Man, what a ghoul.
It's shocking to me people are offended of hearing people tell the truth.
Would you prefer if he lied to you and called you "valuable family members" instead?
Edit to clarify for all those below who misread: I meant "the truth" as in "transparency" from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the holy ground truth of how things should ideally work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement that he's not sugarcoating it with valuable family member but just speaking his mind as in saying the truth.
Stop making hoops. Like what part of tech hiring do you really think you’ve innovated on enough to justify making new hoops?
Hell, you’d think with AI and everyone’s digital footprint you’d be able to reduce the number of hoops.
But every company has their own version of hoops that you need to get that job. Nobody is forcing you though. You can just avoid the companies who's hoops you don't like.
What part of that I just said is false?
In a job seeker applies to 20 jobs, 10 of which have a pleasant interview pipeline that respect the interviewee as a person as well as respecting their time, and 10 which don't (AI interviews, unreasonable at-home tasks, etc), they are more likely to end up in the former group. If you make your interview process worse you either have to make a better offer to entice people to put up with it, or you get worse candidates. No matter what you do there is almost always someone desperate enough to jump through all the hurdles you put up, but desperation is inversely correlated with quality
Firstly, his company, his "cost of friction" to bear. If this cost negatively affects his business then his company will go out of business and the free market will have claimed another victim. Who am I to judge how a man decides to run his own business and interview candidates? I would also like to run my business the way I see fit and not how strangers on the internet want me to.
Secondly, I never said I agree with it, I don't , I just said I appreciate him telling the truth and being transparent about the way he runs his business even though he knew it wouldn't win him any popular votes.
If someone tells you they've commited [insert abhorrent act here], you're not offended by their beliefs, you're abhorred and disgusted by their actions.
Them telling the truth doesn't make it any less abhorrent. Hence "what a ghoul".
Since when is talking to an AI an "abhorrent act"?
Don't you feel you're doing a disservice to victims of actual abhorrent acts?
Btw, you're already talking to an AI when you're applying to jobs online, it's called an ATS.
Just what happened that caused employers to hold so much power in the employee-employer relationship? The collapse of collective bargaining, sure. But what else…
- Labor protections getting weaker over time, plus courts usually siding with employers. Overtime laws got chipped away, and a lot of folks get called "contractors" when they're basically employees.
- Jobs can move overseas way easier now, so workers don't really have the same leverage they used to.
- Big companies buying everything up, regional monopolies forming, and those non-compete clauses making it harder for people to switch jobs.
- At-will employment, temp work, gig jobs, outsourcing, just makes job security pretty shaky.
- Decades of anti-union talk, pushing this whole "you're on your own" idea, and selling "flexibility" like it's some amazing benefit.
- More workplace surveillance, algorithm-based schedules, and automated tracking, just gives the employer more control.
People quite literally fought tooth and nail with blood sweat and tears to gain their rights over the course of years and years during the 18th and 19th century. Many quite literally died, and a lot more were beaten to pulp by the job owners who hired muscle to do it.
Those gains we made have slowly been eroded.
Busting unions, vilifying poor people, weakening and removing regulations, and (very crucially) changing the basic philosophy behind antitrust.
Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.
Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.
Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.
Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.
What was actually unavailable with dire consequences, like masks/etc... was not unavailable due to lean manufacturing, but simply because it was a new demand that did not exist at this scale before.
> What was actually unavailable with dire consequences, like masks/etc... was not unavailable due to lean manufacturing, but simply because it was a new demand that did not exist at this scale before.
Well yeah that's what stocks are for. France had hundred millions of masks in stock in the early 2009 because they were expecting H1N1, we scraped the project because the pandemic didn't hit as bad as we thought, fast forward 10 years later and we spent twice as much to get half as many masks
Wait until ww3, Europe will discover that having one week of ammunition stock is not enough... all of that is expensive so let's not plan anything and pray for the best case scenario
Why does society need to learn the same lessons over and over?
There is a middle ground, no need to treat people like slaves, nor throw them into the street without alternative source of income.
They're the same people that will proclaim that the sky will fall if you raise the retirement age due to a shortage of labor.
Their stories are not consistent, and all they really care about is the value of their stock portfolio.
