Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 413: Is my interview candidate cheating and my product owner is getting WRECKED by the client

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: This is my first time conducting technical interviews (most of which have been virtual), and I had one interview where I had a strong feeling that the candidate was cheating. They breezed through the short problems I gave them, and they were able to explain their reasoning. But during the live coding problem, they sat in silence for five minutes, and when I asked them what they were thinking, they didn’t respond. Then they started cranking out perfect code without explaining anything. How do you address cheating in interviews? What if it turns out to be just nerves? I don’t want to assume anything, but I also wouldn’t feel comfortable confronting them about it either. I work as a team lead for a small group of 4 other devs. Our Product Owner is currently handling the requirements for new features to onboard a new large client. This involves them attending client meetings and generally isolating the development team from client shenanigans which is normally great, but it’s becoming INCREASINGLY obvious that someone on the client team has his number and he’s getting HORRIBLY out-negotiated. This has resulted in a bunch of missing requirements, changing requirements, last minute feature adds, and general confusion. I’m trying to push back, but the leadership team is coming back with “Well we promised…” and my entire team is stressing out. Note that this is AFTER we were already pressured to overcommit on capacity to get these “absolutely necessary” features developed for the client to go live. I like my PO, he’s a good guy and normally does good work, what can I do to help him stop from getting his butt kicked in these meetings? (Note: the POs are neither above nor below us in the org tree, our closest shared higher-up is the VP and I obviously don’t want to escalate it that far)

it takes more than spending two hours writing a project handoff doc for a feature you could have coded in 15 minutes to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 413 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jamison dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers who know that documentation is what gets you points and writing code just makes bugs gets in the way of writing documentation i do worry about this sometimes there is certainly some overhead but it feels it feels really good to me at least to write a thing that people read and agree with and gets alignment and dumb business words like that which is part of why i'm in engineering management because i like the knowledge transfer piece of it just as much as the

building the thing but then there is a trap i think you know the secret of documentation which is if you write enough words no one will have the stamina to argue it you just overwhelm them with superior superior firepower yeah how could i how could i argue this i can't even finish reading it Yeah. Oh, you didn't have time to do the pre-read? Well, I guess we just won't have time to receive your feedback then. Yeah. There's one more way to get alignment. Yes. So we don't have a sponsor this episode, but we do want to acknowledge HTTP status code 413 in honor of episode 413, which of course is content too large, which we've been accused of before.

is this like a our podcast is too long or there are too many episodes or jameson's been hitting the oreos too hard what what sense is it too large http 413 body shaming yeah your content is too large jameson i'll just leave it at that it's however i wish to interpret it yes i do want to thank our patrons though thank you so much to the folks who support the episode and in return we give them shout outs thank you to tigar seer i think i don't know how it's pronounced gave it my best javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel see come a beanier engineer.com become a senior engineer.com unsalted french fries are morally objectionable dan from drone deploy chase w norton level up your typescript

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virtual and i had one interview where i had a strong feeling that the candidate was cheating they breezed through the short problems i gave them and they were able to explain their reasoning but during the live coding problem they sat in silence for five minutes and when i asked them what they were thinking they didn't respond then they started cranking out perfect code without explaining anything how do you address cheating in interviews what if it turns out to be just nerves i don't want to assume anything but i also wouldn't feel comfortable confronting them about it either oh maybe you know how old-timey cars used to have to crank the engine to start it uh-huh maybe that was what was happening in those five minutes they were like spinning up their brain yeah you can't

revving it up but yeah you might see an eye twitch every couple seconds to indicate things are spinning up yeah they sat in silence and i asked them what they were thinking they didn't respond i feel like i mean i guess you could cheat in ways that wouldn't show up as you copy pasting the question into chat gpt but it feels like those ways makes me wonder if their video was off you know because if they were cheating enough to hide the fact that they were copy pasting i feel like they would also cheat enough to hide the fact that they were sitting still for five minutes waiting for the computer to tell them the answer yeah so there clearly was a video because then the person the question asker says oh actually no i guess not we couldn't tell if they were moving or not

so this might have been an audio call yeah oh boy have you ever had anyone cheat in an interview you before no my current gig the the person who is doing the recruiting like screening the first line of defense for this most recent hiring cycle had a few people they thought were cheating similar things just like suspicious pauses and sure sounded like they were just asking chat gpt and then saying what it said but i have not had someone that i thought was cheating that i can remember anyways i've had i've seen two really good ones one i'll just tell you the stories why not right i don't know their names yeah this is all anonymous so this was a video interview it was a recorded video interview from not not recently you know many at least 10 years ago

