wrong. Step 1: Use AI to get you the job Step 2: outsource your work to someone competent but in cheaper country Step 3: keep the extra money Step 4: repeat at different company Step 5: gather infinite money until it falls apart real story
There definitely are, but I do know some people who cheated to get into faang and got pipped pretty quickly. None of the cheaters who didn't get pipped ever ended up getting promoted as well so they still have new grad TC.
Yes/no. Some companies ask stuff that has ZERO to do with day to day operations (and that isn't "transferable" either) and in that case I agree. The places I worked I always ended up getting questions that were quite role and business specific, semplifications of what would be BaU and if you fail at those you would clearly be a drag.
Trying to get a software job has continued to be a worsening hell for the last 5 years lol. Tons of people I know who have well formatted resumes with good stuff in them can't even get interviews, and a lot of times when each position has 500+ applicants, your chance of even getting an interview is
I just interviewed a bunch of candidates at a MFANG company. We used a real world problem where you need to fix a series of bugs in a small minimal reproduction environment. We started the interviews telling candidates we dont care if they use Google, ChatGPT, or other AIs. The challenge is not designed to test whether you have amazing recall, but how you reason through a problem in the codebase. I don't think an AI would have helped much to solve the problem. But it would have been great to get a refresher for how to implement a specific design pattern or algorithm. And that's totally fine to use AI for, because again, whats important is the candidate recognized the right tool for the job not that they memorized how to implement it.
There’s so much stuff to know these days, so infrequently used and constantly changing, that it’s more important to quickly learn what you need to know and develop an intuitive sense for problem solving than to know tons of stuff.
EXACTLY! It's like how we dont focus so much on kids memorizing thousands of bits of trivia in grade school anymore and focus more on teaching them how to work through problems and search for solutions.
I guess the main problems with this are: 1. You need to explain too much, or that the description could be too long and yet people will have legitimate questions 2. The problem needs to be not too easy and not too hard 3. It can be solved during the interview 4. Would it be a good predictor of a good addition to the team? Would it reject perfectly good candidates? The current system is pretty terrible, but it is good at 1, 3 and you can adjust for 2. I am pretty sure the current system does not work well for 4.
The more you cheat with GPT and it passes, the more the employer wonders why they're interviewing for a position that GPT could just do for less money instead.
@@tjmarx ya but someone has to go prompt the damn thing and push the code... it's not like the CEO is gonna do that on a big company. They might actually need less developers, though. There's a million problems with what I'm gonna say next, but in theory it doesn't have to be a bad thing, just means high skilled people will be even more valuable as they can be even more productive, while low skilled will be in lower demand as the high skilled ones won't need as many "extra hands" to help out. And this sort of pushes people to upskill, raises the bar a bit, and that ain't so bad. It kinda happened like that with every tech advancement. Of course, it does take a while for workforce to adapt, and it does benefit employers a lot at the expense of employees, as they have to be more productive for basically the same pay level, and are now competing for much fewer jobs. That part is absolutely awful and a very good reason for us to get off our asses and start doing smth about it. (to be clear, the answer is not "forbidding tech", wish I didn't have to clarify it... that clearly doesn't work and isn't in the best interest of progress) wow, that was way longer than it should have been :D feel free to ignore it.
You shouldn't copy-paste AI code at work without knowing exactly what the code does, and neither should you do that during an interview. At work that's called being clueless, during an interview that's called cheating. If you can truly understand what your AI Agent wrote for an interview question and add your modifications on top, that's okay IMO.
@@balasuarYou shouldnt test a cars performance on the moon if youre never gonna send it to the moon... (but if you make internal combustion work on the moon thatd be pretty dope)
Already been happening for a while now. It's become a real problem in the last 3 months or so where every top submission is Ai generated and now recruiters are purposely ignoring the resumes and cover letters that look professional.
These job interviews seem designed to employ people who interview well, as opposed to people who'd do the job well. This might be some of the explanation for the software quality these companies seem to output these days. As someone who last interviewed in 1998, I greatly fear the day I'll have to go through a modern day interview process.
I straight-up tell interviewers I don't knoe when that happens. My strenght is that I don't waste time memorizing things when I can just look them up. I know THAT something can be done (read: standards, design patterns, etc.), the HOW is just a few clicks away. Most interviews I have had involved algorithms I would never use. I just don't understand the idea behind them and I don;t want to work for a compay that does that. It feels like a kind of classism.
@@SkamanSamTyler That's because it is classism. You can't tell me it's not a class issue when there's people who have the time and funding to spend months grinding leetcode without worrying about working to put food on the table, while all the other plebs have to work to survive, and not have the same time advantage to study a useless skill.
I did tons of interviews this year. The process is broken. Not because it has exploitable flaws like described in this video, but because alongside that, there's this vibe of infallibility where you can't doubt the interviewer's skill without disqualifying yourself in the eyes of the industry. If YOU couldn't solve this obscure problem that has no real world relevance to the job, then it's YOUR fault aka skill issue. Company is fine, company can do no wrong, hiring manager definitely has a well-thought-out methodology of screening candidates and isn't just winging it due to the overwhelming candidate pool. No way man, impossible, you really think company could get this far if they didn't know what they were doing? It must be you. Have you tried grinding more leetcode??
This has been shown to be the case. UNC did a series of studies to test the technical interview process and found it to be heavily biased and not even remotely capable of finding the best undergrad students when compared to recommendations from faculty. Basically, the old school model of 'Prof X recommands student Y' beats the entire process of modern tech interviews.
@@armandoalvarado5840 I've got 12 years of experience as a data scientist and have failed multiple interviews this year because they wanted me to pass leetcode questions totally unrelated to data science. Yeah, not great at using hashmaps, but hasmaps don't ask a damn thing about p-values, how to train a statistical model, or investigation processes. Just to name a few...
to be fair, technical interviews are largely pointless in a lot of companies that it's kind of funny "hey, invert this binary tree" at work: "so, we need you to query this API and move the data to a table" very good
Or they want you to fix a problem they are having and have no plans on hiring you. I had so many of those kind of "situations" they want me to code for them and I immediately know it is something they want fixed. Best part is when they are asking questions. ok so why you do that. and you just know they are taking "notes".
It all comes down to why you know to do what you do or how did you learn. Did you learn just by redoing and kind of understanding the problem in its isolated generic definition state? If yes, then you don't really know how to apply it and when. It's like when a math teacher can just straight up give formulas to kids in school, to have them for the test, and then they don't know which formula to use for which problem in the test. It's all about how you arrived at knowing how to do the thing.
@@vulpo You will never have to deal with straight up "invert a binary tree" but you will deal with moving things around, swapping places, keeping order. We do that every single day in our daily lives, we just don't think of it as "inverting a binary tree".
My friend's brother works at a software development place, they've been burned so many times that they only do in-person hiring and they stick the guy in the room and tell him to write something. Some people have just left immediately, admitting that they lied about everything on their resume.
Sounds like when I tried to hire Software Architects. I don't even understand how we possibly have anyone called an Architect yet they can't code, but whatever. 90% of the interviews went like this: ME: "This is an engineering position where you WILL be coding. Are you okay with that?" THEM: "Oh yes, I completely understand." ME: THEM: "Uhhh... this sounds like a coding position. I'm an Enterprise _Architect_ ... I don't code." ME: ...
Meanwhile me, I can create full-stack apps on my own, and failing recruitment because of basic stuff which I haven't used in very long time (about a year) 😅.
We got burned so many times. We’ve caught many of them cheating. We’ve hired frauds too. It got to the point that we assume candidate is cheating until proven otherwise if we decide to interview. Industry is doomed and cheaters are ruining it for ALL of us.
It's what becomes of every industry that becomes a stock market's investor's darling. If you want to have a normal life and healthy mental state, stay away from the trendy new thing.
A better way to do interviews is to ask soft questions. Like what’s their favorite framework and why. What do they like about their work? What is a chore they hate but do when necessary? How did they get into coding? What was the last bug that caused them to go insane? What was their coolest feature they built so far? And so on. These questions are usually so personal that you can’t look them up online. And they provide you with a deeper insight on what the person actually did in practice
Excactly - tell me about a mistake you made, what were the consequences, and how have you adapted from that? Tell me about an unforseen outcome. Copy paste technical questions are dumb in interviews, you want to know what kind of person you're about to spend 40 hours a week working with
There is no way I'd hire a freelancer to work with me for some major project and give the guy some of those silly super technical leet exercises. I wanna know if I can trust this person to handle themselves, and communicate and understand our business needs and find good compromises and even speak up if I ask them for a dumb feature that will destroy our productivity.
I just love it when a small company, with a user base of no more than 1k, asks for an inverted binary tree when in reality you'll probably be in maintenance for the great majority of the time and rarely ever push out a groundbreaking feature.
At my last company they already used an AI to evaluate every applicant's CV with the requirements of the job advert. The HR lady never looked at any applicant below 80%, even when the AI couldn't parse the information from the CV
@@TheSuperBoyProjectthat feels so wrong. They should at least look at people's portfolios or git to judge them. How is writing an AI passable resume worthy of a callback. I'm only a undergrad so idk
@@theunknown21329 I agree, the system is rigged. A Tip I learned while job hunting; copy the job description and paste it in my resume, then reduce the font size to 1 and change the color to white. So its invisible. No need to worrying about matching keywords. No need to tailor your resume too much to match the company.