Also the "people" of the beginning of your sentence aren't the same people as the "people" in the end of your sentence. People complain about min wage repetitive jobs but it still beats being homeless
As implied by the sibling comment, the final stage is that they do not need people to buy anything.
Dead internet theory is too narrow in its vision.
the goods ought to have become cheaper if the ai/mechanization/industrialization is cheaper than labour.
And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
Those jobs certainly never go out of fashion, as seen in poorer world regions, where you as well say, people find new jobs all the time.
Why? Well, what is wealth inequality? It is people and companies (indirectly also people) not spending money. Just keeping it. "For the future". In bank accounts. On the stock market. In government bonds. Under their pillow. This also explains that a very large chunk of "the rich" is in practice people's pensions.
This means that governments can create almost unlimited new money, without taxing anything, and know it'll be hoovered up by the wealthy. What happens in practice? Wealthy people and companies will provide goods and services to hoover up that money, but they won't want (any new) goods and services in return. In other words: it is a way for governments to acquire almost unlimited goods and services in return for ... nothing at all. A few updates to a database "to be paid in the future".
And if you look at what governments spend money on, it's "everyone", the "public good", in other words: on the poor. In other words: this is a way for the poor to get more stuff now.
You want to kill this effect? Expect every government employee, every pensioner, every unemployment benefit receiver, every sick or disabled person and so on to scream bloody murder, because you'll have to seriously cut a LOT of benefits. Or, frankly, if recent history is any indication, to actually just kill you with a 3d printed gun.
Of course, because the government is still overspending, and debt servicing is becoming bigger and bigger. New debt is adding less and less spending power to government budgets. In some countries debt servicing is already bigger than the growth in debt (and not just Argentina and Pakistan). You can calculate: if Trump continues like this, the US will cross this critical threshold halfway through his term (assuming 5% interest rate). At that point the US government will lose the ability to trade government debt for goods and services. And last Trump term spending went up and up and up as his term progressed, and so far the same is happening this term. Had we elected a deceased possum instead of Trump, our country would have been fiscally better of than we are now.
So you'll see the maga republicans join the democrats in shouting and screaming how evil banks and "the rich" are, in 3 years or less. What's scary is that due to Trump this moment is coming towards us a LOT faster than it was under Biden, despite, of course, Trump getting elected on the promise that he would make the opposite happen. But, as said before, a dead possum would have far outperformed Trump on the fiscal front.
Ummm, what? That’s not how inequality works.
That also shows why you can't touch the rich with the government: first, where would it get goods and services? And when the government gets goods and services it's for "the public good", which effectively means largely for the poor (especially if you reason the way governments do: the palace for the prime minister is the infrastructure that provides for the poor. So that room is really for the poor too, just like the many side-hustles the prime minister and many government figures have. But even disregarding government excess ... mostly these goods and services acquired really are for the poor). Second, the wealth of the rich is really something like 1%-5% of those new goods and services produced. That's what it fundamentally is, that wealth. If you take that away, the incentive for production falls away. And even that ignores the added difficulty that the richest "rich" in the US, by an extreme amount, are the pension funds, especially in aggregate. Attacking the rich will mean taking pensions from old people.
Which leads immediately to the consequence of going after big companies and "the rich": no more (much less) new goods and services. Because nobody's going to replace them, or, if someone does replace them, they become the new rich and you've achieved nothing.
AND there's a major, major, MAJOR catch in replacing the rich. The current rich see the social contract roughly like this "if we provide society roughly as-is, we get to be rich". If you replace the current rich with new MAGA rich, for example, they will demand a new social contract which you may VERY much dislike. For example, Microsoft, Google (even Apple, when it comes to computers) see the freedom to develop and run your own programs, as well as free communication over the internet, as an essential part of their "deal" with society. Chinese and Indian computer producers very much do not see things this way (but are largely, not 100%, 99%, forced into allowing it, at least in the US and Europe, by the current US rich). It seems to me unlikely in the extreme that if the US gets a new rich class, replacing these companies, that this will remain so.
Absurd, they spend a fraction of their wealth on luxury goods (an industry which employs very few people anyway), the rest is on assets, keeping them locked into the financial market.
> Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
> Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
As in any upheaval of the labour market, there will be people who cannot or won't retrain, becoming detached from society. Those usually end up angry, left to their own devices, and lash out politically by voting on demagogues. In the end the whole of society bears the cost, is that really the best way we found to achieve progress? Leave people behind and blame the individual instead of seeking systemic approaches to solve systemic issues?
That will be a rounding error. Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.
Wealth concentration buys policy and media, and after that all of sudden the following things happen: tax gap widens, public services deteriorates, innovation halting, etc.
Wealth concentration means the pie will shrink, and eventually the rich will have to fear the super rich. And how do you reach growth after a country is sucked dry?
No it doesn't. Economic growth comes from "doing more with more". WHO does that doesn't matter. It matters for inequality and jobs and a lot of things, but not for economic growth. If skynet kills all Americans and builds 5 million nukes, that will be economic growth.
In general those things that "the rich" buy are scarce assets - stocks, housing, land, etc. all of which keep getting bidded up in price. This does not generate jobs.
>spawns new luxury good industries.
Trickle down never worked.
>Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
The number of jobs available is politically not technologically determined. AI doesn't automatically destroy jobs in aggregate but this is what the economy is currently programmed to do (via the mechanism of higher interest rates), so this is what companies are chasing with AI.
Counter-factual: https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
Cost of food up.
Number of employees down (despite number of stores going up)
Profits up.
I'd make an argument here about the desperate need for critical thinking in economics, the typically upside down nature of discourse (topics in economics are often approached with "i must defend what i know" rather than "i must learn what i don't know")... but there's no point. You tellingly said "ought", David Hume warned us about the futility of trying to argue from logic against an ought.
Supply and demand is a model, not a law.
Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money!
But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you. Money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
If people still want other people to do things for them, accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented. We don't have to un-invent it. But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade. The magical AIs, or whatever it is that someone has dreamt up that they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead. You only need people to buy things from you if you need to buy things from them as well.
the problem is that whose who do that thinking want to enrich themselves and not provide for others. if that doesn't work, then they won't do it. so the question is, how do we get from the current situation to this life of abundance without letting the majority of people suffer in the transition. because that is hat will happen if we keep going as we are. less and less labor is needed, and the focus is on getting the money from those who still have an income while the rest are pushed into poverty.
i do not believe we will be able to make this kind of transition without a serious push in moral education. this can only work if we change our attitude towards those who can't find work.
personally though i do not believe we will ever need to eliminate work. there are so many worthwhile things we could do. i rather envision a future where the majority of jobs are in education, healthcare and research, almost everything else can mostly be automated. i believe humanity would benefit immensely if we took advantage of all of human potential instead of letting people stay at home.
That might be your problem, but isn't the problem being discussed.
> so the question is, how do we get from the current situation to this life of abundance without letting the majority of people suffer in the transition.
The question is, from the perspective of what is being discussed, who cares? "I got mine" applies.
> less and less labor is needed
If those with the magical AI no longer need labor, it is more likely, as counterintuitive as it may seem, to lead to more and more labor! How? Well, if those with the magical AI no longer need people to work for them, they'll simply disappear from the economy. Which means everyone else without the magical AI will be the economy, and labor is what they most have to offer, so that is what they will trade.
> But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
Relevant as what? Serfs and accountants? Even short of that scenario, there is a big concern if the primary technology of redistribution (jobs) becomes far more scarce.
> If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade.
People will still need raw materials and resources, and those are not evenly geographically distributed.
You need a roof over your head and some food to eat
But whoops, no one is willing to pay you enough to do that.
This was already in 2013:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/80-percent-of-us-adults-face-ne...
And this is now:
https://www.acainternational.org/news/2024-paycheck-to-paych...
The magical AI will (hypothetically) provide this for you.
> But whoops, no one is willing to pay you enough to do that.
You seem confused. The question wasn't posed from the perspective of those who don't have the magical AI.
>Do they?
Yes they absolutely positively really do.
But we are far away from this utopia, this utopia will require a ton of energy to be produced just to run the AI supervision layer, so hopefully by then we'd have fusion energy or something else figures out, and to achieve this utopia there will be a transition period.
