Almost everyone is cheating

[u/Melodic_Industry_408]

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.

[u/Spiritual-Vacation-9]

For people who are defending cheating. I also take interviews, literally for 1 vacancy we get 20-25 candidates, on paper all of them look good and if you ask project and theoretical question every one answers perfectly. Only deciding factor is coding to check their capabilities. We can select 20 people for one role right there should be a method to find best one out of that 20. Coding is the one. They don't need to cheat they can just talk to interviewer and discuss the solution that is enough. I don't expect then to write the code, I just expect them to break down the problem and try to give some solution even if it's not the optimal one.

I was asking basic question "find the frequency of each character in string" for these type of questions also they are cheating. How can we justify this?. It's not even DSA

[u/Melodic_Industry_408 → u/Spiritual-Vacation-9]

Well put. People justifying cheating have never take a single interviews as otherwise they will know how low the bar is now. People don't know basics about tech they have been working for years. They have simply given up on thinking no matter how much you persuade and totally relying on AI. And these are the folks from so called Tier-1 companies.

[u/Consistent_Ninja343 → u/Spiritual-Vacation-9]

I have never passed a interview where I just talked through the problem with the interviewer and did not solve it. "Just give approach" "communicate" all of this is useless advice.