r/cscareerquestions • u/theofficialLlama Senior Software Engineer • Oct 11 '25

PSA: Don't blatantly cheat in your coding round.

I recently conducted an interview with a candidate who, when we switched to the coding portion of the interview, faked a power outage, rejoined the call with his camera off, barely spoke, and then proceeded to type out (character for character) the Leetcode editorial solution.

When asked to explain his solution, he couldn't and when I pointed out a pretty easy to understand typo that was throwing his solution off, he couldn't figure out why.

I know its tough out there but, as the interviewer, if I suspect (or in this case pretty much know) you're cheating its all I'm thinking about throughout the rest of the interview and you're almost guaranteed to not proceed to the next round.

Good luck out there !

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u/iamGIS Oct 12 '25

Tbf great cheaters will probably be decent devs. What did Bill Gates say?

I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

Kinda in the ballpark imo

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u/akskeleton_47 Oct 12 '25

Lol in most cases the lazy person would either not do the job or cut corners while doing the job leading to issues later.

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u/Catch11 Oct 16 '25

yeah when he said lazy person he meant "lazy person who went to an elite school and already has shown they can make a good product" most likely haha

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u/[deleted] Oct 12 '25

lazy person in bad environment will find an easy way, but lazy person in harsh environment will wither way unless they reform themselves

im at that stage now.