I am actually worried about the transition period in your fictional world. Some people will be replaced long before the deprecation of money. It's a lot of people that is going to suffer from extreme poverty if we don't think this right, which I believe is what the OP comment was about.
It doesn't need to provide for everyone. Imagine a single Jeff Bezos type who conquers the world with the magical AI with no need for anyone else to do anything for him. With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else. This is where the "they forget people also need money to buy their goods" falls apart. There is no such need.
Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?
As if the "AI champion" will have a landlord. Methinks you've not thought this through.
> So do your local utilities - power, gas, water, sewage, garbage collection, phone, internet, etc.
Unless he owns all that too. Even if that doesn't play out, safe to say that in said hypothetical future it will be owned by a very small group of people. And while they may still have some trade amongst themselves, there will still be no need to sell things to the average Joe.
> Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?
The magical AI will, yes. But as it is magical, you are right that this future branch is unlikely. Much more likely is the future where people remain relevant.
As before, money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
I really don't want to believe that people leading these huge corporations are dumb enough to actually think this, but at the same time I know better.
this is why we having population collapse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...
And Afghanistan is at 4.66
> developed countries are nowhere near the replacement rate
Doesn't matter because of the immigration. Population of developed countries is growing.
Amateurs, IKEA solved that one decades ago ;) But that's Scandinavian practicality or whatever they use to sell themselves these days :)
Crucial element in GPs complaint was lack of passing on savings to consumers.
You genuinely felt they passed on the savings
They also had decent online shopping.
These days though they're just like everyone else and have cut cut cut and prices have risen. The restaurant has gone to crap too
Aren't restaurants a totally local thing? They have vastly different offers eg in slovenia compared to italy (i visit both quite often), except for maybe hotdogs and cinnabuns... somehow the main ikea prices are different too.
Problem solved!
Yeah margins in groceries are great.
On some definitely are. At least in Canada grocery stores can get better margins by not selling prunes which go from green to dry (or rotten) hile on shelf. Various fruits are sold at loos and I see why.
At the same time I don't think kind-of AAA beef sold for $55-$110CAD has bad margins.
So yeah, the rich might use it to get richer. But so can everyone* else.
N'ah as long as the AIs the everyone else has access to are heavily censored and lobotomized to prevent wrong think, while governments and corporations will have access to the raw unbiased data.
Which part exactly ? The part where everyone pays 20+ a month to a few megacorps or the part where we willingly upload all our thoughts to a central server ?
I think you're overestimating what people use llms for. The only thing they're democratising is themselves
That is the real definition of "AGI" from the VCs shilling all of this rather than their bullshit utopian definition.
> Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
They (companies) do not care.
And that's why lots of bunkers for the executives are being built in anticipation of any civil unrest.
The end state for this system is the incredibly rich selling things to the other incredibly rich and ignoring everyone else.
The CEO of Braintrust, a company that offers AI interviewers, is quoted as saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. Let's see how they react to the founding of 'Trainbust', a company offering AI interviewees to respond to AI interviewers. The truth is, if they want to use AI interviewers, they’re gonna have to go through this thing.
Maybe someone will make an AI to interview the AI interviewers and see which one is the best? AI's interviewing human candidates gonna have to go through this thing.
Mainly they listen to the interview, and write down answers in an overlay for you to repeat. They ace leet code, etc...
I guess this is already pretty close.
Ultimately applicants will endure whatever companies put in front of them with a job market that is this bad.
If the government made this illegal companies would come out with ever increasingly silly filters, such as demanding specific college degrees, handwritten applications by snail Mail etc.
Applicant count for similar positions by year:
23 - 2025 (the position I mentioned)
31 - 2025
10 - 2019
I do think the market is very rough right now for software developers. I also know for a fact that "attractive" hiring companies can get a crazy number of applicants for each opening. SAS was famous for getting 1,000+ applicants per job just after the dotcom bust in the early 2000's.
2. If you get a lot of generally-competent employees after applying reasonable filters (e.g. matching skillset, expected salary), don't give them a long automated test, pick a smaller set randomly. All of them have demonstrated competence, and the likelihood that the test will give you more the more competent employees is offset by the likelihood that they'll move forward with applications more respectful of their time.
