Have you considered just answering truthfully?
Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship.
Fair enough, so if there were one “right” answer, that would be the one to give whether true or not.
But here there is no obvious right answer. If the employer is looking for a particular answer, the poster doesn’t know what it is. In that case, the best thing to say is simply the truth, particularly when the truth that the poster gives here is completely reasonable.
A modern luxury, unavailable to many.
I think you'd rather have good odds at some companies and 0% at others, rather than abysmal but non-zero odds at all companies.
And as an added bonus, you might get hired at a company where you're actually a good fit, rather than one you weasled your way into, and get to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment for a long time!
"Wouldn't give a straight answer on question X" isn't an instant no-hire, but it's not a positive signal.
The attitude suggested by your response suggests you haven't lived that reality yet.
Either way, I'd rather be rejected by an employer for speaking my truth, than lie to be somewhere I'd rather not be.
Yeah I rage quit my job 27 years ago and have been a struggling honest consultant ever since. Clients who want actual solutions to their problems come to me. Does that sound arrogant? Well I also have no savings and don’t own a house.
I don’t regret most of my choices, but I am aware that if somebody paid me enough money I would walk away from my principles. It would have to be a LOT of money.
"Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes"
You were replying to “The job market is much different when you're just starting out”. The past is not now, and you are not just starting out, so your comparison of their position and yours is invalid IMO.
> and will do it again.
Good for you for sticking to your guns, I'm about to do the same with a company that has all but said “dig into AI or get left behind”¹, but those starting out as freshly minted grads likely do not have the luxuries that we might have² and the jobs market is freakishly competitive for them right now³ in a way that I don't think it ever has been before.
--------
[1] time will tell if I leave of my own volition before getting kicked!
[2] experience (both actual experience and experience “talking the talk”) to help getting the next gig, a mortgage paid off so making ends meet is easier, etc.
[3] It had been heading that way for a while, the recent explosion of GenAI+agnetics has made it worse.
Sometimes it's okay to say "I don't know" and it's okay to say "I don't care" and it's okay to say "It doesn't matter much to me".
Every interview is corpospeak where you infer the intended meaning of words anyway.
I certainly feigned enthusiasm when I was in high school to get an after school job in order to help my family buy food.
Lack of adequate calories and nutrition negatively compound. You lose the ability to focus, you increase your medical risk.
I experienced that in my childhood. It’s terrible. I did very poorly academically when I did not have access to food. It’s astonishing to me how fast my academic performance improved after consistently having access to food.
Saying you would rather put yourself at risk instead of hedge your answer on a minor interview question in order to increase your chances of getting a job offer seems like an issue with prioritization.
Job interviews are a performance where you demonstrate you understand what professional expectations are and can abide by them. It's not dishonesty to not respond "I drink too much" when they ask "what's your biggest weakness?" just like it's not dishonesty to respond "can't complain" when someone asks "how are you today," even if you have a lot to complain about.
Once I interviewed someone and they described their tax fraud scheme to me. We didn't go with that candidate. Not per se because they committed tax fraud; because they demonstrated terrible judgment.
I bootstrapped myself from poverty to Staff software engineer, past the age of 45.
Is that privileged? Or sheer will and force of effort?
I am not unique. I am an example.
Even though your position might be the result of effort on your part, you do have to acknowledge that you’re privileged to be in a position to expend that effort on what you want, instead of something else, like finding fresh water daily, or whatever. It’s not sheer will that you were born in a (even marginally) more favorable environment than others.
The term “privilege” here doesn’t just mean a trust fund nepo baby.
This is the mentality that says that if your company goes bust, you didn't work hard enough. Sometimes effort might be the problem..
No, not everyone can make it from nowhere to staff software engineer. That doesn't mean they're not trying hard enough.
Ie I increased my salary, doing same job, all 100% perm position, roughly 30x compared to my first fulltime software dev job after university. Who cares? It doesn't mean anything, just an afterthought. I am father of 2 small kids, and trying my best to be a good father and role model, often succeeding, sometimes failing. Its by far the hardest effort of my life, it takes relentless 20-25 years and I see otherwise brilliant folks failing at this hard left and right.
Also I wish folks in IT were a bit more humble and considered other engineering careers, with +- same effort taking to get a degree, and much worse career progress/compensation/freedom to choose one's path. Arrogance is much more rare there.
I don’t think we’re talking about slaves are we?
This effectively does mean that I was not a moral actor at the time
Would you have stolen or murdered to avoid being homeless? Would that have been a morally blameless act?
So while I agree that privilege is certainly a factor, so is what I've just said.
A lot of people here live very cushy lives that cushion them from very pointy thoughts and questions. As someone who too has to live in this world, I'd rather they didn't.
And you dont even get these nearly as often from people who work in lower paid positions. Or who are actually making moral tradeoffs that affects their income.
I have seen engineers take paycut or risk it because of this or that moral conviction. Not wanting to lie to customer, refusing job for gambling company, working one day less per week so that he volunteers for biblical something.
Just telling management no or just communicating about your work with ai or lack of it are not even one of those.
It is very sad to me that people do feel that pressure, and how the current job market is.