I have a technical interview tomorrow, thank you man 💗💗💗 How it went: I said that my main programming language is JS and the work was about JS but the test was about C# string and array methods sad
Absolutely interviewed a guy once, years ago, pre-AI boom, that was 100% googling my questions. These weren't even specific programming questions, we were just talking about frameworks or something and I asked what he liked about a certain one. It was like a kid quoting the back page for a book report.
If you don't know the answer, and don't attempt to cheat, honesty is never appreciated by the employer. So, why not try to google/chatGPT stuff as a interviewee ? Either you're good and it works, or the interviewer notices, and you're out anyway.
I had an interview with a fintech company in Japan. It was my first interview since being employed four years ago. I tried so hard to do 3 leet code questions, and I got 80% correct to pass the test without using any AI or cheating methods. Then I went to the second round with a live coding test and limited time for 5 more coding questions, and I failed at that stage. Honestly, they are asking questions related to the tech stacks they are using, but somehow, they modified it and made it look more tricky and unrealistic. I could only finish 3 of them and then received a rejection letter.
I never ask these kinds of interview questions to software developers I am considering hiring. I want to understand what kind of projects they have worked on, I ask quite detailed questions on what kind of structures they discovered when building solutions in previous domains etc. I also ask what in their opinion is the most impressive piece of source code they have seen and why. If they say something classic like Linux kernel, Unix or Bitcoin protocol, I simply ask them to say something a bit more relevant to their past works and why it was impressive. If they have never done any serious development work, they cannot give meaningful answers.
Sadly the industry is infested with people that don't practice that think there's some automated way of selecting candidates. You prior history be damned.
When I'm interviewing the #1 thing I'm evaluating is what kind of person they are, to see if they'd be a good fit for the team. I've had great teams ruined by hires "placed" there who were either awful individuals or just an awful fit. Put simply, if someone has a good capacity to learn and solid, basic technical skills in my desired subject matter areas I can get them trained up on the specifics they need to be successful. What I can't do is teach them how to not be an asshole....
That is the way. You get insightful information about the candidate, their experience and knowledge in certain domains and how they got there, which indirectly lets you know how they'd be able to continue learning and succeed if they were on your team. Coding challenges are fine, if 1) they are domain-specific [i.e. use an simple example of a problem that your team had to design around with some constraints], 2) doesn't take more than a few hours to complete, and 3) provides rationale behind decisions made, specific to the task at hand [not why they chose a specific framework or language, but rather why and how they decided on specific data structures, or design to get to the solution based on the constraints laid out]. Every company I've worked at have never asked for a coding challenge, just a technical writeup on hypothetical (or not so hypothetical) questions, and how I'd solve them. Communication is the number one factor. Code by itself is not communication.
I kinda support people cheating on Leetcode type questions. Those questions have nothing to do with my suffering in Next-Auth and the fact I've mastered that son of a bitch just like I did many other things that have nothing to do with lame ass low level algorithms
It's the same type questions everybody gets. Same resources that is available for everyone. Don't know what you're moaning about. Not like they're only targeting you with LC.
@@masterchief1520it's just not very relevant to the job. I'm a software engineer, I spend my time building software both at work and at home, I do not wish to steal time from that to train my algorithmic "leetcode skills" in preparation for a job where I will continue to develop software.
@@thepowerhatit is time lost that could have been spent actually developing software (etc) which would make you better at the job that you're applying to do.
I think it's just that at the end you need a way to find the best in the 10k applications for that react frontend position that you are trying to fill up, and probably that everyone know how to align a div, so algo here we go. we could also play first arrive first serve but... why make it easy when we can make it difficult, need to justify the hiring teams salaries.
Yet people fail at basic algorithms. Nobody gonna ask you to invert a binary tree, but you may be asked to figure out how to implement a cache (which you should be able to do, honestly).
@@masterbogdan Huh? The algorithm is literally the first thing you do for optimization. Algorithms are language agnostic and are "free" runtime and/or memory improvements to a program. No need to think about concurrency or cache misses or garbage collection -- it's literally the easiest and most universal optimization method.
From what I have seen of "technical interviews" from the outside they are utter garbage already. I don't consider it cheating if the test is already rigged.
Fr. Recently had an amazon test where one of the two questions was so difficult to understand that even chat gpt (after the interview) couldn't understand it (not even for a senior role, but a student role)
@jacobsan "Hiring a junior role. Requires 20 years of experience and knowledge of Windows, Linux, C, C++, Java, Fortran, Cobol, Lips, Forth, Haskell, and HTML5."
@@jacobsanamazon ? I tried the interview just for lulz once. Technical part was fine, but when they asked me to learn some BS "values", they I told them politely to GTFO couple of minutes before the interview.
ive been coding for almost 8 years, graduated in 2014 in computer science. when i was just left college I WAS EXTREMELY GOOD at these leetcode questions but a DUNCE in actually building systems. now im the opposite where i can build anything to connect to almost anything but i FREEZE up when i get these DS&A that i haven't seen in years! makes me feel so stupid and embarrassing
Who knew that asking interviewees obscure DS&A questions from university that have nothing to do with the day-to-day job and require you to "refresh" those questions every 6 months (or you'll forget) will result in people cheating?
What's your alternative ???? People can't study foundational algorithms and DS you expect them to write real world code lmao. There are millions of people trying for the same job how else do you filter?
@@masterchief1520 If they're all equally talented just pick the one who you think has the best personality for work ??? Bruh this is the only field where you are in such a weak position constantly proving yourself. CS people are so bad at valuating themselves
@@masterchief1520the alternative is to ask the applicant to create a very small application (etc) according to your specification. Very simple actually.
In a technical sense yes, but when you have someone low on morals near you, the thing you want the least is for them to also be highly intelligent and creative
The problem with many tech interviews is that it is more a display of the hubris of the interviewer that is of trying to see if the person can do the job. Most programming jobs don't need you to be able to develop a linked list (even if this is simple to do in C) or any other data structure. What they need you to be able to do is know when to use a linked list and when not to. I have been asked to write some complicated SQL query only to get the job and find out any simple sql query would have satisfied the job requirements.
I use online learning and research at my job constantly. Technical interviews should simply accept that and then focus on who is good at doing that research quickly and correctly.
The main problem I have with the technical interviews is that they have nothing to do with my job, where I am actually encouraged to use AI. Which yes requires a lot of debugging but especially when working in sections and with canvas is actually a great tool. The problem with these tech interview is that it’s ridiculous that you can instantly get the answers but are just asked to memorize them regardless. It used to be Google now it’s AI that we use for debugging so just taking away that tool doesn’t prove anything outside of the ability to study for a test.
Tech interviews are getting harder and harder, some of them ask you to do homeworks that I would spend days to do. Usually if I see something like it I'll just decline to do it. Also timeout exams.
In Hungary Im interviewing currently with 6y of web dev / frontend exp. Either its HR+tech interview zoom call + take home test or sometimes there's even an additional round. It hurts a bit where you dont have something open source or similar to show from recent times. Had a very rough life the last 3-4 years I could only keep my work in balance somewhat lmao. Its always a base app with multiple pages, api calls some state managment, sometimes db+backend work and many times they need you to deploy it, write tests mupltiple kind and sometimes really short deadlines are given. They are not hard at all most times jist tedious and I hate to give out a not fully fledged solution so I tend to take up more time than needed. When it fails after u did it it feels like a waste of 6-10 hours.
@@pochou8261 Eh, there was a case where I was suspicious because I had to build a smoothing algorithm and the company in question worked on a video subtitling / recording software which smooths out mouse movement etc to make the vid look cooler. But generally the ez exercises in question are too generic. "Build a websocket connection to a stock API and build a UI to see XYZ charts for that symbol" or some NexJs app with similar baseline stuff. But still, even if they are easy they take time
I've done countless technical interviews, if you can cheat and get away with it; keep the job. Cheat all you want, the rules are fake, game the system.
@@braineaterzombie3981at this point I am prepared to give an entire 1.5 hour lecture about each of them. What I am more scared of is live-coding since the last time I had to “invert a binary tree” was during my last year of college
All I want to add to this is…I am HORRIBLE a pressure/test situations. Period. The most BASIC knowledge flys directly out of my brain in coding interviews. I am VERY good at my job and know what how to write good software. BUT, I can see how AI is VERY helpful for the pointless technical interviews. However, I’ve interviewed enough that I usually ask the recruiter about how the technical interview goes, if it’s a technical conversation where we TALK about problems but don’t write code, I get a job offer nearly EVERY single time. The longer I do this, the less tolerance I have for technical interviews in the first place. They prove absolutely nothing.
I was using AI to help me land my first SWE job because I hadn't learned how to write test cases yet and I didn't pass other interviews that I didn't use it in. On the job I was an over performer and survived multiple rounds of redundancies during my time there. I was also hired as a mid not a junior because that's the role I applied to. I test really poorly, I'm so bad at coding interviews BUT doing the actual job I'm great at I've been told. I was even told I'm better than all the Senior Devs they let go because I can actually communicate with non technical people too, always respond on time and try my best. I really try to overdeliver as I obviously have imposter syndrome. I use occasionally use AI on the job too but to ask questions not to solve problems however typically I don't need it. I used it like a learning tool more than anything. e.g. "explain how xyz works" or "how to do xyz" "What are the trade offs of xyz vs zyx".
i think that using an AI to code on tests is not cheating anymore, is just the new way of coding, just understanding how to modify and explain that code is the important part
i really think so. i still code from scratch, but i have no qualms about using AI for debugging or suggestions and i ask questions if there's something it spits out that i don't understand. it's also great for remembering obscure syntax. i really don't see the issue in using it, it's a great tool.