3. Do final-stage (human) interviews with the small set of employees, where you test specific skills relevant to the job. Here you can also throw a couple general-skill questions to ensure the applicant really is generally competent; it's not disrespecting their time, because it's part of the interview time and you're spending it as well (maybe it is if the entire interview is especially long, but then you're wasting also your own time).
The important part is 1). Otherbranch may not be good or popular, but at least if/when employee supply falls below demand, "mass interview" seems like something employers will need to filter out bad applicants without wasting good applicants' time.
I ask this question sincerely because I have no clue how such interview goes, and where is the added value compared to just an automated email
For them. They'll still have to burn all the resources involved in generating two audio/video streams, and analyzing them, of course. And someone's gotta pay for that. And they've gotta make a profit on top of that!
I felt so bad afterwards that I swore them off forever.
It's not like the 'interview' was terrible or anything. I knew it was AI from the start.
It was just that when I got done with it, I realized that I had talked at a computer for ~45 minutes. And, yet again, I was going to be ghosted by the company (I was), and that I was never going to get those 45 minutes back. That was time I could have used to apply for another job, or cook, or sleep, or exercise, or spend time with family. But no, like an idiot, I talked at a bot for that time for literally no reason.
Like, sure maaaaybe the company is going to use it as a screen for 'real' people. But the odds that it's not just another hoop they have for you to jump through are nil. If they send an AI 'interview' at you, that's the exact same as an email requesting yet more portfolio submissions. Pointless.
Edit: before someone throws very strong platitudes at me again, I would like to see real-world examples. Because at least in my lifetime there have been zero consequences for people in power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolae_Ceau%C8%99escu#Death
EDIT: One could argue whether the United Healthcare CEO assassination meets the criteria, too.
So, even if you weren't factually incorrect as well as smug, what's your actual point?
So sure, not a given, but it’s a risk that goes up as conditions get worse.
> It surprises me that the monied elite seem to have so little awareness of what happens when they keep winning.
What happened is that the Russian elite ended up dead or penniless in exile. What happened after that is not really relevant to the lot of the blind elite of the ancien régime.
It's like a century of struggle before that whole situation resolved.
It’s easy to forget after 80 years of stable western democracies, but brutal equilibrium shifts do happen. There was a revolution every ~20 years in Europe between 1789 and 1917. And even during the 20th century, the history of much of the world is full of coups, revolts, and uprisings. See all the revolutions in ex-soviet republics, the Arab spring, etc.
So you can pick and choose between the American independence, the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the Commune, and the soviets, to give you just a couple of examples for which you can find some documentation easily.
Again, am not a Trump supporter in anyway, but agree that when the wealthy keep getting richer while the blue-collar worker continues to struggle, this leads to discontentment and pushback.
Definitely. He tapped the anger and resentment of an underclass. The shame is that this underclass does not really see how he is harming them and how his politics benefit their old ennemies, the economic elite that’s turning into oligarchs.
> Most of the examples you gave of revolutions led to greater democracy and greater socialism, which benefits the blue collar, but ironically, in this case, the blue collar elected a autocratic conservative.
True. But examples of this also abound pre- or during WWII, from all the fascist regimes in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and copycats such as Vichy.
Upheaval and chaos can lead to either progress or ruin.
I think the inability for people to control themselves, while probably our greatest weakness, is also what often saves us. The greed goes too far and then there's a massive backlash (revolution).
Technology is trying to neuter any potential backlash though. I mean who can be bothered with a revolution while there's youtubes to watch and AIs doing everything for you! I'm still optimistic we'll smarten up eventually.
To reach the level of billionaire, it’s pretty much a requirement that you abandon all empathy and ethics.
What’s surprising is that nobody in their circle has educated them on the concept of a win-win. These people could be folk heros, universally loved and respected in ways buying a social media platform and banning all the haters will never accomplish.
The fundamental problem of communism is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people do play along.
Go back a hundred years, you can see what went on when they did. And the government was right there with them.
Now, think about it why we were conditioned from the ground up to forefeit any connections with other people and basically bared of forming high trust communities.
It's largely why Americans are so, so fat compared to other nations.
You don't need money? NEED money, like your life depends on money to keep surviving? 'cos most people do and don't have your luxurious options.