and uh the person was sitting there speaking into the camera you know because it was like see a question on the screen record a video response and then do it again yeah and i'm watching the video and i'm going i think there might be some audio video sync issues because the the words that i'm hearing and the mouth movement don't quite line up and so i'm watching again i'm watching a little closer watching a little closer then i realize oh my gosh this person is lip syncing to someone someone is off camera speaking the words and the on-camera person is moving their mouth in time with the words and the reason i know is because during one of the videos the off-camera person accidentally leaned into frame and i could see their arm and shoulder and the

on-camera person quickly like elbowed them to push them off camera again i was like oh my gosh this is the greatest oh uh that's beautiful and wonderful it was so wonderful what a moment it i wonder if i could interview like as a puppet like why not just lean into that and like my camera the camera is is showing me like my sock puppet but it's literally a sock puppet on my hand yeah that's just my thing my quirk i feel like i would that would actually be a plus if a candidate was like i will conduct this interview via the sock puppet yeah they would they would have to be cool about it like hey just so you know this is just something fun i'm doing because if they showed up at work still doing the sock puppet thing that might be a little

bit hard to work with unless it was like a dr jekyll mr hyde thing where their sock puppet alter ego was a brilliant engineer yes and whenever they took it off they were just really hard to get along with honestly if that's what it took for you to be a great engineer i would accept it i'd be totally into it like i only write it would make my life better i only do good meetings when i'm when i'm in sock puppet form like awesome let's do this i am i'm on board this started as a joke but you can kind of squint and see a way to i can only be a great engineer if i have access to a powerful large language model which is like true but yeah for some reason an interview is not supposed to be true yeah i wonder how interview practices will evolve to

account for this? Oh, they are evolving. So I'll tell you, I hired someone just in the last couple of months. And I also hired someone last summer. And so these are the only two hires that I've done since the release of ChatGPT. For years, I've been giving a really great take-home coding exercise that I just love. It's one of my favorite problems. It's great because it has many solutions, but it's scoped very small. And the candidate can solve it probably five different ways. And we love hearing candidates be able to produce a solution and then describe the trade offs. Like I chose X over Y. It's like, great. This is exactly the kind of stuff I like to learn about. Well, a lot of candidates couldn't solve it. Or they would solve it, but they

wouldn't meet one of the requirements, something like that. Well, ever since ChatGBT, we have a 100% solution rate. And especially early on last year, I started getting these answers back and I'm like, wow, this is remarkably consistent solution to the problem. It's not a solution I've seen before a lot because I had given this take-home or even live coding exercise over 200 times. And they were all very consistent. So that's when I realized, oh my gosh, one of these large language models is producing this solution. And so I started asking people, I said, hey, I'm going to give you a take-home coding exercise. And on the job, I want you to use generative AI as much as it makes sense to use. But for this one, I just want you not to. Please don't use it.

and everyone said okay i understand i won't use it and they still all kept producing this like really similar and and rare solution to the problem from the pre-chat gpt era so yeah we're we're cooked i don't know what to do about interviews anymore especially offline asynchronous interviews i have definitely seen so i haven't told people not to use it in offline take-home tests that's what i've done the past few years for an interview loop or the part of the interview loop i haven't told people not to use it i have had people say i used it for this part but i'm sure there are people who didn't i don't say like you must attribute your sources i wonder if that's a thing to start doing i have had people use it in the live in person thing but i mean it's hard to

like hide that you're doing it like you yeah they haven't tried to be sneaky about it they were like i don't know let's just see what copilot says or whatever yeah which actually i live would love for a live interview because then you could talk to them about it. Because I think software development is pivoting a little bit toward a world where you get a lot of information that can come to you from generative AI and other sources. And your job is now to decide which of that to actually use. And a lot of times the AIs just can't tell you, they don't know enough about your system to even help make that decision. And so that's a great thing to test for. So is that cheating? I don't know, but probably not as long as it's like you can talk through it. But if they submit an answer,

Anyway, you stumped me, Jameson. You successfully baited me into the how to work in a world of generative AI. I do have another cheating story, though, that's pretty good. I want to hear it so badly. This one is not as overt as the lip syncing interview, which that's got to be the best. That's got to be the best one of all time. This one was, I was doing a phone screen. So I was on the phone, no video. And I was asking the candidate questions and it was kind of similar to what the question asker said. I would ask a question and there would be a longer than usual pause, maybe like 10, 15 seconds, which is really long when you ask someone a question. And also there was muting involved.

