The cost of getting a job today

63stack

What's the risk in giving someone a deepseek api key that is loaded with $5? Five dollars in deepseek tokens is enough for like a week of constant use.

n4r9

Is there not a way for candidates to use tokens via the company's own subscription during the test?

luckylion

"Software engineers are poor and can't afford $20/month". linkedin-drivel.

jetemple

Why not put a proxy in front of the model, give each candidate a key with a hard budget, and revoke it after? If you require AI for the interview, you should pay for it

mceleri

I like the idea to consider the token cost for the candidate, good. But why not keep it "on paper", asking how the candidate would use an LLM or agent and why? Actually using an agent means asking the candidate to deliver something that you must validate. And you then need to evaluate the candidate by looking at the output of the LLM indirectly. Isn't it better to directly ask the candidate to explain how an LLM could be used (or if/when it should be used) for your use cases? At the end of the day, it is the same old 'interview coding game' problem, and I suspect it is working even worse now, using LLMs and agents.

solatic

> How you behave, how you relate to others, how you approach problems and the energy you bring to a team matter as much as your technical ability, and often more. As much as I agree with this, I don't think that the whole rest of the post (about how best to examine LLM usage in an interview loop) coheres with this. You cannot conclusively test for common decency in either interviews or recommendations. People are on their best behavior in interviews, and it's rare for someone to pass along a recommendation that will criticize them (or their behavior). Length of tenure at prior organizations is not proof, since too many will tolerate poor behavior. Accept that this is a risk involved with any hire, have clear, written business conduct policy, and be willing to show the door to people who cannot control their behavior after written warnings. Asking how people approach problems with LLMs need not be more than a conversation. Architectural interviews need little more than a whiteboard. If you wouldn't hover over the shoulder of an employee while they work, why do you feel the need to do so in an interview? I get it - bad hires are expensive in more ways than one. But screen-to-offer should not take longer than two weeks in small companies. Interviews help you derisk, but do not ever fool yourself into thinking that an interview process will ever reduce your hiring risk to zero. Getting a handful of dates before a shotgun wedding will always be risky. Accept it and learn to be more comfortable with risk. > the energy you bring to a team matter This is all the more true for hiring managers. Bad management will take strong, high-energy, high-ownership performers and handcuff them. Good management can, sometimes, take people with weaker skills, train them, set them up for success, and inspire them into becoming great performers. Someone who is interviewing, who might accept your job offer, is also taking a risk on whether you are the bad kind or the good kind of manager. The only difference is that job seekers often have more appetite for that risk than job offerers.

methou

> They can’t get a visa. They live in another city. The contract terms don’t work for them. I have to share my stories. For a position I’m a really good fit for at a company I’m familiar with, I asked a guy to ask a guy, and they said they would only hire in the US because the team is in the US. For another position, they reached out to me. They can’t hire in Japan but offered relocation. In both cases, I’m super grateful that people are willing to help, but I could sense that times have changed since 2023. Globalization is no longer that strong; many, many jobs are restricted to certain locations, such as certain cities in the US or India. I don’t know about the EU, though. This gives me some hope that if I’m willing to leave Japan, I can get a good job.

remix2000

Hmmm what if I do the assigned task without a chatbot? Will they even know…?

josefrichter

Hmm I'm thinking: - I'd hire someone who keeps building even when jobless. What you build is your CV/Cover, and your learning opportunity. These days, you have to know LLMs inside and out, which means using them heavily to learn. - The subscription is probably below or around the daily rate, so it pays off quickly. I'd argue that it's an investment in your education - not only learning to work with LLMs, but also using LLMs to teach you almost anything (even beyond tech).

inatreecrown2

Very interesting post about hiring. I am no hiring professional, but after reading to the end this stuck out the most: Do it together. If you expect LLM usage proficiency you can easily check that on the spot, no need to bother the applicant for private token usage.

ungovernableCat

I'm surprised companies are doing take homes in an era of LLMs. I suppose it can save valuable paid time by forcing the candidate to waste theirs instead, but surely you get a lot more signal from actually talking to the candidate and seeing how they think and understand what they're doing.

petesergeant

> Giving candidates a company account for the challenge is off the table: it’s a liability, and I can’t guarantee how it will be used. Reimbursing what they spend doesn’t work either. It’s hard to justify as a business expense, and it quickly drifts into a financial gray area. If you can't give qualified candidates who request it an OpenRouter key with $50 on it how are you affording to pay salaries? How little do you value the interviewing and CV review time of your current engineers? What's the liability you're worried about incurring?

poulpy123

I honestly don't get the point of asking the candidate to use a LLM. If you think that they can replace technical skills (which is fair), why testing these skills anyway ?

FinnLobsien

I think there are a few interesting things here: -If the AI part is so important, why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter? That way you could even level the playing field by giving everyone the same access to the same models. -I believe some of this is temporary. Just about everyone is now constantly using AI, so I believe we'll soon care more about someone actually being able to explain how they'd go about something and why rather than just "can you produce code that does this" -The idea of "applications are a numbers game" and spewing hundreds of resumes everywhere is dying. I know extremely highly qualified people whose resumes never get looked at and recruiters who never look at applications. Everyone is making application materials with AI and HR teams review them with AI. I believe we'll enter an era that's much more manual and high touch.

pjc50

I appreciate that I'm out of touch here, since I have been several years at the same job, but I can't really see how the LLM should have any role in the interview process at all - indeed, other places are going to increasing lengths to keep them out! You're not interviewing the LLM, after all. I suspect LLMs make the "take home coding challenge" even more useless than it already was. If you want to make it part of the candidate interview, then I guess you've got to sit them down with a laptop.

tietjens

I don’t understand why giving someone an api key for their limited use while doing an interview or assignment was thrown out. This is an obvious answer and other companies are doing this. For example, C1 talked about doing this on a recent episode of the Cup o’ Go podcast.

Peroni

This is a fantastic post. >From my admittedly anecdotal and narrow point of view, once you clear a baseline of competence, your willingness to do the work takes you much further than knowing a bit more. From my own, 15+ years of experience focusing entirely on this problem, point of view, I can't emphasise enough how much I agree with this principle. Finding people who are technically capable of doing the job isn't hard. Finding people who can do the job well, that actively make doing the job more rewarding is much more difficult and no technical assessment on earth can screen for that. >Nobody should burn tokens for a company that hasn’t had a proper conversation with them yet. PREACH! This same sentiment applies to all tasks that you expect candidates to do during an interview process. If you want them to put in the work, get buy in first. You get that buy in by having conversations with them and helping them understand why they should care about your company and your opportunity in the first place. I honestly have no notes on this post other than to encourage you to hold on to your current way of approaching the problem because I promise you, you are absolutely on the right track!

littlecranky67

20€ for a claude code subscription will get you through every interview. I spent way more on o'reily books in the late 90s and early 2000s on programming languages and frameworks. As a tech nerdy kid, we spent every last penny on all things hardware while our peers told us to be crazy to spend X amount of money on a new 15GB harddrive. If you don't have 20€ for a claude subscription as a senior engineer it is not because you are poor, it is because you have different priorities.