Ask HN: What are good questions to ask in a remote round in post GPT era?
4 ashu1461 13 7/4/2025, 2:31:39 AM
Almost all candidates nowadays seem to have some form of external help or LLM-based assistance setup during remote interviews.
This makes it increasingly difficult to fairly assess a candidate's actual skills and independent thinking ability.
How are interview processes changing at your company — or at places where you're interviewing — to adapt to this new reality?
Are there any new patterns, tools, or formats you're using to ensure a fair evaluation?
People don’t work in isolation. We use tools to enhance our productivity. If you ask me to write code in Notepad, I won’t be as effective as I could be if i were using Jetbrains IDEs. If I need to do some calculations, I’ll rely on a calculator rather than doing maths in my head. I’ll use grammarly (well, not anymore) to polish my non-native english writing… LLMs are just tools man.
If any, you want to hire people who are good with tools, rather than “geniuses”
2. Do not ask basic software literacy questions. First of all, this was completely stupid even before LLMs. Secondly, its easy to cheat. If you absolutely have to do this then do it terms of measures. Most people in software are entirely incapable of measuring anything and LLMs cannot fix their personality deficiency.
3. Ask all questions where the expected answer is a not some factoid nonsense but a decision they must make. Evaluate their answer on the grounds of risk, coverage, delivery, and performance. For example if you are interviewing a AI/ML guy ask them about how they overcome bias in the algorithms and how they weigh the consequences of different design outcomes. If they are a QA ask them about how they will take ownership of quality analysis for work already in production or how they will coach developers when communicating steps to reproduce a defect.
4. As an interviewer you should know, by now, how to listen to people. That is so much more than just audible parsing of words. If their words say one thing, but their body language says something different then they are full of shit. Its okay that they aren't experts in everything. Their honesty and humility is far more important. They can get every question wrong, but if their honesty is on and they can make solid decisions then they are at least in the top half of consideration. 5. Finally, after evaluating their decision making ability and risk analysis then ask them for a story where they have encountered such a problem in the past and had to learn from failure.
This question comes up at least once a month so this answer is copy/paste from a prior comment.
It could be worth reviewing Ogletree v. Cleveland State University before doing this. A court ruled that a room scan violated a person’s 4th amendment rights.
There is also the risk that the person could have something on their wall which could indicate they are in a protected class, and if they don’t get the job, they could claim you used this information against them.
While I’m sure cameras for interviews are likely commonplace, it does open up some risk. Some may see it as an acceptable amount of risk, others may not.
As a fully remote hiring manager I am interviewing a person and I need to see that person to know if or when they are full of shit when they talk. If that isn't acceptable they can interview somewhere else.
Just ask them how photons lose energy due to inflation and where that energy goes.
I haven't interviewed people at all in a year or so though.
One suggestion I saw recently in a thread was asking deliberately incorrect questions, such as how to implement a particular solution using an irrelevant technology. LLMs are so 'eager to please' they seem to just BS some nonsense in response. Not sure how I feel about that approach however.
I have a standard set of behavioral questions.
The complexity in most development is managing business complexity and a large code base. You’re not going to be able to suss that out by coding interview.
System design based on their actual experience and behavioral questions are better anyway.
Besides if your coding interview can be passed by using an LLM and your day to day coding can’t, by definition your interview isn’t an accurate assessment of whether they can do the job.
Both system design / verbal discussions and programming rounds are critical to the interview process.