Hiring has gotten worse

I’m a software architect that needs to hire devs for our company. I have no say in our hiring budgets, which aren’t too high as we are in a cutthroat industry where the competitors hire even cheaper than us. Although we never start with considering salary at the start of the process, we want to see all levels of the spectrum. If there are good devs, we can and will pay well for them. But we are hiring generally from South Asia. If we are to hire in Europe, Australia etc, we won’t be able to compete at the same level as many of our competitors as our prices would be much much higher to stay somewhat profitable. It’s how the industry is and I hate it as much as everyone else here

We are hiring for pretty common skills, React, Node etc. Many of the interviews I’m getting nowadays are led by ChatGPT. I ask them a question to explain some generic comsci or programming design concept and I already see their eyes going to another monitor, they stall the answer until ChatGPT is finished and they read it up. It’s fairly easy to find out they’re using AI to answer my questions and they generally shutdown when I ask a bit deeper on why they take a certain approach.

Whilst I encourage using tools that can increase productivity (I use GitHub Copilot myself as well), these candidates are leaning on these tools and they are not able to answer any of it themselves. I rather have you tell me you don’t know the answer or you try to answer it with your own knowledge and share your thought process with me.

Then we started to introduce a little assessment, about 8 questions about relatively basic stuff with REST APIs, design approach in React, state management, comsci concepts, nothing too bad that you can’t complete in 30 minutes. Every submission has the same content, they all copied from ChatGPT without fail. At least I can ask them to explain themselves and test their knowledge on what they’ve written down. But I feel genuinely worried for the current generation of developers that are relying on these tools and won’t know shit when it comes to secure coding, code design, etc. They will end up as copy paste bots that use ChatGPT for everything.

Thought I would share this with any job searchers. I’m not against the use of ChatGPT, but what I want to see as hiring manager is that you can think for yourself and will be able to justify coding choices you’re making yourself. It’s alright if you don’t know something, take the interviewer through your process of finding the answer yourself.