• 4 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • That’s a fair point. I think some of our interviewers have said that they don’t mind the candidate using a LLM, as long as they are up-front that they are doing so.

    I’d say the kind of use is important. If they are using it as a form of advanced auto-complete, that’s fine. If they are using it uncritically, or to avoid thinking about the problem, I doubt I’d hire them.

    We need engineers who can solve problems, not a salaried middle-man to an LLM.


  • Many of our candidates are from abroad, and we pay their VISAs and help them move here if they are hired.

    You can offer in-person as an option, but I’m not sure most of our applicants would want to travel hours for an interview. Especially if there is more than one stage with deliberation needed in between.

    Most of our applicants seem to be people currently in employment but who don’t like their job. They are likely doing interviews on the sly during work hours and likely don’t want to take a full day off or signal to their employer they are looking for a job.

    All this to say I doubt forcing employees to do in-person interviews is a good option for most people, but I do agree it should be an option the interviewee can ask for.


  • Playing devil’s advocate: The reason companies feel the need to put these systems in place is most likely because many candidates cheat using chatbots.

    In my company, until very recently, engineers were running the first and second stages of interviews (right after CV vetting) and I’ve heard many times in the last couple of years that my colleagues suspected candidates of using LLMs. There would be unnatural pauses, typing after every asked question etc.

    Granted, I don’t think any have slipped through to being hired, as it’s still pretty obvious, but I can understand why companies may want to put safeguards in place.

    Are they going too far here? Absolutely.

    For us, we actually sit with the candidate in a pair-programming kind of setup to gauge their vibes, way of thinking and confidence as they solve coding problems that closely match what they would do on the job. That usually eliminates “seniors” that haven’t coded for 5 years or that got there by nepotism or sheer passage of time.




  • It’s not particularly bad value for what they’re offering, which seems to be a component library and set of templates.

    For a comparison, the company I work for are paying over a £1000 / year for MUI-X, which is a set of paid React components. It’s cheaper and more efficient than paying someone at our company to maintain our own component library.

    Even a single engineer spending 10% of their time (as I used to) maintaining this stuff would cost the company over £5000 / year in manpower.








  • Real talk, it’s what I used to put in my profile maybe 2 years ago.

    I didn’t watch the news much, I had always stayed out of the discourse and I had refused to apply a 1-dimensional label to my beliefs.

    Put plainly, I was privileged enough that politics rarely affected me directly, and I think until recently there were a lot of people like that.

    One day in 2023, I took a political alignment test and found out I was a democratic socialist and it just so happened I was living in one (UK). Hence why I never felt the need to mess with things.

    Of course, no country is perfect, and as I met more people, especially trans and disabled people, I discovered that there was a lot of terrible shit going on in my country and that’s where I finally got my awakening. I also started watching more political YouTube.

    Since then, I’ve veered slightly further left I’m involved in advocacy and I’m proud to wear the “Left” label as someone who cares for others and believes we can all do better.

    I still believe that left and right are a bit reductive, but I understand now that it’s more like the more of the things you believe in, the further on that axis you go. For example, the UK’s Green Party is bringing together some conservative environmentalists with leftist progressives in their interests to keep our green spaces and maintain traditional trades and crafts.

    Anyway, the point is some “non-political” people are just sheltered. That said, you have to be extremely sheltered in the US to not experience the upheaval currently happening.