Surely just asking the candidate to lean a bit back on the web interview and then having a regular talk without him reaching for the keyboard is enough? I guess they can have some in between layer hearing the conversation and posting tips but even then it would be obvious someone’s reading from a sheet.
So you’d only be going off how they speak which could be filtering out people who are just a bit awkward.
The reality is that no correlation was found between interview success and success at work especially for SW engineers, AI toola didn't change it not remote interviews.
1. Strict honor code that is actually enforced with zero tolerance.
2. Exams done in person with screening for electronic devices.
3. Recognize that generative AI is going to be ambient and ubiquitous, and rework course content from scratch to focus on the aspects that only humans still do well.
AI has some uses, but the list of things it cant do is longer than the list of things it can.
The better option is to just ask the questions in person to prevent cheating.
This isn’t a new problem either. There is a reason certifications and universities don’t allow cheating in tests either. Because being able to copy paste an answer doesn’t demonstrate that you learned anything.
It is a horrific drag on the team to have the wrong engineer in a seat.
If we can’t sus out who is cheating and who is legitimate, then the only answer is that we as a field have to move towards “hire fast, fire fast.”
Right now, we generally fire slow. But we can’t have the wrong engineer in a seat for six months while you go though a PIP and performance cycle waiting for a yearly layoff. Management and HR need to get comfortable with firing people in 3 weeks as opposed to 6 months. You need more frequent one-off decisions based on an individual’s contributions and potential.
If you can’t fix the interview process, you need more PIP culture.
If you’re really off the pace and we made a bad hire, moving slowly hurts everyone.
And moving quickly lets us hire the candidates who really deserve the position, not those who game the process.
Look, I know what you're getting at, and I know that you can feel that a hire isn't good in less than a month. But buddy, you got to give them at least a few months here.
Your stars will get annoyed that you have someone not pulling their weight, your team will have to clean up the mess of bugs and incomplete stories, and the mentors will spend more of their time supporting an engineer that will not come up to productivity no matter how hard they try.
If it’s really a bad hire, you can’t be afraid to move quickly. If it’s not going to work out, I’d rather it not work out in a month than not work out in six months.
A mentor of mine once said, “You will never regret firing somebody, but you will regret not firing somebody.”
Part of being a manager means having a bias for action and being able to back your decisions once you’ve made them.
Admittedly, you’re not just shooting from the hip and firing at random. But by the time you get to the point where you have to thinking about getting rid of an engineer, it’s probably past the point of no return and you need to move.
Dumb over generalized piece of advice.
I’m guessing you’re neither a successful founder nor executive from your comment?
If your comment is really good faith, why don’t we try this exercise: you tell me why it wouldn’t be “dumb overgeneralized advice” to make sure you understand it fully.