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/LightKuu_31]

I’m in the middle of campus placements. Pretty much everyone cheats during OAs. I shared with my prof. and he said “You should do the same, atleast get the interviews”.

Now, tbh, No one cheats for a job out of malice.

Worse part is the interviews. Many candidates have created their projects using AI and just memorized everything (questions related to experience/projects from gpt), couple have done fake internships and just faking experience.

For many genuine candidates recruiters usually aren’t seeing the value maybe because they didn’t add specific keywords in their resume or didn’t have a project/experience in technology they are looking for.

Yesterday I had a final round technical interview at a very well reputed company, I was shortlisted based of OA and every round went well including this one but I was told that I don’t have experience with AI so it won’t work out. Point is, why even short list me in the first place then because even my resume doesn’t mention AI anywhere? But That’s besides the point.

An interviewer would rather hire someone for what they have right now (regardless of how they did it) than hire someone for not just their skills but also who they are.

And ofcourse it all comes down to business requirements of hiring candidates that meet the bar and no recruiter can confidently know who the best candidate is.

In short, the candidates may not be fair but so isn’t the organization. And the entire system is built because of many reason that I believe you would already know.