If the problem is a reused leetcode problem I would be pretty pissed if it was called cheating. I took two mid-low level tech interviews so far and they both used third-parties that do a decent job at coming up with unique problems. I know that's not the best sample size, but my point is that it's totally crazy that someone could ruin your reputation while not doing their job :/ i guess that's the world we live in
I mean that's how Exams work, In here. Many new questions in the papers are from the past 5 years So a person did not studied whole year but Knows answer to those question can easily get more marks than a person who studied each concept in detail but Did not pay much attention to those questions (still recommended as You can self write, and Your knowledge carries over so you can still Write something)
@@Faizan29353 I'm fine with losing their games during hiring. knowing the google questions during the google interview probably has some indication of how dedicated I would be as an employee, or that I'm specifically trying to cheat google, or whatever but I don't like a massive corporation can stain an individual's reputation. I am just whining here because I can't do anything about it
I'm currently studying programming and i plan on working as one. So this video on where to find leaked technical interviews is great just because it will help me practise for said interview. My friend who has finished and got a degree for programming has also helped me guide me, but still nice to know this. I'm literally cave man when it comes to where to find right information 😆😃
Main reason to cheat is the pressure of landing the job . Most candidates cheat . In a given time constraints and high pressure , even a good programmer can fail to deliver . Programming is about solving the problem in optimal way and sometimes solving a problem may take 30 seconds or 4 days . A good company not only takes a reasonable assessment but also checks on your previous projects , ask questions on it just to get to know what the person is capable of .
I opened chatgpt in a code interview and used it when i had to. I however did not hide that from the interviewer. No i did not spend many hours preparing for the interview learning dozens of stupid interview questions, i just did the job of a programmer. As long as you can argue for it you are fine, if the company is not fine with that, they are probably not worth working for.
I think it should be good as long as you don't ask it to spoonfeed you. For example, asking it to breakdown the question into small manageable components should be fine but blindly copy pasting the code without understanding the logic should be a big no no
@@jediknight9896 yes, but it was a smaller company. They asked me why i opened it and i told them that thats my job. When you are programming you constantly get into situations where you have to look something up or find a solution to a problem that you know/expect has been solved before. Being able to use tools like chatgpt is part of the job.
@@HT79 breaking down the question is the part you have to do. Just asking chatgpt how to solve something will often lead to more problems than it helps. However you can ask AI to do standard things for you, or ask it about a certain algorithm that you don't remember exactly. Or maybe ask it for alternative algorithms for a situation. You often have to lead the AI to the solution or just take pointers and more often than not, you can't just copy paste generated code that is more than a few lines. However AI is still a powerful tool that you should learn how to use. Showing that you can use it is not the worst thing to happen in a job interview.
We ended up getting a dozen technical interviews for a recent position. It was an extremely straightforward "Build a basic crud". 4 of them built the frontend using AI.
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu Overly verbose code is a tell. Tonnes of bootstrap classes called, far more than necessary. Frontend code comments with formal language, even though the backend comments either don't exist or use a different tone of language. But the main tell is when the backend and frontend functionality don't match up. Eg the delete on the frontend just splices from the data in the frontend but doesn't call the backend delete route they created.
We believe we had this happen with a new hire from 4 months ago. We struggled to teach him at all for the most part and he could not do his work in any appreciable capacity without repeated support. We think he was using an LLM to get the answers and confidently and aggressively give the answers. None of it lines up with the person we came to know over the next few months, and became exhausting to deal with until the company told us to we could let him go…
the interview questions seem so outdated. An entry-level / junior should never be asked to implement a library and expect seniors to use it. Currently learning DSA, understanding/using is not the problem, implementation is. Interview questions should be catered to the project needs, not a bullet-list of non-sense. Most devs say they don't apply things from the interview for a reason. They either can't identify the need use said DS or are not allowed to create their own DS.
I recently had a person faking knowledge in a tech interview with AI. Once I got suspicious I began to ask questions that I knew chatbots would struggle with since they would hallucinate or go off on strange tangents, and then kept asking follow up questions to get more and more nonsense. Eventually I blatantly asked if they were using a chatbot and got them to admit sheepishly and the guy acted from that point on like a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar. However, I didn't really consider it cheating, but I also didn't think the person was qualified for the position. In my mind, if the person can use AI to come up with better explanations, better code, etc. then just think of it like a tool you'd have on the job, like a calculator. However, the person didn't know enough to guardrail the AI, so they would have been better off without it.
No, it's not ok to lie because you most probably we'll be asked to do stuff you don't know and probably don't even interest you. I see no point in applying to a job you have no knowledge for (in most cases also no interest, because otherwise you would have studied the topic) and then lying to get it. It would just end up miserably for both you and the company. But in the end we're all human and make bad choices.
the hardest part of a job is getting it, once you're through devs in MNCs pretty much do petty changes in code everyday throughout the day, and get paid huge sums for that, so in my opinion the pros of cheating hugely overcome the cons, and if you can cheat and not get caught and get the job, you actually deserve the job man 😂
Best tech interview: I share my screen showing an app that my company built, with some intentionally added bugs. I tell the candidate the problem like I'm a customer and they guide me through bug fixing.
I work as a full stack dev essentially i use chatgpt for my day to day work so essentially any prompt engineers with some programming background can do most dev work
In-person technical interviews are all well and good, but I've seen senior devs have a nervous breakdown and fail because they're given a laptop with an IDE, console and browser, and told "Here's a set of requirements now start coding". That's not how devs operate. Most devs, even experienced ones, have never written a brand new project. Nor do they code on an unfamiliar device with two people watching them the whole time.
Slightly unrelated but also feeds into the point that a lot of devs end up having very narrow scope - I don't know the word for it, but they won't be able to set up the project (devops/build settings, etc) but they'll be able to add additional features given an already working codebase. Tell them to make it from scratch? They can't do it.
@@Toleich got to disagree. I worked a job for 6 years and they never gave me greenfield projects, even though I asked multiple times. So I set about doing it my own time, but with a full working week, commute, and family, how am I meant to find the time? Managed to spin up a few basic home projects but ultimately, keeping up is near impossible. A senior position can take many directions, one being that you code less and manage more.
@@Daijyobanai Fair enough. It's rare that a senior is tasked with a greenfield project. Most if not all of my career has been maintaining and extending legacy systems. If you want greenfield, you need to take a risk and work in start-ups.
over the last 2 years i finished more projects then ever and produced much, much more code. but i would be absolutly unable to code from scratch, just because i am simply missing the syntax of it and i have to look it up. someone interviewing me would think that i know nothing and yet i clearly do in practice. its absurd.
A lot of times, I get stuck on how to get started on a lot of these coding questions and just need a clue. Like is it a 2 pointer? Or tree bfs? Having chatgpt provide a clue would be HUGE since I often waste like half of the interview time figuring this part out.
I will never forget the time 2 companies sent me the same technical requirement they wanted me to develop as a test. I literally sent them the same cloned repo with different names. P.S I still didn't get hired
Damn it. They stole my idea. I got tired of stupid automated interviews that asked questions about geopolitics and archaic english words and thought in creating my own platform for autocomplete the automated interviews. Now I have more work to do to avoid getting caught.
Why call it cheating? Using tools like Google or a calculator shouldn’t be considered cheating, it should be encouraged instrad! In the real world, we rely on these tools, and a strong candidate is someone who can identify bad answers and solve problems effectively using all available resources. The focus of the interviewer should be on candidate ability of problem-solving with all tools available, not restricting helpful tools, I think this approach its not helping anyone!
Because the point of an interview is to use a small amount of time to judge how you will perform on long tasks. If you want to be tested in a "real world" way then the test will last a week where you have to implement a real feature. If you can't solve a small problem without chatgpt helping you then you're not going to be able to solve larger issues in the real job.
I agree with you, interview should be : using available tools to solve programming problem as efficient as possible (speed + quality). Why it's cheating : because it's not part of the rule of the interview until you find an interview that allows it. Similar to school, exams are usually without notes, but sometimes they allow them. Depends on the rules of the interviewer.
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu Companies unsettle you with hardcore math things to get you to lower your starting salary. At the end you do SQL, backend and frontend
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu”for learning purposes” when i could take time, search it up and implement it without a single bit of memorization, that’s how you learn, not memorizing.
@@sorae42 I never said to memorise how to do it. I said every programmer should do it once, specifically so they understand how they work, and how to build other things using the same concepts. I definitely do not mean memorise it, as it's not an effective way to consolidate knowledge. The best way is to attempt to implement it yourself based on your understanding of the concept, and only look up things if you get truly stuck.
The whiteboard coding challenge is asinine. Like the LeetCode BS, this does not represent doing the real job. They're trying to "gotcha" someone without regard to their actual ability.
Pro tip. If you conduct interviews, never, under any circumstances let the interviewee or recruiters have a copy of your questions. I designed all of my questions to defeat this exact problem being described in this video. I have politely declined people on getting copies. It took me many hours to craft my questions and they have yet to fail me. Of course they age like the rest of the industry so it's important to keep them updated. Im like on version 3. Due for another update honestly.
@@user-p8q8sbecause they will publicise it making it useless. Also they will prep their buddies for the exam if someone else goes to the same interview. I have interviewed a lot of people and it blows my mind how many people are unqualified for the job. They think because they have pretty certificates or somehow fell ass backwards into a microsoft job they don't have to answer even the most basic of questions. My questions are crafted so that only serious developers can answer them. I don't care what technologies you have worked with, if you can't answer the basics then it's "Thank you for your time, you will hear next steps from your recruiter."