On topic with the article, I would love to be able to trust AI with more, but have found that I have some useful moments with it, but more because of Internet search not being how it used to be for quality.
For example I think the decision to stick to certain morals is very hard if someone has a disabled dependent, are disabled themselves, or require consistent access to healthcare. There are different lines for different people of course. Our ire shouldn't go towards individuals who make these decisions but the people in power who force others to be in a position where these decisions need to be made.
I don't want to preach martyrdom, but I am also offended by people choosing moral bankruptcy when faced with even the slightest hardships.
My truth is I don't care either way . I get the sense that's the same for parent poster. They just want a job and to say the right thing to get past the hiring filter. Even if I did have a truth its not something I would put above being remote, pay and how a company develops software. I'd rather not have a truth and not have a daily standup.
Plus, and leaving that aside, I have my doubts that even if you did that, that that company would stay alive for very long. Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively delusional people (like e.g. a boss that flips if you don't say the right word with regards to the current hype) to shreds eventually.
Look at musk's companies. They will basically never (on any near timescale...) produce GAAP profitability and yet their IPO is in the trillions. To the point that S&P refusing to suspend their GAAP profitability requirements means the index will basically never see this company in it (which I'm quite pleased about).
The power of already-accumulated capital is simply more powerful than things like "don't be completely pants-on-head stupid about a recent fad" "don't seig-heil in front of the world stage" "there's no point in having people come to an office just to spend all day on zoom" etc etc etc.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and companies can remain irrational longer than you can go without contributing to your 401k.
The same might not be true everywhere.
It's… like… not that simple.
Update:
Every street corner has a yellow garbage bin for recycling. That is where your plastic bottles go. Seems like a better system than having elderly going through bins.
The best benefit about working in a large office is that nobody checks the basement.
It's a job, not a relationship. It's best not to confuse the two.
In any workplace, you will occasionally have to do things you find boring or objectionable. And if you're hoping to find a corporation that is a "perfect match", it will only hurt more when they unceremoniously fire you because the quarterly revenue growth is 1% off or because you cracked an off-color joke.
A relationship is defined as two parties that interact.
It's not friends, it's not romantic, and it's definitely not family, but a job _is_ a relationship.
That said, GP is absolutely correct that you can fall into toxic relationships with your employer. Especially in the US where, realistically, we're forced to rely on our employer for too many things (e.g. healthcare coverage), employers can and do take advantage of the situation.
This just sounds like a standard tech interview. Mind reading to find and perform the secret “signal”. Nobody flips out if you don’t find it, they just move on to one of the other 1,000 candidates for the role.
Said by no-one who has a decent paying job and has bills to pay
I remember the graduate recruitment days - If you told the truth you were the only candidate they saw all day that wasn't the captain of the football team, top of the class and voted most likely to succeed - aka the worst candidate they saw all day.
From the 3 people I interviewed, all of the answers are very similar which is along the lines of: Kinda, but we need to be careful of using it, privacy, hallucination, etc.
All very safe answers and doesn't say anything new to me. If they had been more specific about why and their experiences with it, I'd probably favor them more due to their experience with it. It'd also signal to me that they form their own opinion rather than simply following the crowd.
That is of course assuming that they're looking for some long-term stable team member.
A skilled interviewer smells dishonesty.
However, and to be fair, whether and how they act on it depends on the specific situation.
Most of our stuff in this world actually does work, and the reason why it does is that skilled (teams of) people that care have built it. Meaning that these people can be found in many _many_ places.
Very few jobs are looking for opinioned most are looking at people who might fit in unless you are hiring to distory from without.
We all filter and “nudge” the truth during interviews. We all cater our responses to the person in front of us. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Your interviewers sure aren’t.
It's 2026, you gotta sell your soul just to get a phone screening
To be honest, I don't think I would want to work with or hire you, based on your response here.
I'm an old hat on both sides of this type of discussion from a post-grad view.
Recommendation: use it to own the conversation and to signal mutual fit. Yes, your idea of AI lover versus hesitant matters. I recommend reframing the question to pivot to your fit to the org (and org fit to you) question. Show/concisely explain how you consider whether LLMs are fit to a task and how to tell it improves outcomes.
An outcome focus and willingness to show thought process around a common use case will be a substantially strong response.
- Any long-winded answer to a question is immediate out and has been for years.
- Not having used agents and not being able to comment on what to do and what not to do with them is immediate out since early this year.
From all the tech that we have, agents are really not that hard to learn on the job. They're also not a magical silver bullet.
I think upskilling is the right move in this environment and it is dead simple: Invest a couple of days to show initiative, learn agents yourself and be able to speak from true experience.
You’re more or less admitting that you’re playing trendy tech lottery. Which is fine, but maybe not generalizable to the whole industry.
I don't know about that, and I am 100% biased so take what I say with a grain of salt. My position is very much this: you may not trust coding agents to make code changes, but if you're not willing to treat them as a research aid or have them work for you, you're pretty much saying they can't help you work more efficiently.
