs and other things that may use something like this

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money

- if the credits are treated as money

(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

- that will always be an issue, but I doubt it's too relevant here

(X) Extreme profitability of spam

- if someone spends a credit for spam and they think it's worth it, it might be an issue. But most spam wouldn't be worth it, IMHO, especially if it will be deleted from a forum, anyway.

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

- well, yeah :)

(X) Sending email should be free

- this isn't about email, but I don't necessarily like having to pay to post. However, lots of forums will remain free, as not everyone will use this idea if it's implemented. And some forums have paid accounts now, anyway.

(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?

- why should we trust the credit system - important question, as we haven't thought out how it could be gamed or abused.

I'm on board with people getting excited about living in a society, it is all pretty magical. But affordability isn't some random social construct, it is in great part about physical limits. Unless you want to redefine what words mean which is always an option available to us.

That is what I'm asking you. Are you saying that you just want to use a different word capture the idea that only one person can have the apple? Because instead of saying Mr A can't afford the apple you're saying that Mr A can't have the apple because of a divine right ... that looks a lot like it has the same implications as affordability.

The social construct you're pointing at is the labelling of the situation rather than the underlying physics of the situation, is where I'm going with this. If scarcity is a factor, then affordability exists as a reality. You can relabel it as a social construct, but you can't escape the real world.

> Do you mean like if you attempted to take oil that isn't considered to be yours that an army will roll in and destroy you?

I mean that more than the social limits, the real limits are the bigger part of why I can't do what I want with oil.

> And that's something interviewers are looking for.

I understood this answer to be part of the written application, in an interview I would just classify this as pointless small talk and just answer something.

> Just the fact that you're ready to go all-in arguing about a detail

This is HN, sir. Going all-in on detail is part of the culture.

(I'd say "refuse" but I recognise you're not in a strong bargaining position here and you have to choose your battles).

  (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

Your strange and desperate attempts to turn this off-topic continue to be recognized, but for those still reading in good faith, it was resource allocation that was said to be the social construct. Who can afford and who cannot afford something is decided by the whims of people and nothing more.

Scarcity is a physical phenomenon. Only one $thing exists and more than one person wants it. Scarcity. The agreement to transfer that $thing to someone is based on humans respecting made up rules. Society. Social constructions. How we define affordability is different. You can "pay" in different ways, some that don't have physical mapping t real world like "social standing."

The laws of supply and demand and scarcity still apply, yes. But how that plays out is social. People have to agree or fight. "Affordability" is based on what we agree is worth an exchange. You may value the approval of the recipient more than money. What does affordability mean here? To curry favor later with someone else or because your moral framework lets you sleep better (they were a hungry kid and you don't want kids hungry - another kind of scarcity where we define affordability by how hungry you are).

Like you said, unless we redefine words. Then you can have affordability and scarcity mean the same thing.

Edit: snark reduction

Exactly. Now you're starting to get it. Mr B being able to get an apple by "devine right" and him being able to afford the apple are the exact same thing. And as you witnessed, Mr B was suddenly able to afford an apple he previously may not have been able to afford just because on a whim people changed what they believed in. So, as you can now plainly see, resource allocation is entirely a social construct, just as I said originally.

> The social construct you're pointing at is the labelling of the situation rather than the underlying physics of the situation, is where I'm going with this.

In other words you are trying to randomly change the subject? Resource scarcity is a thing. That much is true. We couldn't recognize resource allocation if it wasn't. But it is not the particular subject we are discussing.

The discussion, in case you have already forgotten, is about how better resource allocation would, apparently, solve many other problems people face. Whereas I am dubious of the claim. My take is that if humans are screwing up something as simple as resource allocation, they're going to continue to also screw up everything else even after you've taken resource allocation out of their hands such that all the other problems will remain.

Is this weird diversion of yours because you want to support the original assertion emotionally but can't actually stand behind it logically and hoping that if you can steer us into talking about something else that that we'll forget all about it?

Resetting an alarm is going to look 'real good' if at some point the place burns down and for sure the building is insured somewhere and for sure that information is something you could dig up. If there is no unit owner and no HOA then multiple tenants will need to band together and get something going, initially we weren't talking about tenants at all, you brought that up and since then you've been tilting at windmills because nothing satisfies your needs. Obviously I won't be able to come up with workable scenarios for each new restriction that you impose because you can keep that up forever.

I'm not in the 'oh, I will just give up because I can't be arsed to solve this safety issue' group, if it really is an issue - and I'm going on the assumption here that it is - then someone will care about that. The key is to locate the someone and then to state your case, and when one method doesn't work to come up with another one that gets you closer.

Learned helplessness is not a solution to anything.

Obviously there are lots of things to figure out, but I don't see how any one of those would be a deal breaker.