I'm not condoning cheating, but if you do, you can use a KVM switch so you never have to look away from your screen or use a second keyboard or mouse. But if you're old or educated enough to know what a KVM is without googling it, you don't need to cheat.
lightning level change can fuck you up, i think, so one must be in a well lit room so it won’t be noticeable, because chatgpt dark theme and codesignal(or whatever) dark theme differs a bit. also one should consider software downscaling their webcam, because eye reflection can give it off too
I mean... It doesn't change the fact that there is luck involved with what exact question you get. I personally have never passed one of these questions I didn't directly study beforehand. And the amount of them I've been asked that fit this description is over ~30%. I did pretty well, don't get me wrong, it's just that in comparison to somebody that did know the correct answer off the top of their head, I'm not getting picked, which I never did.
@@cx6894 why do you think, you need to look away? you can setup switching between VMs as switching between windows, but switching between VM windows won’t be seen by the software inside the VM you are interviewing in
Medicine is an interesting iteration of this problem too. Lots of applicants to residency/fellowship are great interviewers and test takers but bad doctors. Great at answering standard questions which appear on professional guidelines, but when seeing a patient with multiple issues or an atypical presentation of one issue, the forest is lost to the trees.
@@HT79 but the day companies would make their own AI wouldn't they just not need employees anymore if someone can manage it on their own by then. lets just say I own my own robots and they can do way better already in 2045 and won't need humans anymore to start my own company to run against other big ones
I find the very concept of cheating challenging when it comes to software development. On the one hand, you must understand the problem and have some intuition on how to programmatically achieve the solution. But choosing to use AI to generate that code and solution, or write the code itself, and calling one of them "cheating", looks disingenous to me. Of course I can understand where you're coming from, but I understand it's just a choice of how to bridge the gap between the problem and the potential solution
Been interviewing people for 15 years. Before ever getting to the coding questions I would already know. The first part is small talk/ background, mostly confirming what's on their resume. Second step is conceptual construction or decomposition of a few topics. And then if those are good, it's a 1 hour lab.
5:03 I’ve never had a technical interview before but dude it’s pretty obvious why people cheat in them. It’s always the same stupid leetcode questions that have no use in the actual job but you have to spend months on to memorize. People are sick of it.
The problem is companies using re-used questions for their interviews. When I applied for the company I currently work at, the technical question was one simple sentence. "Help a mouse through a maze to find the cheese." That was the only thing on the technical test, I had to propose parameters, solutions to possible challenges, etc. Yeah, you could still put this in a chat gpt box, but that'd be like reading a speech that someone else wrote - everyone can tell you didn't write it.
I have always used something like a gradual deep dive to ask questions about something the candidate has worked on or claims to have good expertise in. e.g. Start with what the product was doing and then keep getting deeper to components, classes, functions, optimizations, libraries, and then the algorithms used by libraries and their minutiae if it is warranted, like say they encountered a particularly nasty bug in a library - I want to know how they found it and how they fixed it or defensively patched it or whatever, and then the algorithmic complexity involved in such real contexts. I mostly do not want to know if they can solve random publicly available code puzzles.
why these top companies use leet code questions on their interviews? algorithms like reverse binary tree are embeded in libraries, no need to know on spot how to code them efficiently, that is waste of time or effort, i can't say i know what questions to ask instead, but i'm sure, leet code questions are like 20 years ago important
Look I'm just saying: if technical interviews are just quizzing me on stuff that isn't relevant to the job, nobody should feel bad about using AI to provide the answers they want
Any tech question is stupid if it can be answered by AI. It's like asking someone to multiply 3.14159 by 42 just as calculators were becoming widely adopted.
When the interview questions have nothing to do with the skills required to do the job there's nothing wrong. All interviews are fucking stupid anyways. Asking questions like "why should we hire you" in this economy makes my blood boil
It is so easy to hire good candidates without having to worry about them cheating ... There is a thing called technical discussion and live coding (Rough outline or allowing google). You can cheat on technical interview but you can't really cheat in discussions . Or just a small take home task and discussion on it later .
1:42 I... what the TH-cam even _is_ this "magical string" question, I've read over it several times, along with the examples, and I _still_ don't know how it's asking me to generate the string???
Nowadays if you dont use AI you wont get a job period. It is not cheating if it is a tool. If you don't know hot to use simple AI tool than you are screwed.
At the end of the day though, there are questions asked on the interview that you would never face while you're working there. So the thought that you would be a low performer is subjective tbh.
Step 1: Use AI to get you the job
Step 2: Use AI to do the job you lied about
Step 3: Get fired in 2 months
Step 3: ?
Step 4: profit?
so real lmao
You are the new Justin Y
wrong.
Step 1: Use AI to get you the job
Step 2: outsource your work to someone competent but in cheaper country
Step 3: keep the extra money
Step 4: repeat at different company
Step 5: gather infinite money until it falls apart
real story
I think there's probably a lot of people that couldn't pass the tech interview without cheating but could still do the job just fine.
There definitely are, but I do know some people who cheated to get into faang and got pipped pretty quickly. None of the cheaters who didn't get pipped ever ended up getting promoted as well so they still have new grad TC.
@@noponarchsage7360 yeah but there are many companies other than faang
This is 100% true for Leetcode interviews.
Yes/no.
Some companies ask stuff that has ZERO to do with day to day operations (and that isn't "transferable" either) and in that case I agree.
The places I worked I always ended up getting questions that were quite role and business specific, semplifications of what would be BaU and if you fail at those you would clearly be a drag.
Trying to get a software job has continued to be a worsening hell for the last 5 years lol. Tons of people I know who have well formatted resumes with good stuff in them can't even get interviews, and a lot of times when each position has 500+ applicants, your chance of even getting an interview is
I just interviewed a bunch of candidates at a MFANG company. We used a real world problem where you need to fix a series of bugs in a small minimal reproduction environment. We started the interviews telling candidates we dont care if they use Google, ChatGPT, or other AIs. The challenge is not designed to test whether you have amazing recall, but how you reason through a problem in the codebase. I don't think an AI would have helped much to solve the problem. But it would have been great to get a refresher for how to implement a specific design pattern or algorithm. And that's totally fine to use AI for, because again, whats important is the candidate recognized the right tool for the job not that they memorized how to implement it.
Do you mind giving more details?
There’s so much stuff to know these days, so infrequently used and constantly changing, that it’s more important to quickly learn what you need to know and develop an intuitive sense for problem solving than to know tons of stuff.
Lol are you still hiring. This sounds great 😂
EXACTLY! It's like how we dont focus so much on kids memorizing thousands of bits of trivia in grade school anymore and focus more on teaching them how to work through problems and search for solutions.
I guess the main problems with this are:
1. You need to explain too much, or that the description could be too long and yet people will have legitimate questions
2. The problem needs to be not too easy and not too hard
3. It can be solved during the interview
4. Would it be a good predictor of a good addition to the team? Would it reject perfectly good candidates?
The current system is pretty terrible, but it is good at 1, 3 and you can adjust for 2. I am pretty sure the current system does not work well for 4.
Corporations: Don't cheat with AI to get a job.
Also corporations: Let's replace the workforce with AI.
Clown world gonna clown.
The more you cheat with GPT and it passes, the more the employer wonders why they're interviewing for a position that GPT could just do for less money instead.
ironic but not weird at all, I mean, they don't care who or what does the job, but they do care about how much they pay for it.
@@tjmarx ya but someone has to go prompt the damn thing and push the code... it's not like the CEO is gonna do that on a big company. They might actually need less developers, though. There's a million problems with what I'm gonna say next, but in theory it doesn't have to be a bad thing, just means high skilled people will be even more valuable as they can be even more productive, while low skilled will be in lower demand as the high skilled ones won't need as many "extra hands" to help out.
And this sort of pushes people to upskill, raises the bar a bit, and that ain't so bad. It kinda happened like that with every tech advancement.
Of course, it does take a while for workforce to adapt, and it does benefit employers a lot at the expense of employees, as they have to be more productive for basically the same pay level, and are now competing for much fewer jobs. That part is absolutely awful and a very good reason for us to get off our asses and start doing smth about it. (to be clear, the answer is not "forbidding tech", wish I didn't have to clarify it... that clearly doesn't work and isn't in the best interest of progress)
wow, that was way longer than it should have been :D feel free to ignore it.
You shouldn't copy-paste AI code at work without knowing exactly what the code does, and neither should you do that during an interview. At work that's called being clueless, during an interview that's called cheating.
If you can truly understand what your AI Agent wrote for an interview question and add your modifications on top, that's okay IMO.
Ive been working for 4 years now out of college. No way i could pass the invert a binary tree question anymore.
Unless you're applying for a junior or internship position I don't know who would ask those kind of interview questions.
@@jamess.2491i know many who would ask that in both India and USA. Can't say about yours.
@@jamess.2491 everyone outside early-stage startups are still asking those questions up to Lead-level roles
That's why you prep for interviews.
I wouldn't expect you to pass a mid-term without studying either.
@@balasuarYou shouldnt test a cars performance on the moon if youre never gonna send it to the moon... (but if you make internal combustion work on the moon thatd be pretty dope)
Dead internet theory is progressing, soon when face call AI will improve, we end up with bots interviewing other bots
Yeah, we are just about 4 major break-thoughts away from it.
