Cheating in Technical Interviews: Techniques and Consequences

Cheating in tech interviews may yield short-term gains, but it ultimately leads to disastrous consequences and damaged reputations.

### The Consequences of Cheating in Technical Interviews: A Cautionary Tale
* 🚫 "With an estimated **10% of people attempting to cheat**, today we'll look at the actual techniques these clever wannabe programmers use to land a **high-paying developer job**."
* 💻 Cheating in technical interviews has become more common with the rise of **remote work and large language models**, drawing parallels to cheating in other industries like **academics and sports**.
* 📚 Basic cheating techniques include cribbing answers from a hidden laptop with browser tabs open to LeetCode solutions, but **understanding the logic behind the code** is crucial to **avoid being caught**.
* 🕵 More sophisticated methods involve studying **leaked interview questions** shared on various platforms, although discussing interview experiences with peers is considered **acceptable**.
* 👥 Some candidates resort to enlisting friends to help during the interview, but this method is often **impractical due to the need for in-person collaboration**.
* 🤖 The use of AI tools like chatGPT has emerged as a **new cheating strategy**, with studies showing **varied success rates** depending on the type of questions asked.
* 📉 However, relying on AI can backfire, especially with custom questions where cheaters only passed **25% of the time**, highlighting the **risks of using incorrect code**.
* ⚠ Ultimately, cheating can lead to severe consequences, including rejection, blacklisting, and **lasting damage to one's professional reputation**, making it essential to "**Choose Wisely**."

there are two kinds of people in the world I don't trust: people who don't put swear words in their code comments and people who don't tell the truth. With the rise of remote work and large language models over the last few years, we've

also seen a rise in the number of people cheating on technical interviews. With an estimated 10% of people attempting to cheat, today we'll look at the actual techniques these clever wannabe programmers use to land a high-paying developer job in this highly competitive

job market and, most importantly, the disastrous consequences for those who get caught. Oh my God, it is November 25th, 2024 and you're watching The Code Report. Some of my biggest inspirations growing up as a kid were athletes like Lance Armstrong, Barry

Bonds, the entire Russian Olympic team, and Mike Tyson. They're all elite athletes, but they also bent the rules a little bit to get ahead. Now, I'm not recommending you bite your interviewer's ear off when you can't figure out how to

invert a binary tree, but the reality of the modern tech job market is that many people out there are cheating to get ahead and sometimes it actually works. But cheating happens in virtually every industry: academics like to plagiarize, investors like to do Ponzi schemes, and

chess players like to allegedly use remote-controlled Morse code emitting implants that transmit Stockfish moves directly to the sphincter. That's brilliant if true, but this technique wouldn't work very well on a programming interview. So now let's take a look at

Some real-world cheating techniques. The most basic technique is cribbing the answers. In high school, you may have written math equations in your palm before a big exam. In a remote technical interview, you can do the same thing by having a secret laptop out of the view

of your webcam with a million browser tabs open to different LeetCode solutions. This works because many technical interview questions are reused over and over again. There are classics like FizzBuzz, invert a binary tree, and a magical string. And if you're lucky

enough to get one of these questions, you can secretly look at your laptop to solve it. But solving the problem is only one part of the test. You also need to understand the logic behind the code. If you quickly solve a problem in code, but can't explain how it actually works, the

interviewer will think one of two things: this guy is an autistic 10x developer unicorn, or more likely, you're just a filthy cheater. In a technical interview, it's crucial that you explain your thought process clearly as you solve a problem. You're expected to make errors

and work towards a solution iteratively, just like you would in real life. But the most likely reason this cheating technique will fail is because you simply won't be asked a question on your secret laptop. A more sophisticated cheating technique is to study interview

questions that have been leaked on the internet. And companies are always updating their interview questions, but that doesn't stop people from screenshotting or taking that content from the interview, then sharing it on various low-key websites and Discord channels. I'm not going to share these

