I do lots of technical interviews in Big Tech, and I would be open to candidates using AI tools in the open. I don't know why most companies ban it. IMO we should embrace them, or at least try to and see how it goes (maybe as a pilot program?).
I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never was to just answer the coding puzzle anyway.
To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). If I give you a puzzle and you paste the most optimized answer with no reasoning or comment you're not going to pass the interview, no matter if it's done with AI, from memory or with stack overflow.
So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.
> So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.
Candidates could also have an AI listening to the questions and giving them answers. There are other ways that they could be in the process without copy/pasting blindly.
> To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc).
Exactly, that's why I feel like saying "AI is not allowed" makes it all more clear. As interviewers we want to see these abilities you have, and if candidates use an AI it's harder to know what's them and what's the AI. It's not that we don't think AI is an useful tool, it's that it reduces the amount of signal we get in an interview; and in any case there's the assumption than the better someone performs the better they could use AI.
You could also learn a lot from what someone is asking an AI assistant.
Someone asking: "solve this problem" vs "what is the difference between array and dict" vs "what is the time complexity of a hashmap add operation", etc.
They give you different nuances on what the candidate knows and how it is approaching the understanding of the problem and its solution.
I believe it won't change the outcomes that much. For example, on coding, an AI can't teach someone to program or reason in the spot, and the purpose of the interview never was to just answer the coding puzzle anyway.
To me it's always been about how someone reasons, how someone communicates, people understanding the foundations (data structure theory, how things scale, etc). If I give you a puzzle and you paste the most optimized answer with no reasoning or comment you're not going to pass the interview, no matter if it's done with AI, from memory or with stack overflow.
So what are we afraid of? That people are going to copy paste from AI outputs and we won't notice the difference with someone that really knows their stuff inside out? I don't think that's realistic.