AI Broke Interviews - Hacker News

Posted by yusufaytas 11/1/2025

88 points | 126 commentspage 3

antiquark 11/2/2025|

Welp, back to nepotism, I guess.

vasilzhigilei 11/1/2025||

Interviews should be in-person.

TrackerFF 11/1/2025||

In every practical sense, online interviews are the part of the early screening process. The sheer amount of applicants means that you need to do some filtering before inviting people to do on-site interviews.

Gigachad 11/2/2025|||

If you make the first interview in person, most people filter themselves out because they aren’t in the country or can’t be bothered.

Do a first phone screening to agree on the details of the job and the salary, but the actual knowledge testing should be in person.

floundy 11/2/2025|||

So the process is now:

1. Embellish your resume with AI (or have it outright lie and create fictional work history) to get past the AI screening bots.

2. Have a voice-to-text AI running to cheat your way past the HR screen and first round interview.

3. Show up for in-person interview with all the other liars and unscrupulous cheats.

No matter who gets hired, chances are the company loses and honest people lose. Lame system.

NumberCruncher 11/1/2025||

Modern problems sometimes require old-fashioned solutions.

ferrouswheel 11/1/2025||

While I agree LLMs have forever changed the interviewing game, I also strongly disagree with deeming slop code as "perfect" and "optimal".

There's a lot of shitty code made my LLMs, even today. So maybe we should lean in, and get people to critique generated code with the interviewer. Besides, being able to talk through, review, and discuss code is more important than the initial creation.

tavavex 11/1/2025||

Interview questions are a genre of their own though. They are:

1. Very commonly repeated across the internet

2. Studied to the point of having perfect solutions written for almost any permutation of them

3. Very short and self-contained, not having to interact with greater systems and usually being solvable in a few dozen lines of code

4. Of limited difficulty (since the candidate is put on the spot and can't really think about it much, you can only make it so hard)

All of that lends them to being practically the perfect LLM use case. I would expect a modern LLM to vastly outperform me in almost any interview question. Maybe that changes for non-juniors who advance far enough to have niche specialist knowledge, but if we're talking about the generic Leetcode-style stuff, I have no doubts that an LLM would do perfectly fine compared to me.

harpiaharpyja 11/1/2025||

It's an indictment of how bad coding interviews are/were

tavavex 11/1/2025|

> Then there’s the pacing. A human pauses to think. AI-assisted candidates pause to receive a perfect answer. You can mostly feel the rhythm shift. Their eyes drift slightly. You think we don’t see that, don’t you?

I really hope most interviewers have at least the barebones skills to be able to discern AI-using interviewees, like what the author claims to have. I'm trying to get hired at the junior level, and the thought of competing with people who have no qualms with effectively cheating in real time is pretty scary. I'm human, I will inevitably not know something or make minor missteps - someone with an AI or a quick-witted friend by their side can spit out perfect, fully-rounded, flawless, HR-optimized stories and replies with a satisfying conclusion for the behavioral questions, and basically always-correct, optimal solutions for the technical questions.