Already been happening for a while now. It's become a real problem in the last 3 months or so where every top submission is Ai generated and now recruiters are purposely ignoring the resumes and cover letters that look professional.
just use the ai detector gpt
then Dead world xd
And once everyone is a bot. No one will be.
These job interviews seem designed to employ people who interview well, as opposed to people who'd do the job well. This might be some of the explanation for the software quality these companies seem to output these days.
As someone who last interviewed in 1998, I greatly fear the day I'll have to go through a modern day interview process.
I straight-up tell interviewers I don't knoe when that happens. My strenght is that I don't waste time memorizing things when I can just look them up. I know THAT something can be done (read: standards, design patterns, etc.), the HOW is just a few clicks away. Most interviews I have had involved algorithms I would never use. I just don't understand the idea behind them and I don;t want to work for a compay that does that. It feels like a kind of classism.
@@SkamanSamTyler That's because it is classism. You can't tell me it's not a class issue when there's people who have the time and funding to spend months grinding leetcode without worrying about working to put food on the table, while all the other plebs have to work to survive, and not have the same time advantage to study a useless skill.
I did tons of interviews this year. The process is broken. Not because it has exploitable flaws like described in this video, but because alongside that, there's this vibe of infallibility where you can't doubt the interviewer's skill without disqualifying yourself in the eyes of the industry. If YOU couldn't solve this obscure problem that has no real world relevance to the job, then it's YOUR fault aka skill issue. Company is fine, company can do no wrong, hiring manager definitely has a well-thought-out methodology of screening candidates and isn't just winging it due to the overwhelming candidate pool. No way man, impossible, you really think company could get this far if they didn't know what they were doing? It must be you. Have you tried grinding more leetcode??
This has been shown to be the case. UNC did a series of studies to test the technical interview process and found it to be heavily biased and not even remotely capable of finding the best undergrad students when compared to recommendations from faculty.
Basically, the old school model of 'Prof X recommands student Y' beats the entire process of modern tech interviews.
@@armandoalvarado5840 I've got 12 years of experience as a data scientist and have failed multiple interviews this year because they wanted me to pass leetcode questions totally unrelated to data science. Yeah, not great at using hashmaps, but hasmaps don't ask a damn thing about p-values, how to train a statistical model, or investigation processes. Just to name a few...
to be fair, technical interviews are largely pointless in a lot of companies that it's kind of funny
"hey, invert this binary tree"
at work: "so, we need you to query this API and move the data to a table"
very good
The interviews are harder then the job itself its funny
In my entire software career, I don't recall every having to invert a binary tree.
Or they want you to fix a problem they are having and have no plans on hiring you. I had so many of those kind of "situations" they want me to code for them and I immediately know it is something they want fixed. Best part is when they are asking questions. ok so why you do that. and you just know they are taking "notes".
It all comes down to why you know to do what you do or how did you learn. Did you learn just by redoing and kind of understanding the problem in its isolated generic definition state? If yes, then you don't really know how to apply it and when. It's like when a math teacher can just straight up give formulas to kids in school, to have them for the test, and then they don't know which formula to use for which problem in the test. It's all about how you arrived at knowing how to do the thing.
@@vulpo You will never have to deal with straight up "invert a binary tree" but you will deal with moving things around, swapping places, keeping order. We do that every single day in our daily lives, we just don't think of it as "inverting a binary tree".
My friend's brother works at a software development place, they've been burned so many times that they only do in-person hiring and they stick the guy in the room and tell him to write something. Some people have just left immediately, admitting that they lied about everything on their resume.
Lmao
This is the way, I would appreciate if interviews does this more often.
Sounds like when I tried to hire Software Architects. I don't even understand how we possibly have anyone called an Architect yet they can't code, but whatever. 90% of the interviews went like this:
ME: "This is an engineering position where you WILL be coding. Are you okay with that?"
THEM: "Oh yes, I completely understand."
ME:
THEM: "Uhhh... this sounds like a coding position. I'm an Enterprise _Architect_ ... I don't code."
ME: ...
Meanwhile me, I can create full-stack apps on my own, and failing recruitment because of basic stuff which I haven't used in very long time (about a year) 😅.
We got burned so many times. We’ve caught many of them cheating. We’ve hired frauds too.
It got to the point that we assume candidate is cheating until proven otherwise if we decide to interview.
Industry is doomed and cheaters are ruining it for ALL of us.
I love computers and IT, but I hate modern technology industry...
Yup
It's what becomes of every industry that becomes a stock market's investor's darling. If you want to have a normal life and healthy mental state, stay away from the trendy new thing.
I despise it. Infested with people that don't practice but are making the rules and making it worse.
@@muhdiversity7409 are you trying to tell that we need more managers and even less work done?
@@wuzimu2323 Definitely more managers and agile coaches. Got to make those burn down charts have the correct shape.
A better way to do interviews is to ask soft questions. Like what’s their favorite framework and why. What do they like about their work? What is a chore they hate but do when necessary? How did they get into coding? What was the last bug that caused them to go insane? What was their coolest feature they built so far? And so on. These questions are usually so personal that you can’t look them up online. And they provide you with a deeper insight on what the person actually did in practice
I'm taking notes.
Excactly - tell me about a mistake you made, what were the consequences, and how have you adapted from that? Tell me about an unforseen outcome. Copy paste technical questions are dumb in interviews, you want to know what kind of person you're about to spend 40 hours a week working with
There is no way I'd hire a freelancer to work with me for some major project and give the guy some of those silly super technical leet exercises. I wanna know if I can trust this person to handle themselves, and communicate and understand our business needs and find good compromises and even speak up if I ask them for a dumb feature that will destroy our productivity.
I just love it when a small company, with a user base of no more than 1k, asks for an inverted binary tree when in reality you'll probably be in maintenance for the great majority of the time and rarely ever push out a groundbreaking feature.
Fireship content machine is on overtime. Keep it coming.
Soon we'll be interviewed by AI, while using AI to cheat and AI using anti-AI software to determine if you used AI to cheat in the interview.
they already use AI to chuck out the majority of applications. Same with having AI to mark Hireview interviews.
At my last company they already used an AI to evaluate every applicant's CV with the requirements of the job advert. The HR lady never looked at any applicant below 80%, even when the AI couldn't parse the information from the CV
@@TheSuperBoyProjectthat feels so wrong. They should at least look at people's portfolios or git to judge them. How is writing an AI passable resume worthy of a callback. I'm only a undergrad so idk
@@theunknown21329 I agree, the system is rigged. A Tip I learned while job hunting; copy the job description and paste it in my resume, then reduce the font size to 1 and change the color to white. So its invisible. No need to worrying about matching keywords. No need to tailor your resume too much to match the company.
"cheating is not a mistake It's a CHOICE" is my favorite line ever
I have a technical interview tomorrow, thank you man 💗💗💗
How it went: I said that my main programming language is JS and the work was about JS but the test was about C# string and array methods
sad
Good luck
Good luck bro
I have one for an unpaid 1 month Java internship, tomorrow.
@@Dipj01 If they actually make you go trough a technical interview for that... Just cheat, you deserve better
Sooo Remote control repository it is
Absolutely interviewed a guy once, years ago, pre-AI boom, that was 100% googling my questions. These weren't even specific programming questions, we were just talking about frameworks or something and I asked what he liked about a certain one. It was like a kid quoting the back page for a book report.
If you don't know the answer, and don't attempt to cheat, honesty is never appreciated by the employer. So, why not try to google/chatGPT stuff as a interviewee ? Either you're good and it works, or the interviewer notices, and you're out anyway.
I had an interview with a fintech company in Japan. It was my first interview since being employed four years ago.
I tried so hard to do 3 leet code questions, and I got 80% correct to pass the test without using any AI or cheating methods. Then I went to the second round with a live coding test and limited time for 5 more coding questions, and I failed at that stage.
Honestly, they are asking questions related to the tech stacks they are using, but somehow, they modified it and made it look more tricky and unrealistic.
I could only finish 3 of them and then received a rejection letter.
I never ask these kinds of interview questions to software developers I am considering hiring. I want to understand what kind of projects they have worked on, I ask quite detailed questions on what kind of structures they discovered when building solutions in previous domains etc. I also ask what in their opinion is the most impressive piece of source code they have seen and why. If they say something classic like Linux kernel, Unix or Bitcoin protocol, I simply ask them to say something a bit more relevant to their past works and why it was impressive. If they have never done any serious development work, they cannot give meaningful answers.
Sadly the industry is infested with people that don't practice that think there's some automated way of selecting candidates. You prior history be damned.
When I'm interviewing the #1 thing I'm evaluating is what kind of person they are, to see if they'd be a good fit for the team. I've had great teams ruined by hires "placed" there who were either awful individuals or just an awful fit. Put simply, if someone has a good capacity to learn and solid, basic technical skills in my desired subject matter areas I can get them trained up on the specifics they need to be successful. What I can't do is teach them how to not be an asshole....
@@johnwilliams3075 Yep, you can no longer undo things that should have been learnt at a decent home.
That is the way. You get insightful information about the candidate, their experience and knowledge in certain domains and how they got there, which indirectly lets you know how they'd be able to continue learning and succeed if they were on your team.
Coding challenges are fine, if 1) they are domain-specific [i.e. use an simple example of a problem that your team had to design around with some constraints], 2) doesn't take more than a few hours to complete, and 3) provides rationale behind decisions made, specific to the task at hand [not why they chose a specific framework or language, but rather why and how they decided on specific data structures, or design to get to the solution based on the constraints laid out].