My bank account does.
Seriously though, I don't think this dynamic arises when people have choices, sure, but specifically in the land of job seeking the relationship is brutally asymmetric a lot of the time. People need jobs. One need only to look at the terrible current state of "send us your CV, also fill up our form in our website, also yeah we might sell your info".
If the cost of interviewing drops to close to 0 for a company, we can expect to see interviews being part of the process along with everything else. Juniors have it bad and they might just get it worse.
I do agree AI feels too much, but how's that different from companies sending me timed puzzles, riddles, random logic tests, and so on?
This means no 8 hour tests, no talking to computers, no special little projects for me to evaluate me.
You get equal face time and no more than 45 minutes of me doing anything by myself (that's the max leeway).
If you want me to do anything else either I'm getting paid short term contractor rates or making you make a sizable donation to charity.
However, speaking just for myself as an interviewer, I will generally spend a couple of hours per-candidate reviewing any work samples, etc that are asked of a candidate. If we've asked them to invest their time in such a thing, it only makes sense to respect their time by investing my own.
I wonder if you are typical, or if typical is closer to my 5 minute impression?
50% that I’m terrified of bad hires, 50% I recognize the opportunity and gravity from their side so try to respect that.
I give you a lot of credit for doing this. When I was still in development, I had a pretty robust github page, a sizable portfolio of stuff I had built and other side projects I was working on with various other platforms like Salesforce.
Not once did an interviewer review any of that. I would find myself referring to my github page several times over during the interview. I got so frustrated with interviewers asking me how to do simple things in interviews, I finally walked out of several and told them if they had just taken five minutes and looked at any of my github projects, they would've saved themselves a lot of time asking stupid questions about basic stuff.
I had to stop very quickly when I realized how many candidates take it as an invitation to argue, accuse me of being wrong, or see it as an invite to redo the problem and resubmit.
I also had one case where someone tried to go on a rampage against me and the company because they though our rejection was unfair (the candidate wasn’t even top 5 among the applicants)
Our solving and counter-solving leads us into fairly dysfunctional places.
The problem with AI interviews (and much of the hiring automation in general) is that (a) it's not good faith, it scales so that all the candidates can be made to do work that nobody ever looks at. If I'm on a short list of two people for a Director level position, I'd happily spend 8 hours making a presentation to give. If I'm one of a thousand and haven't even had an indication that I've passed some basic screening, not so much. And (b), all this stuff usually applies to junior positions where the same payoff isn't there. I've worked for months with customers to get consulting contracts before, and obviously price accordingly so it nets out to be worth it. Doesn't work if you're putting in all the free work for a low probability chance at an entry level job.
If you reduce an interview to “face time” and start trying to keep score on that metric you’re not seeing the full picture.
Though to be honest, whenever a candidate vocally removes themselves from the candidate pipeline for something like this (which is very rare) it feels like we dodged a bullet.
I respect the candidates I put through the process and consider large amounts of time required for each candidate to be discriminatory and disrespectful.
>Though to be honest, whenever a candidate vocally removes themselves from the candidate pipeline for something like this (which is very rare) it feels like we dodged a bullet.
If you want an underfoot character with no respect for their own worth then yes... you both dodged bullets.
I feel your comment is a bit one-sided, no?
Companies asking me to spend 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 hours on a take home quiz before I’ve so much as had a 15 minute screen with HR or the hiring manager go straight into the trash. I’m not putting in serious effort when you’ve put in effectively none.
Hate to be a snarky guy, but the more a company demands up front the more they tend to be a bullshit shop anyway. I have had some random no-name sub-contracting shop in the Federal space cold-call and ask me to submit to a take home assignment with a 16 hour estimated completion time. No surprise, they folded several years after I declined. No one worth a damn put up with their shit.
Recently, I had a recruiter tell me I needed to submit to an hours long coding challenge before any contact with the company. When I respectfully declined to proceed without at least a 15 minute phone screen, I got a reply that, as it turns out, they already had a pending offer out. Had I not held some standards with this employer I would have completely wasted my time.