Resources with you actually know it you can find leaked questions all over GitHub as well as this weird Chinese website called 1point3acres.com They compile things like the most common interview questions asked in the last 6 months at companies like Meta, but most

of these are just public leak code questions anyway, but it becomes a gray area when proprietary non-standard questions become leaked. What doesn't constitute cheating though is discussing interviews with like-minded colleagues on awesome websites like Daily.dev, the sponsor of today's video. It's a

completely free social platform that curates all the best developer content on the internet and helps you connect with other like-minded people. Instead of scouring the bowels of Reddit for an update on your favorite JavaScript framework, you can rely on Daily.dev to

pull content from over a thousand top sources to get all the content you need in one place. And when you install their highly rated browser extension, staying up-to-date becomes an easy daily habit. Join over 1 million other developers on Daily.dev by using my

invite link on the screen, but if you're not skilled enough to pass the technical interview, another way to cheat is to ask your bros for help. Pay a friend or two to sit next to you during the interview and deliver the solution to you in sign

language. Typically, this needs to be done in person because if you try to use some screen sharing software during the interview, you'll likely get caught because many interview tools use pre-screen tests to check to make sure that you're not using a remote desktop.

or some other collaboration tool, the main reason this won't work though is because most aspiring programmers don't have friends. But luckily nowadays we have artificial programmers in the form of chatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Nowadays you can simply screenshot a question, feed it into one of these AI tools and

get the solution immediately. But does this actually work? Earlier this year, Interview.io conducted a study to answer that question. They conducted interviews where the interviewers had no idea that the interviewees were using chatGPT. They tested verbatim LeetCode questions, modified LeetCode questions, and

completely custom questions. On verbatim questions, the pass rate was 73% for the cheaters and only 53% on the non-cheating control group. On modified LeetCode questions, the pass rate went down to about 67%, still beating the

control group. However, when it came to custom questions, the cheaters started to bomb and only passed at 25%. That's better than 0%, but the thing is AI tools often spit out code that looks correct but is actually nonsense. And if you try

to pass that code off as legit in an interview, it'll be blatantly obvious that you're cheating. And that's exactly what happened to some guy who was trying to use Claude during an Xai interview. The interviewer called him out, then they had

a nice discussion about how cheating actually occurs nowadays. One thing to keep in mind with this study though is that it was conducted about a year ago and AI tools have already gotten much better at coding since then. And what's crazy is that in their experiment, nobody

actually got caught in the act of cheating now even if you manage to get away with cheating with AI during an interview it's still a very bad idea because if you interview with Fang the next step is typically an in-person interview where you'll have to problem

solve on a whiteboard and your only hope of cheating there is with some kind of brain chip or remote controlled repository but if you can pull that off you deserve the job but the main reason you shouldn't cheat is that you'll likely get caught and when that happens

all kinds of bad things will happen first of all you'll be automatically rejected from that position second you might even be blacklisted from reapplying to that company in the future third if you're building a public profile on places like Twitter and LinkedIn you'll find that Tech is

actually a pretty tight-knit community and if people find out you're a cheater it could permanently damage your reputation four it'll be extremely embarrassing and will be a bad decision that haunts you for the rest of your life and five in the unlikely case that

you actually do get the job you'll likely end up being a low performer who's at the top of the chopping block for the next round of layoffs ultimately though cheating is not a mistake it's a choice so make sure to Choose Wisely this has been the code report thanks for

watching and I will see you in the next one

Cheaters are breaking the technical interview... how?

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Introduction: Cheating in Technical Interviews

The author introduces the topic of cheating in technical interviews, highlighting its increase with remote work and AI.

An estimated 10% of people cheat in technical interviews.

The author uses examples of athletes who bent the rules to illustrate the prevalence of cheating across various fields.

Cheating is prevalent in various industries, including academics, investments, and even chess.

Cheating Techniques: From Basic to Sophisticated

The most basic technique is using hidden resources like a second laptop with solutions to common interview questions.

The ability to explain the logic behind the code is crucial; simply copying code won't suffice.

A more sophisticated method is using leaked interview questions found online.

Websites like 1point3acres.com compile leaked interview questions.

Another method is getting help from friends using sign language or AI tools like ChatGPT.

Effectiveness and Consequences of AI-Assisted Cheating

A study showed that AI tools were effective for verbatim LeetCode questions (73% pass rate), less so for modified ones (67%), and ineffective for custom questions (25%).

AI-generated code can often be incorrect, making cheating obvious.

An example is given of someone getting caught using Claude during an interview.

AI tools are constantly improving, making this technique potentially more effective over time.

Getting caught results in rejection, potential blacklisting, reputational damage, embarrassment, and poor performance if you somehow manage to get the job.

The tech community is tight-knit, making reputational damage a significant risk.

Even if you get the job, you'll likely be a low performer and vulnerable to layoffs.

Cheating is a choice, not a mistake. Choose wisely.