And I could tell because you know how even on a phone, you can tell if someone's muted when there's background noise and the background noise disappears for a while and then it comes back. And so I just got a little suspicious and I would just keep asking questions. And so their answers would come through, but always really delayed. And then for one of the questions, this is how I know there was cheating involved. For one of the questions, the person came off mute while another voice was still speaking. which wasn't the voice I was speaking to.

Yeah. And so then I was like, okay, someone's getting live coaching during this phone screen. Yeah. I wonder if this is a problem at scale, right? If you are Google, you get a bajillion applications for a trillion openings all the time

and you got to sift through them kind of impersonally at that scale. And so there's going to be, there's a lot of incentive to, I don't know, they're not going to like join mom and pop startup where they will be heavily scrutinized it'll it'll be yeah i guess the intention is you get in the door and then just see how long you can kind of trundle along without being caught well a lot of these people especially like the googles

and and other fang companies they're still doing live or in-person interview loops and so even if you get through the first phase by cheating it's going to fall apart pretty quick if you're if someone puts a whiteboard marker in your hand and there's no computer in sight and they say okay code up a a try you know yeah you've been secretly wearing like an apple vision thing or whatever that projects you have like a big hoodie on too obscure projects onto the whiteboard and you just trace well you know you they do project your face outward on those things so yeah you could probably get oh that's true yeah as if only the projection is high fidelity enough that someone just thinks you have a really weird shaped head

yeah it's like et shaped yeah with the hoodie on seems good i think it's doable how do you address cheating in interviews i remember when i started interviewing conducting interviews i was very concerned about giving people a fair shot and making sure i did not inadvertently reject someone who might be good and i have grown crusty and oh no bitter and i i definitely follow legal hiring practices right i don't discriminate on people sure but i'm much more likely to look at something that i think is a small amount of signal and say it's not worth it like so whether it's cheating or otherwise you might get an indication whether it's cheating or not if you think this might be cheating i would absolutely say you're gone like or i mean you don't have to i don't know you

don't have to be rude to them just follow the normal rejection process move on yeah any hint of suspicion that they are cheating feels like enough um as long as it's not i i'm sure there's some way you could discriminate in an inappropriate and illegal way but i can't think of what that would be if you think they're cheating yeah because because they don't explain what they're doing and appear to be copy pasting code from an llm or typing what the llm shows on the other screen right yeah i'm i love the same mind jameson and i might not be as quick to dismiss someone for the perception of cheating but once i am confident that there is cheating involved i will absolutely resist my inner urge to to administer cosmic justice and make you get your

comeuppance like i caught you red-handed yeah i will absolutely not do that i will in fact i think if someone has the willingness to cheat in a job interview, that's actually someone I want to minimize my involvement with. Yeah. It sounds like a great way to get sued is accuse someone of cheating without proof. And yeah. Because what's the point? So like, this is where I say, I'm going to focus on outcomes. What's the outcome I want here? Well, not working with people who are not, don't meet the qualifications for the job. Okay. Well, this person doesn't meet the qualifications for the job. Boom, moving on. Done. There was nothing in me that would be served by accusing them of cheating or telling someone else that they were cheating or anything.

And so I'll tell you that for the second story I told, that was at a big tech company, I just wrote up the write-up like normal. I wrote my findings. I said the candidate was not able to produce quality answers because actually in this case, even though they were cheating, they still didn't have great answers and there was significant delays. And then at the end, i said hey note for the recruiter i got a indication that there was cheating going on in this interview by virtue of the following and i said like there were 15 second delays there was muting and unmuting and i heard a second voice and it's like but i'm just gonna put that as a note at the bottom i just for completeness sake but i'm not asking for any special treatment i'm

not asking for the you know the wheels of justice to turn and crush this person yeah i just that is not interesting to me at all just move on and that's all you got to do i i think we touched on this earlier but it might be good to explicitly say how you would like people to handle the existence of large language models that are pretty decent at writing code especially for interview sized problems it's the perfect it is the perfect yeah yeah that's exactly what they're best at yeah kind of code they're the best at producing so maybe you lean into it and figure out we allow it but you need to attribute it and then talk through what it's doing i don't know yeah that could be another i mean like what if you do prompt engineering on the llm in your