Something fundamental that I think gets missed a lot in any conversation about AI, is that the only thing that has any value or meaning in the world is fundamentally human time, the seconds that tick by between your birth and your death. Everything else is some abstraction of that. The entire value of money is to buy the time or the produce of time of other people. The entire value of AI is to produce more with less investment of human time. Using AI to conduct "interviews" is detestable behavior that devalues humanity overall and possess no dignity. It's utterly disgusting, and it should probably be illegal.
I mean, strictly speaking, the AI interviewer is a net positive, as on the whole, it reduces the time humans take to do something. But only if they keep the same 'interview' rate as before. Not likely.
However, I agree with you here too. It's the damned reciprocity of it all. For me, it was that I knew (and was proven correct) that the AI interview was pointless; that I was talking at the void. The company never got back to me outside of the standard form email. It never mattered if I wore a suit to the interview and minded my manners or if I was naked and screaming obscenities in the 'interview'. Likely my face and voice will now be used in some training dataset against my wishes after some EULA gets changed without my notice. It's so denigrating. I'll never apply there again, even if they get rid of the AI interviews, it's left such a bad taste in my mouth.
You want to have an AI interview me? No. It can interview my AI agent if you want, but not me. You want to interview me? Put a human on the line.
Great points overall here. But I just want to pause a second and and react to the above portion :
Wow. I really am living in the future.
Thus in any situation where a company is offloading internal effort but still requiring the candidate to put in time & effort, that's a company I would not want to work for. This is the ultimate expression of that bullcrap.
"Now you gave me two bad feelings about the company."
Now, the important thing is offer a way to upgrade to a human. But I have no problem at all starting with AI, in fact I honestly prefer it.
In some ways it's not that different with hiring. I used to work with HR teams that knew the roles they were hiring for extremely well and could make reliable calls on whether or not to pass a candidate to a hiring manager. More recently I've seen HR get outsourced entirely, or staffed with cheaper employees that just shuffle documents through systems.
Once again proving that somehow HR has become captured by bug people
The power imbalance is already so far tipped to the employer side. This verbiage doesn't even consider the applicant a human with time worth saving or worth having meaningful conversations!
They're seeing the opposite because people are desperate. When HR teams use tools like this interviewees have no choice. Braintrust are literally holding people hostage with this. Of course the numbers look good. But you didn't ask the people being interviewed by your product what they think of it or how it made them feel.
And of course Mr. Jackson doesn't care. His company's bottom line is his performance bonus.
Some companies genuinely don't care though; they're a meatgrinder that just need to get warm souls into the machine. Ironically: These are the companies that are being eaten alive by AI right now.
> While some worry AI will dehumanize the hiring process, we believe the opposite. Deploying AI will enable more quality interactions, more quickly for the candidates who are the best fit for our jobs– without unnecessary administrative tasks or distractions. We fully believe in AI’s ability to build depth and breadth in our selection process, while acknowledging that the road ahead will have its challenges. Let’s face it: the candidates who want to work at Coinbase are as enthusiastic about AI as we are. They, like us, are optimistic about the future of this (and all) technology.
Dystopian, infuriating, unethical and immoral.
Look at the language Coinbase uses. Only their view is a "belief." The opposing view is a "worry." Others are motivated by fear. Only holy Coinbase is motivated by love!
This is, of course, doublethink. We all know that removing humans from the hiring process is, by definition, dehumanizing.
Coinbase's article would have been more palatable if it were truthful:
> Some believe AI will dehumanize the hiring process. We agree, and we're SO excited about that! I mean, we aren't in this business to make friends. We're in it to make cold, hard cash. And the less we have to interact with boring, messy human beings along the way, the better! If you're cold, calculating and transactional like us, sign on the dotted line, and let's make some dough!
But if they were that truthful, fun, and straightforward, they'd probably be more social, and they wouldn't have this dehumanizing hiring process to begin with.
Yet Anthropic didn't want people to use AI as part of interviewing for them.
No. That's when you get to talk to my second AI.
"AI will create jobs instead of destroying them."
"AI will solve the climate crisis despite doubling or tripling humanity's energy footprint."
At some point it became acceptable to lie to the public with a straight face.
https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
They aren't penalized at all for lying, and not lying is a massive loss of potential profit. So then, why not lie, is their logic.
