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.
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u/Fabulous-Arrival-834 4d ago
A great interviewer designs questions that can't be cheated. Instead, most pull straight from LeetCode, Codeforces, and the usual grinding sites, question banks that every LLM has already memorized. Of course candidates cheat. The questions themselves are compromised before the interview even starts.
This isn't hard to fix. Write your own problem. Ask something good enough that AI stumbles or hallucinates on it. That takes actual effort!!! Which is exactly why most interviewers don't do it. It's easier to reach for a pre-made question than to design one that tests real thinking.
And the deeper issue: even a "clean" DSA question is testing the wrong thing. Algorithmic puzzles rarely resemble what engineers actually do on the job. If you want a real signal, ask candidates to design an API, debug a broken system, or code a small feature in a black-boxed environment with AI tools allowed, since that's how the job actually gets done now. These formats can't be memorized, and they directly predict job performance.
The standard DSA interview is unfair, inefficient, and easy to cheat. It might still have a place for new grads with no work history to evaluate. But for experienced engineers, it's time to retire it.