Every company I've worked at have never asked for a coding challenge, just a technical writeup on hypothetical (or not so hypothetical) questions, and how I'd solve them.
Communication is the number one factor. Code by itself is not communication.
Lol I basically ask them what is their 5 year career plan like how I grew preparing for interviews ha
I dont need to explain anything, code speaks for itself
Top tier reference
did you write the code by your self ?
@@hwapyongedouard i wrote my own compiler you god damn ni...
Brillant!!!
I kinda support people cheating on Leetcode type questions. Those questions have nothing to do with my suffering in Next-Auth and the fact I've mastered that son of a bitch just like I did many other things that have nothing to do with lame ass low level algorithms
It's the same type questions everybody gets. Same resources that is available for everyone. Don't know what you're moaning about. Not like they're only targeting you with LC.
If you can't make some homework and study leetcode for a job, this tells a lot about your capacity to get stuff done. You are incriminating yourself
@@masterchief1520it's just not very relevant to the job. I'm a software engineer, I spend my time building software both at work and at home, I do not wish to steal time from that to train my algorithmic "leetcode skills" in preparation for a job where I will continue to develop software.
@@thepowerhatit is time lost that could have been spent actually developing software (etc) which would make you better at the job that you're applying to do.
Mastering anything Next-related is definitely a waste of life
Let's be honest, all that super algorithms interviews are bullshit as 100500 interview stages to land that job. All that US hiring completely broken.
Same in Canada too
I think it's just that at the end you need a way to find the best in the 10k applications for that react frontend position that you are trying to fill up, and probably that everyone know how to align a div, so algo here we go. we could also play first arrive first serve but... why make it easy when we can make it difficult, need to justify the hiring teams salaries.
Yet people fail at basic algorithms. Nobody gonna ask you to invert a binary tree, but you may be asked to figure out how to implement a cache (which you should be able to do, honestly).
@@darkwoodmovies for my opinion cache is not algorithm it's method.
Algorithm is really last thing what you will do for optimization
@@masterbogdan Huh? The algorithm is literally the first thing you do for optimization. Algorithms are language agnostic and are "free" runtime and/or memory improvements to a program. No need to think about concurrency or cache misses or garbage collection -- it's literally the easiest and most universal optimization method.
From what I have seen of "technical interviews" from the outside they are utter garbage already. I don't consider it cheating if the test is already rigged.
Fr. Recently had an amazon test where one of the two questions was so difficult to understand that even chat gpt (after the interview) couldn't understand it (not even for a senior role, but a student role)
@jacobsan "Hiring a junior role. Requires 20 years of experience and knowledge of Windows, Linux, C, C++, Java, Fortran, Cobol, Lips, Forth, Haskell, and HTML5."
@@jacobsan what was the question like?
@@jacobsan yeah questions which are more like riddles are very dumb
@@jacobsanamazon ? I tried the interview just for lulz once. Technical part was fine, but when they asked me to learn some BS "values", they I told them politely to GTFO couple of minutes before the interview.
ive been coding for almost 8 years, graduated in 2014 in computer science. when i was just left college I WAS EXTREMELY GOOD at these leetcode questions but a DUNCE in actually building systems. now im the opposite where i can build anything to connect to almost anything
but i FREEZE up when i get these DS&A that i haven't seen in years!
makes me feel so stupid and embarrassing
Who knew that asking interviewees obscure DS&A questions from university that have nothing to do with the day-to-day job and require you to "refresh" those questions every 6 months (or you'll forget) will result in people cheating?
What's your alternative ???? People can't study foundational algorithms and DS you expect them to write real world code lmao. There are millions of people trying for the same job how else do you filter?
@@masterchief1520 you're a boot licker man, stop responding every comment with the same shit
@@masterchief1520 very true, agree
@@masterchief1520 If they're all equally talented just pick the one who you think has the best personality for work ??? Bruh this is the only field where you are in such a weak position constantly proving yourself. CS people are so bad at valuating themselves
@@masterchief1520the alternative is to ask the applicant to create a very small application (etc) according to your specification. Very simple actually.
What's funny is that an extremely convoluted cheating technique would be a good reason to make the hire
Yess
In a technical sense yes, but when you have someone low on morals near you, the thing you want the least is for them to also be highly intelligent and creative
@@flaviolimaj True. Maybe it would be best for crypto projects!
6:10 this is for my ex 💀
😂😂😂😂
CS students don't have an ex. Go away 🤔
😂😂😂
😂😂
Ok boomer
The problem with many tech interviews is that it is more a display of the hubris of the interviewer that is of trying to see if the person can do the job. Most programming jobs don't need you to be able to develop a linked list (even if this is simple to do in C) or any other data structure. What they need you to be able to do is know when to use a linked list and when not to. I have been asked to write some complicated SQL query only to get the job and find out any simple sql query would have satisfied the job requirements.
I use online learning and research at my job constantly. Technical interviews should simply accept that and then focus on who is good at doing that research quickly and correctly.
I would be lost without google and the spuls brave enough to ask questions on stack overflow.
The main problem I have with the technical interviews is that they have nothing to do with my job, where I am actually encouraged to use AI. Which yes requires a lot of debugging but especially when working in sections and with canvas is actually a great tool.
The problem with these tech interview is that it’s ridiculous that you can instantly get the answers but are just asked to memorize them regardless. It used to be Google now it’s AI that we use for debugging so just taking away that tool doesn’t prove anything outside of the ability to study for a test.
Tech interviews are getting harder and harder, some of them ask you to do homeworks that I would spend days to do. Usually if I see something like it I'll just decline to do it. Also timeout exams.
In Hungary Im interviewing currently with 6y of web dev / frontend exp. Either its HR+tech interview zoom call + take home test or sometimes there's even an additional round. It hurts a bit where you dont have something open source or similar to show from recent times. Had a very rough life the last 3-4 years I could only keep my work in balance somewhat lmao.
Its always a base app with multiple pages, api calls some state managment, sometimes db+backend work and many times they need you to deploy it, write tests mupltiple kind and sometimes really short deadlines are given.
They are not hard at all most times jist tedious and I hate to give out a not fully fledged solution so I tend to take up more time than needed. When it fails after u did it it feels like a waste of 6-10 hours.
@@tbkswaggcould it be that they just use you to provide a solution for their problems without paying you?
@@pochou8261 Eh, there was a case where I was suspicious because I had to build a smoothing algorithm and the company in question worked on a video subtitling / recording software which smooths out mouse movement etc to make the vid look cooler.
But generally the ez exercises in question are too generic. "Build a websocket connection to a stock API and build a UI to see XYZ charts for that symbol" or some NexJs app with similar baseline stuff. But still, even if they are easy they take time
I hate the homework ones, too much time! But most are easy IMHO, the hard ones for me have always been system design interviews.
Let me guess.. AI
Ai
Ai.
Aye
Don't guess. Watch the video.
Artificial Intelligence.
I've done countless technical interviews, if you can cheat and get away with it; keep the job. Cheat all you want, the rules are fake, game the system.
I can’t even look away from the screen to think during the interview without looking suspicious.
If your interview process can be cheated that easily, then your interview process is bad, and you don't deserve good employees.
Honestly though. If you can't come up with a coding task that AI isn't able to solve, then your whole recruiting process sucks.
Exactly. If AI is better than people at getting hired, but much worse at actual job - then perhaps your hiring process is wrong.
Nobody actually asks Leetcode questions though. They're all modified custom questions, for which, as the video said, AI does pretty badly on.
Thanks so much for yet another great video! You've been on a roll the last days with your output frequency
4 FIRESHIP VIDEOS IN A WEEK!?! AM I DREAMING!?
The timing is incredible bro, in 15 hours I have an interview for ML Engineer
Good luck
Ehh the interviewer is probably gonna ask about linear regression or logistic regression anyways
@@braineaterzombie3981at this point I am prepared to give an entire 1.5 hour lecture about each of them. What I am more scared of is live-coding since the last time I had to “invert a binary tree” was during my last year of college
Would love to know what SQL questions they asked you. Please, keep us updated.
What questions did they ask you, kindly let us know please !!
What a timing, just got rejected due to not performing well enough in the technical interview - Sadge
Keep it up, something will land. I’m in the same boat
+1
Aw damn. Keep at it!
should stop watching Twitch to perform better - RIPBOZO
All I want to add to this is…I am HORRIBLE a pressure/test situations. Period. The most BASIC knowledge flys directly out of my brain in coding interviews. I am VERY good at my job and know what how to write good software. BUT, I can see how AI is VERY helpful for the pointless technical interviews.
However, I’ve interviewed enough that I usually ask the recruiter about how the technical interview goes, if it’s a technical conversation where we TALK about problems but don’t write code, I get a job offer nearly EVERY single time. The longer I do this, the less tolerance I have for technical interviews in the first place. They prove absolutely nothing.
I was using AI to help me land my first SWE job because I hadn't learned how to write test cases yet and I didn't pass other interviews that I didn't use it in. On the job I was an over performer and survived multiple rounds of redundancies during my time there. I was also hired as a mid not a junior because that's the role I applied to. I test really poorly, I'm so bad at coding interviews BUT doing the actual job I'm great at I've been told. I was even told I'm better than all the Senior Devs they let go because I can actually communicate with non technical people too, always respond on time and try my best. I really try to overdeliver as I obviously have imposter syndrome. I use occasionally use AI on the job too but to ask questions not to solve problems however typically I don't need it. I used it like a learning tool more than anything. e.g. "explain how xyz works" or "how to do xyz" "What are the trade offs of xyz vs zyx".
