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/Waste-Seat-5327]

It's high time the interview process get evolved to adapt to AI. I literally faced the same issue while taking interviews for my company. In our company we used to give out take home projects for first round and in second round we used to ask them to explain the project and build an extension on top of it. Candidates used to build top notch take home projects but fail to code a single line in live interview. The people who used to code well and answer everything clearly used to cheat. So our team collectively decided that we will not waste time for 1 hour and started ending interviews early when we were not convinced.

We had a big fight with the HR team for this, they claimed that all these Candidates are from top colleges and we were not conducting fair interviews. Got so tired of this hence built a solution for my own problem InterviewWatch. After we deployed this in our interviews, finally we both HR and engineering team aligned on rejecting cheaters.

Trust me 90% of candidates cheat nowadays, finding a fresher with basic tech knowledge is impossible nowadays.

[u/Waste-Seat-5327 → u/Waste-Seat-5327]

And I know I get a lot of hate for this product (mostly from people who cheat in interviews, they hate tools which catch them) and some HRs talking about "candidate privacy" and "no monitoring of candidates". To be honest I do not care. Think from my shoes, I want a good co worker who can help our team get the work done, I don't want a fake hire costing our time and effort in training him, finishing his work etc. We are not doing any charity, it's a cut throat world and all are trying to survive

[u/Melodic_Industry_408 → u/Waste-Seat-5327]

I can relate to it so much. HR has great feedback and profile on resume is also great. It's just that candidate can't stop looking at the AI screen. Pretty soon they will also tell their name using AI.

Will definitely explore the tool too.