Since when are bosses interested in college graduates? People with years of experience are regularly turned away as the bosses look for the equivalent of a senior seasoned employee wiling to work for peanuts.
When I was younger and argued that degrees were dumb because they weren’t training me for actual work, it was explained to me that the degree served as a filter for people who had some basic skills but ultimately had demonstrated problem solving, information processing, and critical thinking skills. Guess that’s over now (it’s still a blocker if one doesn’t have a degree despite 20 years experience)
School is what you make of it, but how can the employer filter out the people who cheated with AI?
If their efforts with AI were sufficient to accomplish the school testing goals, then their efforts are likely to be effective in accomplishing whatever goals their boss has for them. Using AI is no different from using a calculator, search engine, or any other tool. It’s not cheating to use tools, unless you’re explicitly asked not to. However, if a professor assigns homework and specifically tells you not to use a calculator or search engine, how can they tell you followed the rules and didn’t cheat? It’s the same problem, nothing new.
Only a shockingly small fraction of students are there to learn. It is sadly more about certification and the social experience. Nothing new in this.
Ironically kind of perfect for mangement.
My team interviewed what I can only assume was one of these candidates about a month ago. Every single person on the interview panel, including myself, was floored at how absolutely inept the candidate was. It was so bad, and the candidate realized it was so bad, that they threw in the towel halfway through the system design portion of the interview - and that’s with us dumbing down the questions successively just to try to give the candidate a little bit of traction.
The really damning part we realized in the postmortem/debrief was that the candidate had answered some PSQL questions quite adeptly on the phone, but when asked very similar questions in person, they were completely unprepared… which made us conclude they must have had an LLM listening to the audio stream of the interview during the phone screen portion and just throwing out answers for the candidate to use. Yeah, I get that interviewing is stressful and can knock you off your game, but this was genuine an order of magnitude worse than anything I’ve ever seen before in that ballpark.
Bosses are like “wow they can create a report in 2 minutes.” Bosses impressed because they use AI too but it takes them longer.
My faith in US Higher Education standards was pretty low right before the LLM nonsense hit, but wow was it shattered after that.