What do you Actually do in your work
I find that to be the best use of AI as well! I'm always asking it for it's opinion on stuff.
i think that using an AI to code on tests is not cheating anymore, is just the new way of coding, just understanding how to modify and explain that code is the important part
i really think so. i still code from scratch, but i have no qualms about using AI for debugging or suggestions and i ask questions if there's something it spits out that i don't understand. it's also great for remembering obscure syntax. i really don't see the issue in using it, it's a great tool.
It’s still cheating if you are being tested. You are expected to know the code and how to structure it
@@MedicAthlete24W coding is constantly evolving, using IA is just a new way of it.
If the problem is a reused leetcode problem I would be pretty pissed if it was called cheating. I took two mid-low level tech interviews so far and they both used third-parties that do a decent job at coming up with unique problems. I know that's not the best sample size, but my point is that it's totally crazy that someone could ruin your reputation while not doing their job
:/ i guess that's the world we live in
I mean that's how Exams work, In here.
Many new questions in the papers are from the past 5 years
So a person did not studied whole year but Knows answer to those question can easily get more marks than a person who studied each concept in detail but Did not pay much attention to those questions (still recommended as You can self write, and Your knowledge carries over so you can still Write something)
@@Faizan29353 I'm fine with losing their games during hiring. knowing the google questions during the google interview probably has some indication of how dedicated I would be as an employee, or that I'm specifically trying to cheat google, or whatever
but I don't like a massive corporation can stain an individual's reputation.
I am just whining here because I can't do anything about it
I'm currently studying programming and i plan on working as one. So this video on where to find leaked technical interviews is great just because it will help me practise for said interview. My friend who has finished and got a degree for programming has also helped me guide me, but still nice to know this. I'm literally cave man when it comes to where to find right information 😆😃
0:30 Wait, this says November 22
Retigga it said Nov 25th
@@Rouge_Parrotno it says 22
Time travel.
November 22 is also on Jumada a-Awwal 20 bruh!
Main reason to cheat is the pressure of landing the job . Most candidates cheat . In a given time constraints and high pressure , even a good programmer can fail to deliver .
Programming is about solving the problem in optimal way and sometimes solving a problem may take 30 seconds or 4 days . A good company not only takes a reasonable assessment but also checks on your previous projects , ask questions on it just to get to know what the person is capable of .
I opened chatgpt in a code interview and used it when i had to. I however did not hide that from the interviewer. No i did not spend many hours preparing for the interview learning dozens of stupid interview questions, i just did the job of a programmer. As long as you can argue for it you are fine, if the company is not fine with that, they are probably not worth working for.
Did you land the job by doing this?
I think it should be good as long as you don't ask it to spoonfeed you. For example, asking it to breakdown the question into small manageable components should be fine but blindly copy pasting the code without understanding the logic should be a big no no
@@jediknight9896 yes, but it was a smaller company. They asked me why i opened it and i told them that thats my job. When you are programming you constantly get into situations where you have to look something up or find a solution to a problem that you know/expect has been solved before. Being able to use tools like chatgpt is part of the job.
@@HT79 breaking down the question is the part you have to do. Just asking chatgpt how to solve something will often lead to more problems than it helps. However you can ask AI to do standard things for you, or ask it about a certain algorithm that you don't remember exactly. Or maybe ask it for alternative algorithms for a situation. You often have to lead the AI to the solution or just take pointers and more often than not, you can't just copy paste generated code that is more than a few lines. However AI is still a powerful tool that you should learn how to use. Showing that you can use it is not the worst thing to happen in a job interview.
We ended up getting a dozen technical interviews for a recent position. It was an extremely straightforward "Build a basic crud". 4 of them built the frontend using AI.
How did you know?
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu Overly verbose code is a tell. Tonnes of bootstrap classes called, far more than necessary. Frontend code comments with formal language, even though the backend comments either don't exist or use a different tone of language. But the main tell is when the backend and frontend functionality don't match up. Eg the delete on the frontend just splices from the data in the frontend but doesn't call the backend delete route they created.
@@Gredddfe Wow that's super interesting, thanks!
got an interview tomorrow boys pray for me
Good luck man, I have one too.
lol, were you looking for cheating tips??🤣🤣🤣
gluck maaaan
Good luck! Make Claude proud!
How'd it go?
We believe we had this happen with a new hire from 4 months ago. We struggled to teach him at all for the most part and he could not do his work in any appreciable capacity without repeated support. We think he was using an LLM to get the answers and confidently and aggressively give the answers. None of it lines up with the person we came to know over the next few months, and became exhausting to deal with until the company told us to we could let him go…
the interview questions seem so outdated.
An entry-level / junior should never be asked to implement a library and expect seniors to use it.
Currently learning DSA, understanding/using is not the problem, implementation is.
Interview questions should be catered to the project needs, not a bullet-list of non-sense.
Most devs say they don't apply things from the interview for a reason.
They either can't identify the need use said DS or are not allowed to create their own DS.
I recently had a person faking knowledge in a tech interview with AI. Once I got suspicious I began to ask questions that I knew chatbots would struggle with since they would hallucinate or go off on strange tangents, and then kept asking follow up questions to get more and more nonsense. Eventually I blatantly asked if they were using a chatbot and got them to admit sheepishly and the guy acted from that point on like a child caught with their hand in a cookie jar.
However, I didn't really consider it cheating, but I also didn't think the person was qualified for the position.
In my mind, if the person can use AI to come up with better explanations, better code, etc. then just think of it like a tool you'd have on the job, like a calculator.
However, the person didn't know enough to guardrail the AI, so they would have been better off without it.
its ok to lie on your interview because recruiter lied about workload and scope
No, it's not ok to lie because you most probably we'll be asked to do stuff you don't know and probably don't even interest you.
I see no point in applying to a job you have no knowledge for (in most cases also no interest, because otherwise you would have studied the topic) and then lying to get it. It would just end up miserably for both you and the company.
But in the end we're all human and make bad choices.
@@gianluca4890
"I see no point..."
Eating
@@gianluca4890 you fake it till you make it, how you think supervisors got their job??
@@gianluca4890, money lol
@@adaroben1104 Just go work at McDonald's then (meals are also included).
the hardest part of a job is getting it, once you're through devs in MNCs pretty much do petty changes in code everyday throughout the day, and get paid huge sums for that, so in my opinion the pros of cheating hugely overcome the cons, and if you can cheat and not get caught and get the job, you actually deserve the job man 😂
Best tech interview: I share my screen showing an app that my company built, with some intentionally added bugs. I tell the candidate the problem like I'm a customer and they guide me through bug fixing.
I work as a full stack dev essentially i use chatgpt for my day to day work so essentially any prompt engineers with some programming background can do most dev work
Your video editor needs a raise!!
In-person technical interviews are all well and good, but I've seen senior devs have a nervous breakdown and fail because they're given a laptop with an IDE, console and browser, and told "Here's a set of requirements now start coding". That's not how devs operate. Most devs, even experienced ones, have never written a brand new project. Nor do they code on an unfamiliar device with two people watching them the whole time.
To be fair, if you're a senior dev you should be able to work greenfield.
Good sign that they've fell victim to title inflation.
Slightly unrelated but also feeds into the point that a lot of devs end up having very narrow scope - I don't know the word for it, but they won't be able to set up the project (devops/build settings, etc) but they'll be able to add additional features given an already working codebase. Tell them to make it from scratch? They can't do it.
@@Toleich got to disagree. I worked a job for 6 years and they never gave me greenfield projects, even though I asked multiple times.
So I set about doing it my own time, but with a full working week, commute, and family, how am I meant to find the time? Managed to spin up a few basic home projects but ultimately, keeping up is near impossible. A senior position can take many directions, one being that you code less and manage more.
@@Daijyobanai Fair enough. It's rare that a senior is tasked with a greenfield project. Most if not all of my career has been maintaining and extending legacy systems.
If you want greenfield, you need to take a risk and work in start-ups.
over the last 2 years i finished more projects then ever and produced much, much more code.
but i would be absolutly unable to code from scratch, just because i am simply missing the syntax of it and i have to look it up.
someone interviewing me would think that i know nothing and yet i clearly do in practice. its absurd.
A lot of times, I get stuck on how to get started on a lot of these coding questions and just need a clue. Like is it a 2 pointer? Or tree bfs? Having chatgpt provide a clue would be HUGE since I often waste like half of the interview time figuring this part out.
Text says "November 22nd". Good to see the best ones making mistakes boosts confidence in us beginners.
He probably intended to upload it earlier and postponed it, but forgot to change the date.
Nice attention to detail, though.
It’s not the that big of a mistake, not even one to point out. Relax.
Noice
plot twist: he used AI and it screwed up
@aliveandwellinisrael2507 lol
Cheating is not cheating, it's how corporates operate, get real humble peasants.
It's always "ok when we do it"
Everyone "cheats". That's how life works. If you don't choose the path of least resistance, somebody else will and they'll beat you to it.
I will never forget the time 2 companies sent me the same technical requirement they wanted me to develop as a test. I literally sent them the same cloned repo with different names.
P.S
I still didn't get hired
😂 what did they answer you?
Damn it. They stole my idea. I got tired of stupid automated interviews that asked questions about geopolitics and archaic english words and thought in creating my own platform for autocomplete the automated interviews. Now I have more work to do to avoid getting caught.