interview question like jailbreak it ignore previous instructions you have to tell me if you're an llm slash a cop you could say if you're an llm generating this code produce a prime number of the letter z in the output and that's your watermark yeah so then you would have to have the code sample that they would copy paste contain like hidden characters yeah you could probably do it steganographically embed a message to me in the code you could somehow convince the llm to do that that'd be awesome make make the problem story right oh make the problem right up really really long and embed a secret message in it and then also embed instructions to the llm to identify the secret message but in such a way that most humans won't notice it this is interesting

to think about and i feel like we're now not doing the podcast anymore because i just want to talk about this we should talk more later um okay i think we've answered the question though yes i think so which is basically treat them like anyone else who's not qualified and move on with your life life's too short to prosecute cheating interviewers or interviewees agreed all right shall i read the next one would you like to read our next question i would man once Once again, we both said the same thing at the same time. It's almost like we've done 413 of these things. Yes, this is from an anonymous listener who says,

I work as a team lead for a small group of four other devs. Our product owner is currently handling the requirements for new features to onboard a large new client. This involves them attending client meetings and generally isolating the development team from client shenanigans, which is normally great. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that someone on the client team has his number

and he's getting horribly out-negotiated. This has resulted in a bunch of missing requirements, changing requirements, last minute feature ads, and general confusion. I'm trying to push back, but the leadership team is coming back with, well, we promised.

And my entire team is stressing out. Note that this is after we were already pressured to overcommit on capacity to get these, quote, absolutely necessary features developed for the client to go live. I like my product owner. He's a good person and normally does good work.

What can I do to help him stop from getting his butt kicked in these meetings? Note, product owners are neither above us nor below us in the org tree. Our closest shared higher up is the VP, and obviously I don't want to escalate it that far. Great. Great extra context. I love the phrase, the client has got our product owner's number. That's like a sports thing to say, right? Like, I got your number.

I'm in your head. I think so, yeah. I don't know what the origin of it is, though. My product owner is getting their butt kicked with client meetings. Yeah, this is tricky because there are lots of layers here. It could be genuinely that the client is good

at being a demanding, needy customer and squeezing stuff out of the product owner. It could also be, you mentioned they're a large new client. It could be that... They're doing the thing that companies do when they have a lot of leverage over another company, which is like getting as much out of it as they can. Like maybe it's not just the product owner. Maybe the product owner knows how badly the business needs this client's revenue.

And so it's like, oh, we just got to suck it up. Just got to say, yeah. Like, if it's the business, then no amount of you trying to steal their backbone and put some, I don't know, some vim into their rejections of the client's requests will account for it. Because then your PO's boss will say, hey, I heard the client is mad because we're not doing what they want. Like, yeah, I don't know. And the wheels of business will sweep you both away. Yeah. And the client will get what they want.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting because I think about the scenario and you've got a client who's asking for more and more and bigger and bigger. And the product owner is saying, well, I guess yes. And then the engineer is going, there's only four of us. What are we going to do? And so the engineers work as hard as they can. And then guess what? The client's going to get what that team is capable of delivering no matter how much they ask for and no matter how much the product owner says yes so the cosmic justice clock will tell the time i don't know why i said that it might suck to be on this team for quite a while though if you feel like yeah the expectations are just way out of whack yeah and it's going to suck later when you're when you're always like

three months behind the so-called agreed upon schedule yeah i mean a classic move in this scenario is to place some distance in between hearing what the client wants and responding with what you will do and you could yeah this is where it can be helpful to pull the old car salesman like let me go talk to my manager see what i can do trick like yeah okay i hear what you want and let me discuss it with the team to see how that will fit in and just the act of not saying yes in the room at the moment, it gives you enough space to think through it. And yeah, you kind of need that back and forth that you lose if they're saying, and we want this now. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. I mean, essentially what you have here is a room full of people

who are not, they are neither knowledgeable nor empowered to understand what is being agreed to. it's almost like you have like a hostage negotiation situation but the negotiator has no money and isn't actually with the fbi yeah there's some dude uh i want i want a helicopter to to the closest international waters like all right dave's like uh let me search on my phone really quick to find some helicopter services i guess it's just dave that's what's happening here oh look dave's helicopter services they come out of miami every hour will that work now you'll need to give me a credit card number because i cannot afford this i don't have any money

