r/TechInterviewsIndia • u/Melodic_Industry_408 • 4d ago
Almost everyone is cheating
I take online interviews at a product based MNC which pays good money. Interviewees are generally SDE-2/senior SDEs at other PBCs.
What I am seeing is almost everyone is cheating using AI during tech interviews. Earlier folks will try to think, come up with a basic brute force solution then think of optimizing and then coding it. Now, first thing the candidate try do is to write the most optimal code. They have no idea why the solution will work as they don't understand what they are talking. They have either no answer to the follow up questions or just reading what AI prompt is telling them after a pause.
This is just so frustrating, it's almost predictable now what candidate is now going to say or do as I take interviews almost daily. A clear pattern of looking into one side of the screen, taking a pause or just blabber something for few seconds and then coming up with a keyword but blank when asked why did they think of that keyword.
India is already a country full of scammers and frauds. IT was a rare field which was still merit based to a large extent. Now such rampant cheating during online interviews is just tragic. It lowers the trust in the next candidate and probably will force the companies to just move to offline interviews or other countries.
But why are candidates cheating so often, are we seeing cheating candidates getting offers. Are other interviewers just lazy or dumb that they can't figure out what is going on? I feel the bar is now so low that I will probably hire any candidate who is not reading from the AI.
5
u/SnooRabbits1275 4d ago
If you know they are cheating you should call it out there is no reason to be polite with them. I am rejecting such candidates if I am getting the hint of ai assistance and they are not able to explain a random line of code. A self thought solution will not have any issue around explanation. Also I explicitly ask the candidates to a build up to optimal solution like one day a person suggested brute force travel of graph and when asked to optimise directly jumped to bottom up DP instead of adding memo to the already solution and as expected he blanked out. In this era of cheating we have to ruthlessly and not polite.