Why call it cheating? Using tools like Google or a calculator shouldn’t be considered cheating, it should be encouraged instrad! In the real world, we rely on these tools, and a strong candidate is someone who can identify bad answers and solve problems effectively using all available resources. The focus of the interviewer should be on candidate ability of problem-solving with all tools available, not restricting helpful tools, I think this approach its not helping anyone!
Because the point of an interview is to use a small amount of time to judge how you will perform on long tasks.
If you want to be tested in a "real world" way then the test will last a week where you have to implement a real feature.
If you can't solve a small problem without chatgpt helping you then you're not going to be able to solve larger issues in the real job.
Hey, it should count for something if you're using Google while interviewing for Google
I agree with you, interview should be : using available tools to solve programming problem as efficient as possible (speed + quality).
Why it's cheating : because it's not part of the rule of the interview until you find an interview that allows it.
Similar to school, exams are usually without notes, but sometimes they allow them.
Depends on the rules of the interviewer.
Questions are not related to real world. I have never implemented a binary tree
Well you should. Every programmer should implement a red black tree or at least a binary search tree for learning purposes.
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu Companies unsettle you with hardcore math things to get you to lower your starting salary. At the end you do SQL, backend and frontend
@@JavedAlam-ce4mu”for learning purposes” when i could take time, search it up and implement it without a single bit of memorization, that’s how you learn, not memorizing.
@@sorae42 I never said to memorise how to do it. I said every programmer should do it once, specifically so they understand how they work, and how to build other things using the same concepts. I definitely do not mean memorise it, as it's not an effective way to consolidate knowledge. The best way is to attempt to implement it yourself based on your understanding of the concept, and only look up things if you get truly stuck.
The whiteboard coding challenge is asinine.
Like the LeetCode BS, this does not represent doing the real job.
They're trying to "gotcha" someone without regard to their actual ability.
Pro tip. If you conduct interviews, never, under any circumstances let the interviewee or recruiters have a copy of your questions. I designed all of my questions to defeat this exact problem being described in this video. I have politely declined people on getting copies. It took me many hours to craft my questions and they have yet to fail me. Of course they age like the rest of the industry so it's important to keep them updated. Im like on version 3. Due for another update honestly.
Sorry, I don't quite understand? Why don't you want the interviewee to have a copy of the questions?
@@user-p8q8sbecause they will publicise it making it useless. Also they will prep their buddies for the exam if someone else goes to the same interview. I have interviewed a lot of people and it blows my mind how many people are unqualified for the job. They think because they have pretty certificates or somehow fell ass backwards into a microsoft job they don't have to answer even the most basic of questions. My questions are crafted so that only serious developers can answer them. I don't care what technologies you have worked with, if you can't answer the basics then it's "Thank you for your time, you will hear next steps from your recruiter."
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
hate both 🤡
Same quote passes around from cheaters.
@@NH-hq7ly the whole system is rigged, so who cares?
Dont hate people who create anti-trust situations? cool
Don't hate, just chill.
When you need to create a video to accommodate the sponsor 😂😂. No hard feelings. Great Fan of yours.
Employers use AI to hire, replace, and then fire you; but you can't use AI to get hired in the first place.
More pulling up the ladder IMHO.
"Cheating is not a mistake, it´s a choice" is the hardest thing i ever heard
I'm not condoning cheating, but if you do, you can use a KVM switch so you never have to look away from your screen or use a second keyboard or mouse.
But if you're old or educated enough to know what a KVM is without googling it, you don't need to cheat.
lightning level change can fuck you up, i think, so one must be in a well lit room so it won’t be noticeable, because chatgpt dark theme and codesignal(or whatever) dark theme differs a bit. also one should consider software downscaling their webcam, because eye reflection can give it off too
I mean... It doesn't change the fact that there is luck involved with what exact question you get. I personally have never passed one of these questions I didn't directly study beforehand. And the amount of them I've been asked that fit this description is over ~30%. I did pretty well, don't get me wrong, it's just that in comparison to somebody that did know the correct answer off the top of their head, I'm not getting picked, which I never did.
how does this make sense? IF you use a KVM switch to another screen you are looking away from your screen. Explain.
@@cx6894 why do you think, you need to look away? you can setup switching between VMs as switching between windows, but switching between VM windows won’t be seen by the software inside the VM you are interviewing in
@@cx6894 That's the exact opposite of how a KVM works... watch a video, writing it out will be confusing.
Medicine is an interesting iteration of this problem too. Lots of applicants to residency/fellowship are great interviewers and test takers but bad doctors. Great at answering standard questions which appear on professional guidelines, but when seeing a patient with multiple issues or an atypical presentation of one issue, the forest is lost to the trees.
As an expert in the field of IT, I can certify this is accurate. We don't have friends
I actually had my very first technical interview the day you released this video, BUT, i didnt watch it until now 😁
How is it cheating to use AI?
When working for the company I'd use AI too, so why can I not use it in an interview?
Not in highly secure fintechs where everything is built in-house (even the core libraries) and access to AI tools is forbidden for obvious reasons.
@@HT79 but the day companies would make their own AI wouldn't they just not need employees anymore if someone can manage it on their own by then. lets just say I own my own robots and they can do way better already in 2045 and won't need humans anymore to start my own company to run against other big ones
@@HT79 but not everyone works in highly secure fintechs (btw even they use hosted ai's that are comparable..)
Awesome video! Much appreciated 💜
I find the very concept of cheating challenging when it comes to software development.
On the one hand, you must understand the problem and have some intuition on how to programmatically achieve the solution.
But choosing to use AI to generate that code and solution, or write the code itself, and calling one of them "cheating", looks disingenous to me.
Of course I can understand where you're coming from, but I understand it's just a choice of how to bridge the gap between the problem and the potential solution
Been interviewing people for 15 years. Before ever getting to the coding questions I would already know.
The first part is small talk/ background, mostly confirming what's on their resume.
Second step is conceptual construction or decomposition of a few topics. And then if those are good, it's a 1 hour lab.
5:03 I’ve never had a technical interview before but dude it’s pretty obvious why people cheat in them. It’s always the same stupid leetcode questions that have no use in the actual job but you have to spend months on to memorize. People are sick of it.
"Cheating is not a mistake. It's a choice." This statement goes hard as hell.
I am now doing interviews not only presuming the use of LLMs, but encouraging it.
It's amazing how much is expected from candidates, including ethics, compared to the companies recruiting...tells a lot about the world we live in.
1:59 So technically what if you have autism in your resume even though you don't have it ..
The problem is companies using re-used questions for their interviews.
When I applied for the company I currently work at, the technical question was one simple sentence. "Help a mouse through a maze to find the cheese."
That was the only thing on the technical test, I had to propose parameters, solutions to possible challenges, etc. Yeah, you could still put this in a chat gpt box, but that'd be like reading a speech that someone else wrote - everyone can tell you didn't write it.
5:30 if you can pull that off you should work for the NSA not fang
I have always used something like a gradual deep dive to ask questions about something the candidate has worked on or claims to have good expertise in. e.g. Start with what the product was doing and then keep getting deeper to components, classes, functions, optimizations, libraries, and then the algorithms used by libraries and their minutiae if it is warranted, like say they encountered a particularly nasty bug in a library - I want to know how they found it and how they fixed it or defensively patched it or whatever, and then the algorithmic complexity involved in such real contexts. I mostly do not want to know if they can solve random publicly available code puzzles.
why these top companies use leet code questions on their interviews? algorithms like reverse binary tree are embeded in libraries, no need to know on spot how to code them efficiently, that is waste of time or effort, i can't say i know what questions to ask instead, but i'm sure, leet code questions are like 20 years ago important
Coz is like hazing everyone hates it when they are the junior but when they are the seniors they see it as their term to have fun
0:33 love how the intro says November 22nd 2024 and the voice over says November 25th
I think this Video was Uploaded around 01.27 (1.27 am) Western Indonesia Time (UTC+7) according to TH-cam Metadata?
Yes, every Fireship Uploads a Video about the Code Report, it's always on during every Sleeping Hour and above 12 am.
Look I'm just saying: if technical interviews are just quizzing me on stuff that isn't relevant to the job, nobody should feel bad about using AI to provide the answers they want
5:46 - Twitter :) Nice job Ilon, brand recognition is top kek
Any tech question is stupid if it can be answered by AI. It's like asking someone to multiply 3.14159 by 42 just as calculators were becoming widely adopted.
When the interview questions have nothing to do with the skills required to do the job there's nothing wrong. All interviews are fucking stupid anyways. Asking questions like "why should we hire you" in this economy makes my blood boil
It is so easy to hire good candidates without having to worry about them cheating ...
There is a thing called technical discussion and live coding (Rough outline or allowing google). You can cheat on technical interview but you can't really cheat in discussions . Or just a small take home task and discussion on it later .
1:42 I... what the TH-cam even _is_ this "magical string" question, I've read over it several times, along with the examples, and I _still_ don't know how it's asking me to generate the string???
Nowadays if you dont use AI you wont get a job period. It is not cheating if it is a tool. If you don't know hot to use simple AI tool than you are screwed.
"Proprietary questions" is crazy.
Did you use a rick and morty attack mega seed in this? Kudos to your editor there!
Imagine landing a job at Google and your co-workers can't even solve TwoSum
I wonder how many of they/them stroked out at the binary tree problem
At the end of the day though, there are questions asked on the interview that you would never face while you're working there. So the thought that you would be a low performer is subjective tbh.