What's so insulting about Coinbase here is they are not even trying to make their lies sound plausible anymore.
Step two, those companies lose access to the top talent who will simply go interview somewhere else or get a job in some other way.
Step three, less scrupulous candidates start to cheat these automated systems. There will also be paid services helping you cheat.
Final outcome: most of the people who get to the actual interviews in those companies will be candidates with dubious skills at the actual job, willing and able to cheat corporate policies.
Unfortunately, this will take a couple of years to play out to its logical conclusion.
The fatalism in tech right now is an actual cancer. Very few people, least of all Adam Jackson, are intelligent enough to actually use these tools for what they're good at, and let humans handle what humans are good at. If we can't put AI everywhere, we can't justify the capital inflows, so the capital inflows preconclude that AI must go everywhere, and if it must go everywhere then it must be good at everything.
- how many people that currently work at your company had to go through an AI interviewer to get the job? - do referrals have to go through an AI interviewer too?
To me, this just smacks of a tool that increases the cost of cold-submitting your resume so companies can optimize for "preferred" hiring paths likeinternal referrals.
Maybe that's your problem right there. If you treat entry-level tech roles as a high-volume hiring market, you're going to end up with negative team productivity, which leads to revenue loss, which leads to budget cuts, which leads to more high-volume hiring.
I feel like HR culture is to deliberately insert as much indignity as possible, into the process. HR is really all about being the "top dog," in the relationship. They don't want employees to have any agency.
I saw the company that I worked for, for almost 27 years, change. It was fairly slow. When I first joined, I felt as if they really wanted me. It was an honor, and I accepted a lower salary, because I really wanted to be part of a world-class organization, and that my work would make a difference.
By the time I left, I saw HR treating candidates like shit (I was a hiring manager, and saw it firsthand). I was a bit disappointed that candidates actually seemed to accept this treatment, but the culture has changed all around.
But the current climate, where even the most innocuous job opening gets spammed with -literally- thousands of unqualified (and sometimes outright faked) CVs, is a real problem.
Or, you know, send your own AI agent into the interview.
Maybe Mr Jackson needs to confront the truth that when he looks back on his life in few decades time he realizes that he made the world a worse place for everyone.
AI Loopidity is when AI is used to manage AI, like ballooning bullet points to an email which then get reduced to bullet points.
I use AI every day, I build AI in to products at work. I would be on board with an AI assistant to help rate/categorize/summarize job applications, but this is too much.
Unless the expectation is that my coworkers will be mostly AIs, I'd hang up and end the interview probably.
You can put people through a lot of indignity but once you start having people acclimated to a Western first-world lifestyle now actively competing with AI and people from the third-world and telling that they're not working hard enough if they're not willing to live the debased existence of an AI or that someone from the third world is willing to live for basic first-world access, something must give.
Surely.
Garbage out, garbage in.
That is quite rich coming from Braintrust. The founder should spend less time doing press interviews and more time listening to feedback from his own community. I was from the outside intrigued by the unique way of working and signed up to learn more about it.
The thing that immediately jumped out is community members complaining about failing the initial screening without any feedback at all. This initial screening is apparently an AI interview. If the AI is so great, it should be trivial to get it to explain why it rejected interviewees. Unless it has serious shortcomings that would be risky to publicize.
Alternatively, this could be a sneaky way of collecting training data for the AI by preying on unsuspecting humans.
Yikes. One thing that's incredibly important about reaching the interview-stage of a job application has been that there is a parity, or even an imbalance favoring the candidate, in human time usage. The company's people (often multiple people at once) have to spend time with the candidate to conduct the interview, so there are stakes for scheduling an interview. The company is investing something into that interaction, so you as a candidate can have some faith that your time is being valued. In the very least, your 45 minute interview is valued at 45*n minutes of company labor for each interviewer.
Admitting right off the bat that you're going to waste the time of 90% of your applicants without these stakes is just wildly disrespectful.
I know, that says a lots about recruiters.
It definitely feels odd talking to a machine. On the positive side it was clear, patient, and will evaluate everyone equally.
andrewstuart•6h ago
When there’s plenty of candidates they happily shove them all down a terrible recruiting pipeline.
xacky•6h ago