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.