I'm working on a Show HN post that includes:
https://github.com/gitsense/smart-ripgrep
It's a fork of BurntSushi/ripgrep. What I hope to show with it is that you don't have to use coding agents to code. They can be used to surface knowledge that's buried in documents, issue comments, PR discussions, and other places.
Believing coding agents are trendy would be like saying search was trendy in 1998. They're not going to change the world the way Anthropic wants us to believe, but they will shape how humans develop software. And I think for the better, since AI is capable of processing information at scale to help you move forward.
want a Flutter developer who is unusually strong at directing AI-driven software delivery. This is not a traditional "write the code yourself" role.
Why?
If the winding path is actually interesting and gives you insights into how the person works, why would that be a bad thing?
I much rather prefer someone who needs 3 seconds to triage a question and tell me: "This is X, I know this, here is the solution" or "This is Y, I don't know it, but I will get back to you within 24h".
I do absolutely not want a "Well let's think jointly about this for a couple of minutes". There is no jointly with your boss. Let's do a some math of a 1:12 manager to direct report ratio. That means for every hour you have, your boss only has 5 minutes. And if you talk to your boss' boss, they have 25 seconds for every of your hours.
So in the same interest of helping post-grad job seekers, do what you've gotta do to get yourself paid, but maybe don't presume that vibe_that_works speaks for every hiring manager.
Not to disagree of course that time is limited, but in my experience, optimizing it this harshly leads to poor results, because eventually, you just get leapfrogged by reality.
Hyper-optimized systems are brittle and can't really adapt to the market changing.
But yeah, I guess they still need developers. Just doesn't sound like a fun job :D
So let me take this a step further. You want to meet your boss' boss for 10 minutes to present them something. 10 minutes of his time are an equivalent of more than 20 hours of your time. So if your initial idea was to "take maybe 1-2h" to prepare for this -> You are underprepared by at least one order of magnitude.
Which might not be ideal, because "orging for the sake of org" to my understanding consumes significant resources not going into building products/marketshare/shareholder value.
But then again, I'm no hiring manager in such a structure, so this is probably just an uninformed take.
But why?
Most of my most fulfilling experiences in tech have come out sitting down and hashing out a problem with someone else (including with managers/leaders).
It sounds like a miserable org if I am not expected/allowed to have an actual back and forth conversation with my boss. If I'm employed to be on a team working on an aligned common goal, why would I not use that collective skill and experience to my fullest advantage?
You're describing a coding sweatshop. What is the point of any discussion at all then? If the "boss" can't carve out enough time, that's their own problem. Letting that stress propagate to the team is plain bad leadership.
I know you might think some of these candidates don't have other much better choices to find work, but they absolutely do.
But that sounds more like "evasive" is the problematic attribute and not "long winding".
Which does show up at the same time often, true. But not always.
That’s a bit ironic, given the typical output of LLMs.
The reason a technical interviewer will be asking this question is because they want to see how you adapt to using new technologies, LLMs being one of the most disruptive technology that has hit the tech industry since at least the internet. You will likely be expected to use LLMs and they will want to know that you are someone who truly understands the capabilities of them - upsides and downsides, where to use them, what guardrails you need to put in place.
I'd encourage you to revisit the re-factoring task you worked on. Work out why it didn't work, work out what didn't work about it and if you have the chance try again, but use different techniques, there's a lot of conversations going on about what people find working and not working - try to join that conversation. Try to document what you learn. Then in the interview discuss these rather than just saying you gave up. The interviewer isn't going to check up on how successful your project was, they just want to know how you think and how you approach problems.
You should just be honest. If you're not a good fit for the company then you should honestly be eager to discover this.
> I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer
"I don't. I personally don't find value in them for the type of work I do. I am also uncomfortable with using their outputs under the current copyright regime. I also question how competitive any organization can possibly be if LLMs become the main driver of their work products."
> I've had more bad results than good the few times I've tried them
"I prefer to write correct code rather than debug bad code generated from a limited context window."
Having been in academia in the past and now in software I can say with a lot of certainty that this will take a lot more upfront work than otherwise.
Academic code does not have a lot of structure. And usually lacks a lot in terms of tests. While AI is best when it can mimic patterns as well as there are tests to target.
So you will probably need to budget a few weeks to establish good patters, docs as well as testing patterns before you can seriously make it really do what you want it to do.
Even with 3 weeks I'm just not the Fortran/C programmer to get that job done so I moved on to other things.
The analogy I've had for myself is that it feels like using a bulldozer to dig rather than a shovel. If you use it to dig archaeological artifacts, it can make things worse than you started. A lot of the work however, is just moving dirt around, so you are wasting time by using a shovel.
That this doesn't have a clear and obvious answer one can expect shows how the issue is politics, not strategy.
When you apply as a mechanic, there is no such weird political debates about certain power tools where people have passionate opinions on which tool to use.
That's probably not going to be enough for AI maxxers, but it probably won't be too much of a turn off for anyone but the most extreme AI minners, and everyone in between will probably be fine with it.
Frankly I plan to steer well clear of any "the majority of our code is AI generated" shops for the foreseeable future. Seems like disasters waiting to happen and I'd rather let other people step on those rakes
Look at the uptime and incident rate of all the big tech companies that have gone all in on AI generated code