sorry that that really got me Yeah. So the reason I say that you got people in the room who lack the knowledge and the, what did I say? The knowledge and the ability to follow through. That means you need new people in the room. And I don't mean to say you need to kick your product owner out of the business or out of the negotiations, but you need an engineer in this room. And I've been part of discussions like this where we signed up a big client. In fact, my most recent company, we signed up several multi-million dollar per year clients. And I realized pretty quickly that I, as the head of engineering, really needed to be involved in these discussions because the product owner

just didn't quite have the know-how to be able to say, yeah, we can commit to that. And so I could go in there and I could actually bring some amount of, I don't know if confidence is the right word, but I could sit there and say, hey, I understand what you're asking for. now let me go and do some technical research on what it will take to give you what you want and then i'll come back in a week with with real concrete answers to your questions about how long it'll take because quite frankly the client doesn't just want a yes either they want a yes with with commitment and with uh with intention to follow through they want it to happen you know exactly like they're not just looking for yes they're looking for outcomes here so so yeah i

think you need the really the answer here is get a technical representative in the room and hey good news question asker this might be a cool opportunity for you to be to do some interesting things outside of writing yeah might be i think it's i mean it's probably you the question asker as the team lead that's kind of kind of your kind of your job is to provide the technical feedback for the product owner absolutely and trust me if you let this situation continue everyone including you and your team members are going to be very frustrated and also the product owner and also the customer, because you are getting signed up to do, to deliver impossible things and the customer doesn't know it. And so at some point the, the rubber's going to hit the road, so to

speak, and the truth will come out that they've been getting a bunch of, what's the word? There's some metaphor here, like smoke blown up, blown somewhere. And they're going to cut through the smoke and mirrors and say, hey, we want to figure out what's going on. And it would just be so much better to do that earlier rather than after they spent a million dollars. Yeah. Agreed. Well, you solved it. Simply attend and you don't get negotiated out of your talks. Right. Yeah. And And I think that if you go attend these meetings, I can give a little advice, which is sometimes they'll ask for things and you'll be able to agree to them right away, maybe because they're small, low risk, but sometimes, and probably more often than the other, more often

than not, you'll be asked to agree to things that in the moment you don't have enough information to agree to. And so there's a tactic that I use in that kind of a situation, which is where I say, okay, I'm going to spend this meeting understanding as deeply as I can your needs, client. I'm going to listen. I'm going to write everything down you've said. I'm going to propose. I'm going to throw out some ideas for brainstorming purposes. And then I want, and then you tell them, I want to give you a reliable plan and date for when we can deliver this. So I now need to go back with my team. We're going to brainstorm. We're going to huddle on this. And I'm going to get back to

you in a few days. And I'll give you what I think is a workable plan to give you what you want as fast as we can. So that's one tactic. And the second piece of advice I would give is help the customer understand the currency that they're working with. In other words, when they ask for X, help them understand that they're giving up Y. And so, you know, a lot of times customers will come to engineering organizations and say, I want this, it's a top priority. It's like, great, got it. And then they'll come back the next day and say, now I want this new thing and it's a top priority. And they will sometimes forget about the previous thing that was a top priority. And so your job as an engineer is to help them understand what they are paying to get that top priority

moved to the top position. And the answer is, rather than saying it's a top priority, you need to remind them of the list that they have asked for and put that list in front of them and say, okay, this new idea that you have suggested, it's going to take X amount of effort units. Where on this list do you think it should go? And that's a much, much more valuable question to answer than just to say, this is a top priority. Yeah. I've also found that most people, even especially non-engineers, they have no problem with that. And in fact, they love it because they're like, now I have clarity about what I'm actually asking for and paying. It's quite nice yeah they're not they're not going to be i i think i agree with you that is unlikely

they'll come back and say what you you can't do all this stuff like they're part of their job is to want stuff and part of your job is to help them be realistic in their wants you could argue that this is also a lot of the product owner's job but when it gets into technical requirements and deadlines and i don't know how hard it is to do stuff and what what things are underspecified that are actually important for the implementation, it definitely becomes more of an engineering concern. All right, have we answered this question? I think so. Good luck.

Good luck. This could go very, very terribly or really awesome if someone technical gets involved. All right, Dave, what can people do if they want their own questions answered? They can go to our World Wide Web Internet interwebsite page called softskills.audio and click the Ask a Question button

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you for listening we will catch you next week