alt Hacker NewsI had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, like, literally anything about how this thing on their resume worked, they finally shrugged and said that "GenAI did most of it."
It was a bizarre disconnect having someone be both highly educated and yet crippled by not doing.
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This the kind of interaction that makes be think that there are only 2 possible futures:
Star Trek or Idiocracy.
Wait, so they could say, write a linked list out, or bubble sort, but not understand what it was doing? like no mental model of memory, registers, or intuition for execution order, or even conceptual like a graph walk, or something? Like just "zero" on the conceptual front, but could reproduce data structures, some algorithm for accessing or traversing, and give rote O notation answers about how long execution takes ?
Just checking I have that right... is that what you meant?
I think that's what you were implying but it's just want to check I have that right? if so
... that ... is .... wow ...
This is exactly the end state of hiring via Leetcode.
Sounds a little bit like the stories from Feynman, e.g.: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...
The students had memorized everything, but understood nothing. Add in access to generative AI, and you have the situation that you had with your interview.
It's a good reminder that what we really do, as programmers or software engineers or what you wanna call it, is understanding how computers and computations work.